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DIRECTED BY:  Joel Reed (Career Bed, Sex by Advertisement); Michael Findlay (Satan’s Bed); John Maddox (Scare Their Pants Off)

FEATURING:  Georgina Spelvin (Career Bed, Sex by Advertisement); Yoko Ono (Satan’s Bed)

PLOT:  An overbearing stage mother pimps out her daughter to sleazy producers and unscrupulous talent agents (Career Bed); Dr. Joanne Richfield investigates Sex by Advertisement in the swinging sixties; sex traffickers kidnap a Japanese mail-order bride (Satan’s Bed); a pair of creeps kidnap women off the street and subject them to oddball role-playing scenarios (Scare Their Pants Off).

COMMENTS:  For those looking to (re-)experience the freewheeling world of ’60s sexploitation cinema, you could do worse than the latest Blu-ray re-releases by Distribpix and Something Weird. But you could also do better. These double features of impeccably restored films provide a sampling of what resulted when low budgets, rushed production schedules, and varying degrees of creativity and talent combined to churn out roughies for the Time Square theaters of old. The moments of weirdness glimpsed in this archive are sprinkled among nonsensical plots, long stretches of repetitive interiors, and New York City street footage with post-sync dialogue performed by bad actors.

In Career Bed, a conventional telling of a well-worn tale, a widow takes her daughter to New York, determined to make her a big star. Susan Potter just wants to marry her sweetheart from back home, but when her beau shows up in the city, Mrs. Potter seduces him, then tells Susan she’ll be better off pursuing an acting career. Through this Mrs. Robinson sideline, Mrs. Potter continues to get a piece of the action as she sets up dates for Susan with supposed entertainment industry bigwigs.

Future Devil in Miss Jones star Georgina Spelvin appears in a minor role as a talent agent who gets Susan to spend the night with her, after telling Mrs. Potter she has no interest in her daughter’s virginity “in the classical sense” (though she’s certainly interested in the “Classical” sense, if you know what I mean). This all leads to depressingly predictable results, though in the end, Susan thwarts her mother by marrying a producer. Mrs. Potter then sets herself up as a talent agent so she can continue exploiting naïve young women in search of fame and fortune.

Sex by Advertisement attempts the white-coater format, in which a medical professional discourses on the vices rampant in society. Unfortunately, Dr. Richfield (Spelvin again) is no Krafft-Ebing, and the narrative focuses more on condemning the pervasive advertising culture of the “Mad Men” era than in elucidating its sexual mores. Our narrator begins by describing how fetishists used to discreetly seek partners through coded ads (“Babysitter, for OLDER difficult children/Sitter supplies equipment”), but nowadays, with far more explicit language, everyone’s getting in on the game.

Within this vaguely constructed frame narrative, the few notable vignettes include an “art studio” where nude models serve as canvases for body painters and another where wannabe Jackson Pollocks practice “action painting” by hurling buckets of paint at naked girls. An extended sequence provides the most coherent story through an interview with “Malcolm,” a leather worker who starts making bondage gear for an “obedience society” after a chance run-in with a couple practicing flagellation in Central Park (they admire his handmade belt and ask if they can try it out).

The astute viewer will note this has nothing to do with advertising, but it’s best not to get hung up on the details. If you’ve ever wanted to see a black and white, low-rent version of the masked orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut, here’s your chance. When Malcolm joins the club for one of their meetings, people wearing nothing but dime-store Halloween masks mill about in a sparsely furnished room to a soundtrack of cheering laughter, the crack of whips, and dogs barking. A girl with electrodes taped to her nipples writhes around while a bored-looking man occasionally ups the voltage. The night ends with the society members opening their wallets for Malcolm’s leather goods. He accepts their orders because “it’s more interesting and many times more lucrative” than his former job in computers.

The inaccurately titled curiosity Satan’s Bed (there’s nothing remotely satanic about the plot, nor is there even really a bed), generates interest for two reasons—the presence of a young Yoko Ono and the directing efforts of Michael Findlay. The story goes that Ono was disowned and left broke in New York after telling her parents she wanted to pursue conceptual art. Needing money to pay her rent, she answered an open casting call for a film about a Japanese mail-order bride. The convoluted plot involves a trafficker who wants to go straight and marry for real. His partner, determined to make him stay in the game, kidnaps Ono’s character and moves her around to various apartments. The original production company never finished the film. Findlay purchased the footage then worked with his filmmaking partner (and future wife) Roberta to complete it.

The additional footage involves a gang of dope-fiends in need of drug money. Their MO involves breaking into apartments where pretty girls happen to be showering, stealing the money out of their wallets (and any booze in the liquor cabinet), then roughing up the girls before taking off. These sections feature the Findlays’ hallmark creative touches, poetic evocations of the “urban jungle” and weird little details like black lace lingerie nailed to stark white walls with switchblades.

The thin plot thread designed to tie the two incongruent halves together involves the gang hired to hold Ono’s character hostage at a house in Long Island. Obviously, she never makes it there. The gang arrives and begins to terrorize the home owner who, in typical Findlay heroine fashion, grabs a gun and gets the better of her attackers.

Scare Their Pants Off, by far the oddest film of this bunch, begins with a woman being rescued from a rapist by a business man who takes her back to his place. He offers her a drink while assuring her she’s safe now, but the drink turns out to be drugged, and she immediately passes out. Waking up strapped to a chair in a dark room, she’s approached by a figure in a long black cloak, his face covered by a corrugated metal mask. He begins lighting candles after telling her his sad story—he was horribly burned and disfigured in a plane crash and has now decided to have one last night with a woman before he kills himself.

The dark room with its simple props, the mysteriously garbed suicidal man, and a soundtrack that sounds like Darth Vader breathing over theremin strains, create a Gothic atmosphere of surprising pathos. The woman, though disoriented, tries to talk him out of his plan; surely he’ll find a someone who will love him for who he is. While this is going on, we see intermittent shots of the business man, now dressed far more casually, smoking a cigarette and watching them through a peephole in the wall. The masked man insists the only way he could be certain of a woman’s love is if she could look him in the face and kiss him without recoiling.

“Could you do it?!” he asks her before tearing off his mask to reveal a doughy white face lumpy with scars. She screams and faints, the man removes this second mask and his partner joins him before they congratulate themselves (“Fantastic! What an effect!”), not so much for scaring their pants off as making their captive audience faint with fright.

As they move onto the next act, it becomes clear these guys get off more on role-playing than anything else. More black comedy than exploitation, as Ashley West remarks in the disc’s liner notes, this film commits two cardinal sins of grindhouse cinema—chastely edited sex (there’s not even any groping and barely any nudity) and stories played for laughs (if you ignore your strong moral objections to seeing women kidnapped, drugged, and forced to LARP, it’s actually pretty funny).

In one of the scenarios, the men perform as members of a Nazi-inspired organization interrogating a spy. The commander yanks off the woman’s bra, only to demurely cover her up again in the next shot. For most of the film, the victims remain clothed or covered by sheets, watching in bewilderment as their kidnappers ham it up for their own amusement. All this culminates with the unconscious girls being left in a car abandoned on the ferry. The guys begin to plan their next narrative as they watch it leave the harbor. “I was thinking about something new – something about time travel. . . We could advertise, for girls interested in taking part in an advanced scientific experiment.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Jammed with ripe, extremely quotable dialogue and glorious vintage footage of Manhattan at night, Career Bed is a fast-paced and tawdry delight that alternates between surprisingly arty atmosphere (such as the theatrically-staged trysts between Welles and Spelvin) and hilarious technical gaffes. . . Reed immediately followed this one up with the plotless mondo-style erotic shocker Sex by Advertisement. . .  Reed manages to inject the formula with some cockeyed energy here thanks to the absurd sex scenarios he creates and that certain Big Apple sleazy feeling you simply couldn’t replicate now. – Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo-Digital (Career Bed/Sex by Advertisement)

“To appreciate this insanely odd [disc], you need to know about the distinctly American and sublimely weird subcultural phenomenon known as the grindhouse. Infamous for “grinding out” lurid D-grade films that wallowed in sex, drugs, violence, and all kinds of taboo ephemera, grindhouses were inner-city movie theaters that symbolized a fascinatingly twisted national underbelly. Taken as 60s and 70s Americana, the horribly acted and directed amateur films that grindhouses specialized in are actually quite amusing in their earnestly perverted glory. Scare Their Pants Off. . . contains a few unerotic topless scenes and is astoundingly, teeth-grindingly dull. Satan’s Bed is an awkward splice of two separate films. . . Laughable narration tries to weave the two films together, with zero success. Satan’s Bed deals with rape, and like many grindhouse flicks, treats the act as if the woman ultimately enjoys the violation. It’s this kind of appalling misogyny that makes the grindhouse genre ultimately reprehensible. But, again, who can blame it for existing in the darker corners of our tight-strung society? – Jason Bovberg, DVD Talk

HOME VIDEO INFORMATION: Both Blu-ray sets are available in standard or limited editions (with slipcases and booklets featuring vintage ads, interviews and essays about the film makers). Career Bed/Sex by Advertisement includes an audio commentary by John Szpunar. The extras on the Satan’s Bed/Scare Their Pants Off disc include Something Weird shorts (Jane on a Train), an uncredited dance sequence from Findlay’s The Touch of Her Flesh (1967), the original trailers (the Satan’s Bed trailer narrated by Findlay in his Richard Jennings voice), and an image gallery.