Look what I found!

Yes, it’s the Coiled Pleasure Glass Dildo — “A dreamily shaped dildo with a gorgeous, intensely pleasurable shape that bears testament to its unique, hand-blown design, the Coiled Pleasure is a pyrex glass offering from Joyful Pleasure that’s perfect for a wide range of sexy pursuits. Formed into a delightfully angled curve, with a choice of large or small tip (depending on the end you choose to insert), it would be near impossible to miss the spot, whether you’re exploring g-spot or prostate stimulation.”

Got to love the prostate stimulation. I’ve got to fill the gap between now and my next scheduled colonoscopy somehow.

One user is enthusiastic: “Absolutely perfect. Smooth and satisfying! Would be perfect for a newbie, as there are no distracting textures.”

And you don’t have to talk to it afterwards.

 

I have a separate life reviewing real movies — the kind that play in theaters. And while I can’t get away with the same sort of thing I can here, I manage to get my point across.

From The Lakeville (Conn.) Journal, Feb.26, 2015

I slithered into the afternoon showing of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s “50 Shades of Grey” at the Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, last week, hoping nobody would see me.

Alas, anonymity proved elusive. The theater held several solid citizens known to me. I mention this in case they feel inclined to blab.

Down in front were three middle-aged ladies. They were giggling nervously, and cracking jokes along the lines of “Carla wanted to come . . . but she was tied up!”

Hahahaha.

There were two men, besides me, in the audience of perhaps 25, both part of a couple.

One had his cap clamped firmly down on his head. The other looked like it might have been his idea to see this flick — the eagerly-anticipated film adaptation of E.L. James’s stunningly unreadable and successful novel.

A glutton for punishment, I read the book, too. I thought it wasn’t dirty enough to be pornographic, and too clumsy to be erotic.

Mostly it was long.

The flick is, too. If you take the naughty stuff out you still have a solid 100 minutes of some of the most insipid dialogue since . . . . Since never.

This is the worst.

Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) is about to graduate from college. She pinch-hits for her roommate, Kate (Eloise Mumford), who is supposed to interview young, handsome bazillionaire Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) for the school newspaper.

In the single best thing that has ever happened to anybody, Kate got the flu. So Ana has to go interview the boy wonder. Who takes a shine to her, in his charming, handsome, wealthy way (that masks a dark secret).

Apparently being a young bazillionaire means you still can’t find a decent suit.

Christian’s jacket collar pulls away from his neck as if it’s afraid he’s going to tie it up and beat it.

Hey, wait — maybe it’s not bad tailoring. Maybe it’s foreshadowing!

So one thing leads to another and pretty soon Ana and Christian are on the verge of becoming an item — except Christian’s got this contract she needs to review first.

See, Christian’s a dominant, and he doesn’t have girlfriends — he has submissives. And they have to sign a contract that specifies, in great detail, just how funky he can get.

In a film that requires an unusually robust suspension of disbelief from those in the audience, the contract- review scene offers a much-needed laugh.

And it is here that we get the absolute best line of the flick:

“What’s a butt plug?”

We’re talking about a fairly complete look at the nekkid body of Dakota Johnson. (And of Jamie Dornan, for the ladies.)

And there’s a “playroom,” with many interesting devices and accessories that you probably don’t have at home.

Gray suits, gray cars, an endless parade of blonde women in gray suits, gray neckties (see accessories, above).  However, I was keeping track, and I counted, at most, 18 shades of actual gray things.

Then there’s dramatic foreshadowing in a hardware store. A barf scene. Heroic gesture by Christian in fending off a drunken photographer pal of Ana’s. Text messages of tremendous dramatic import, shared with the audience. Helicopter and glider rides.

Variations on spanking, flogging, and restraint — and the always popular Ice Cube Special you may remember from “9 ½ Weeks.”

There are several groanitatious moments — when Christian confesses that his real mother was a crack addict, when Christian takes Ana home to meet the family, and when Christian plays the piano.

Ana observes that his playing is sad. (The word she is looking for is “bad,” but never mind.)

Yes, it is sad. Because Christian is sad. Because he cannot love. He can only dominate. But Ana is changing him.

You see where this is going?

Finally, things go too far in the playroom. This is the most dramatic part of the film. It made the man in the audience who looked like it was his idea say “Whoops” out loud, lending credence to my theory.

And then the film ends — suddenly, like a love affair with a deranged rich pervert who just happens to be the most boring person on the planet.

And that’s the big problem with “50 Shades of Grey.” It is the film that proves that, in the right hands, even the adventures of a psycho pervert with rock-hard abs and an unlimited budget can be about as exciting as a PBS documentary about sea turtles and penguins.

There are racier movies. There are weirder movies. But offhand, I can’t think of a duller movie. Therefore, I heartily urge everybody to see “50 Shades of Grey.” Why? Because I had to.

Messiah of Evil (1973) is a semi-coherent zombie flick with some Ancient Evil and a lot of art damage. Arletty, played by Marianna Hill, goes floundering into a little California beach town looking for her father, who is some kind of artist. Along the way she meets an albino guy with a pickup full of dead people; Thom the Suit-Wearing Weirdo and his two groupies; and Elisha Cook, Jr. as the town wino.

There is a whole lot of plot that mostly consists of flashbacks and the reading of diaries and it gets mighty tedious.

Then there is some pretty decent zombitation, beginning with the cuter of the two groupies becoming the manager’s special at the grocery store.

These are pretty clever zombies — they can build fires on the beach to signal The Dark Man, or Messiah of Evil if you prefer. They run the movie projector at the theater, and patiently wait for Groupie #2 to finish her popcorn before they attack.

The flick suffers from Antonioni Syndrome — characters wandering around visually striking sets, talking in circles.

Somebody probably thought there was some kind of art being made.

Hill never gets nekkid, which is a shame — and, of course, an automatic one-coil deduction.

It loses another coil for Frequent Fast-Forward.

So two coils, which is generous.

Jerry Warren’s Teenage Zombies (1959) is a bit of tease in that there are only two teenage zombies and they are only zombies for about 90 seconds of screen time.

And they are not noticeably different as zombies.

See, these kids decide to go water ski-ing out by a deserted island. They never do get to the water ski-ing, however, because it seems like much more fun to explore the deserted island.

Alas, as is often the case with deserted islands, it is in fact inhabited by a mad scientist with a zombie army and an ee-ville plan to take over the world.

This mad scientist is a lady, with an ICBM chest and a consistently bad attitude.

Her main zombie is Ivan, who can follow simple commands. We only get a quick look at the other zombies.

When I say zombie, I mean the mindless, shambling, robotic type of zombie, as created by the better sort of voodoo spell. These are not the reanimated corpses of Romero et. al.

The scientist is tinkering around with a gas that will turn Americans into zombies. She is working for someone from “the East,” which I take to mean your Red Chinese, those cunning devils. If you’re thinking, “Sounds like the Obama Administration,” well, if the shoe fits…

Anyhoo, there’s a lot of back and forth on boats and a crooked sheriff in a bad suit who keeps tugging on his lapels.

There’s also a very cute girl in high-waisted jeans and if you don’t think that can look good guess again.

We’re talking zombie gas. Boats. Shambling bug-eyed master zombie. Greasy men in bad suits. Mad scientist who looks like your fourth grade teacher on vacation in Las Vegas ca. 1955. Bad fighting. Deus ex machina in the form of an dezombified gorilla. The U.S. Army. Promise of Presidential citation. No water ski-ing.

Shot in Exciting Blur-O-Vision!

Mildly amusing, especially when the kids look under the bushes for their motorboat. Two coils.

The excitement of Blur-O-Vision

So in  She Demons (1958) some stupid people out in a boat during a hurricane wash up on the one supposedly deserted island that is not only being used by the Air Force as a target but also is home to a deranged Nazi war criminal scientist and his squad of goons who are torturing girls in unconvincing “native” costumes in order to isolate the chromosome or gene or something that will restore Mrs. Deranged Nazi War Criminal Scientist’s acid-damaged face.

Now that’s a lot of plot to get into one paragraph, never mind one sentence, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to read than to watch this flick.

The deranged etc. looks a little like the young Ralph Lauren, if that helps. And Irish McCalla looks darn good in her spoiled rich girl shorts.

Nazi goons with limited vocabularies —”Raus! Schnell!” (later adopted for “Hogan’s Heroes”). Dancing native girls who look like they are all called Myrna. Bad bongo drumming. She demons, sporting papier mache faces with big teeth sticking out. Mrs. Deranged winds up looking very similar to the Aztec Mummy. Incredibly boring. One coil.

Hey, it’s Ed Nelson! (Center, above.)

That’s what I was thinking when I fired up “Night of the Blood Beast” right after watching “The Devil’s Partner” again.

I was enthusiastic about the latter a couple years back (click here) and was glad to see him in this Roger Corman spectacle, about stupid scientists who send people up into orbit in motorized soup cans and then bitch when parasitical aliens attach themselves to the astronaut.

The aliens look like seahorses, incidentally, when viewed under the fluoroscope — sort of a self-powered X-ray machine, with extra radioactivity.

Ed’s role as Dave isn’t nearly as demanding as his double role as Nick/Pete in “The Devil’s Partner.” For one thing, Dave doesn’t have to do a transformation scene into an old man with wild, John Brown hair.

No, Dave just has to clench his jaw, look determined, and ignore the photographer girl’s big butt.

It is big, too. No getting around it.

I noticed her butt because I always notice girls’ butts, but also because the flick was pretty interminable. Dead scientist, renegade blood cells, monster that looks like the cast-off bits of all the monster costumes in history.

So I cannot get excited about “Blood Beast” at all. One coil, and that’s a gift. Even with Ed Nelson, who according to Wikipedia is still around, living in Louisiana.

Jean Rollin’s The Nude Vampire (1970) lacks actual vampires and doesn’t have all that much nudity. It does have green slime on rocks by the ocean, and girls dressed up like I don’t know what, and a guy with the best antler hat this side of Wendigo.

And capes. Lots of capes.

See, Pierre’s kinda torked off that his rich father is up to something at the fancy house in Paris. He finally mugs a guy and steals his ticket, only to find that it’s a suicide cult, and the participants blow their brains out so this semi-chunky gal in a flimsy orange wrap can lick their blood. Not drink it, mind you, but lick it.

Pierre’s pop and two other old pervs are convinced the girl is a vampire and they want to know the secret of immortality.

The joke’s on them, however, as what the girl really is is a mutant that represents the next stage of humanity, but that little tidbit is only revealed at the end of the flick, down at the ocean with the green slime on the rocks.

We’re talking one seriously incomprehensible story here, and not nearly enough nekkidity to make up for it.

Man in cape. New race of mutants, many of whom appear to have just beamed down from The Planet of the Hal Holbrooks. Girls in red capes, standing on rocks covered with green slime. Fourteen breasts. Three stripteases. Gratuitous belly dancing. Avant-garde music on the soundtrack makes the entire experience even more forgettable.

It’s not as bad as Requiem for the Vampire. But it still sucks.

One coil.

Note: After revisiting this flick, I determine it is an all-time achievement, worthy of the Iron Coil.

I got a two-fer disc from Netflix with  “Back from the Grave” and “The Undertaker and His Pals.”

Somebody got their wires crossed because the former is “I Eat Your Skin,” previously discussed in this space. I repeat it here. I have nothing to add, really, except in this version they got the dubbing straightened out:

Two exciting facts about ‘I Eat Your Skin“:

• There is no skin-eating in the film.
• Auteur Del Tenney was from Connecticut and once made a good film, 1964’s The Curse of the Living Corpse, which had real writing, a real script, a real editor, and real actors, including Roy Scheider in his screen debut.

“I Eat Your Skin,” also made in 1964, wasn’t released until 1971 as the second half of a drive-in double bill with “I Drink Your Blood,” a hippie-biker rabies epic.

It had been sitting on the shelf under the title Voodoo Blood Bath, but the distributor liked the “Last Supper” imagery on the twin bill poster. (“I Eat Your Flesh” would have been better, but it was taken.)

Novelist Tom Harris writes smutty best-sellers and spends his time poolside at the Fountainbleau in Miami, reading aloud from his works to a crowd of bikini-clad housewives. His agent, a clenched-jawed WASP named Fairchild, hatches a scheme to go to this island where a scientist is working on a cure for everything and, oh yeah, there are supposed be eighteen kinds of poisonous snakes and zombies on this island.

So they go because a pudgy bald guy in a Dacron suit is chasing Tom (with malice aforethought) for horsing around with his wife. So what the hey?

During this opening sequence it is apparent that director Tenney achieved something remarkable: this is the first American film made for domestic release where the words don’t match the lips. At all.

It’s as if it was dubbed into Korean and dubbed back from the Italian translation of the Korean by a crew from Portugal.

This results in happy accidents such as the pudgy bald man shaking his fist and yelling “I getting you am son of beech!”

OK – there’s a whole lot of plot which I won’t bore you with. It’s sufficient to relate that the zombies are real, the voodoo priest wishes to sacrifice the blonde, the scientist is fairly evil, the other guy is completely evil, the good guys escape, and the island blows up.

The zombie transformation scenes are entertaining in a primitive fashion; their eyes bug out through the caked-on makeup, making them look like trout that have been lightly coated in corn meal and fried. (If you don’t believe me try it.)

The voodoo dancing is pretty good but ultimately tedious, as is the sight of Tom with no shirt.

The clenched-jawed WASP looks like what you’d get if you stirred the genes of Robert F. Kennedy and William F. Buckley together and told the result you were outlawing touch football and madras pants.

As a period piece, I Eat Your Skin is mildly amusing. One decapitation. One extended blast of voodoo dancing. Girls in bikinis. Man in Dacron suit shoved in pool. Bad prose read aloud to girls in bikinis prior to man in Dacron suit getting shoved in pool. Exploding zombie. WASP climbing a cliff in loafers. Mad scientist. Snakes. Code Yellow ethnocentrism – enough to be noticeable, but not egregious enough to be funny. Short.

Two coils.

Jack Brooks, Monster Slayer (2007) is a nice, tidy, and moderately amusing revenge flick with some serious monsters and a whole lot of sinister barfing and death tentacles.

Young Jack witnessed his entire family getting whomped on by some sort of forest demon, and he is wracked with guilt because he got away. This in turn causes him to be a goateed, baseball-capped loser with a bad anger problem.

And a plumber.

Normally this set-up would send the red flags flying, but luckily they keep the psychobabble to a dull roar, the better to concentrate on the glop, which this flick has in spades.

Robert Englund plays the nutty professor who buys the house with the evil stuff in the yard, so when he gets infected with the monster yick he retches a lot in front of his dopey students, and then morphs into a thing that looks like a cross between Jabba the Hut and Freddy Krueger.

The thing sends out the Death Tentacles, which bind up the victims until it’s time to jam a weird white thing down their throats and suck up their insides (and, presumably, their souls). Then they turn into zombie monsters.

Jack’s belligerence sure does come in handy here, because these zombies (or monsters, I can’t decide) take a lot of killing.

There’s some of kind of love subplot but I can’t remember what it was about, except that it does not involve any nekkidity (automatic one coil deduction).

One large fat beast. Two, if you count the nerdy girl. Actually, it’s three, if you count Robert Englund before and after the transformation. Two accessory beasts. Fast-moving zombie demon critters that used to be community college students. (You can tell them from regular, non-zombie demon critter community college students by their speed.)

Green barf. Yapping dog. Sinister old man in hardware store. Old boiler. Fun with plumbing. The old “the car won’t start and the monster is coming” gag. Superstitious natives. Psychiatrist.

Short and to the point. A nice job, only lacking in breasts to be a CACA Iron Coil contender. As it is, a well-deserved three coils.

The Bloody Brood (1959) is a Canadian beatsploitation flick starring an impossibly young Peter Falk as the slightly cross-eyed and all sinister Nico, a drug dealer who is also the leader of a group of beatniks.

They’re having a party, dig? And the gang just witnessed the old newsie die of a heart attack at The Digs, dig?

So Nico and this other cat who dresses real square but is truly hip, you know, they decide that the real kick is to plan and carry out a murder.

(Okay, the attempt to write this in Beatnik ends now.)

So when this kid shows up with a telegram for the guy whose apartment they’re trashing, and he’s not there, and the kid sees a rather fleshy gal in tights doing one of those aimless dances you can still see at a Bob Weir/Phil Lesh show, well, it’s all over, because these psychobeats feed the kid a hamburger with ground glass in it.

And the kid dies.

This infuriates his older brother, Cliff, who infiltrates The Digs (the bar where these dorks congregate) and eventually figures it out, in between getting beat up by Nico’s underworld henchmen.

The big denouement is when Cliff bribes the house poet (the Gregory Corso of this group) with cash and booze to read a horrible poem that reveals the details of the murder.

This sounds like pure fermented curd, and in many ways this is a pretty crummy flick.

But the acting is pretty good. The direction is pretty good. And the music is pretty good.

The poetry, bongo playing, and bad dancing, however, are about as scaly as you’d expect.

So for a cheapo exploitation flick designed to take advantage of the notoriety of the Beats, it’s not half bad.

I give this one an honest three coils.