GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE / SLOGAN: Naked under leather, naked little homewrecker.

GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE
Starring Marianne Faithfull, Alain Delon, Roger Mutton
Directed by Jack Cardiff
Redemption USA

SLOGAN
Starring Serge Gainsbourg, Jane Birkin, Andrea Parisy
Directed by Pierre Grimblat
Cult Epics

Reviews by Louis Fowler

60s chanteuse (and 70s junkie) Marianne Faithfull goes full-on sleazy rider in this motorcycle mama flick about a woman in search of...uh...um, yeah, I don't really know. Maybe herself. That's what most rebellious women on the prowl did in movies like this back then, right? Can the cast of ZABRISKIE POINT back me up here?

So, for an hour and a half, Faithfull speeds along the European countryside, eschewing all motor-vehicle safety laws by continually closing her eyes and grimacing to the wind like a drooling moron, reciting vapid internal monologues about the need for societal rebellion and the want for her lover to be inside her as the camera occasionally oversaturates colors. Because the 60s were, like, totally trippy, man.

Yeah, I'm being a bit facetious, but, as irritating as it all could (and can) be, GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE it still a very intoxicating movie to take in, so why fight it?

Faithfull became a bit of sex symbol for wearing only a (wool-lined) leather bodysuit throughout this thing—I can only imagine how stinky that thing must have gotten by the time filming wrapped, not to mention the numerous chaffing heat-ashes she must have endured—been there, done that, sister. That being said, it's a cinematically attractive body odor that wafts off the screen, arousing so much untapped wanton curiosity that has been dormant since, hell, at least college. While we all may melodramatically pretend to vomit when the idea is even brought up, surely all of us do have a secret desire to bed an unwashed homely pseudo-hippie free-spirit with no consequences or qualms, right? GIRL ON A MOTORCYLE lets you live out that perpetual daydream from the comfort of your well-Febrezed Lazy-Boy. No more Rainbow Family Reunions for your dangerous sexual double-life, pal!

Plus, untapped lusts aside, can you really dislike any movie that has a jaunty fondue-eating sequence?

The cast is B-level 60s manufactured cool. Marianne Faithfull—who contributes no songs, seriously—is better in theory than in practice. French Oliver Reed-a-like Alain Delon really tries to amp up the proceeding with a bit of an edgy personality, but, no go. It's Faithfull's show.

Serge Gainsbourg, however...he'd never let himself be upstaged by a starlet. Unless, of course, it was all part his marketing strategy. Which it usually was.

Very few people have ever really just pissed cool right off the screen the way Gainsbourg did. Here was this goblin-like Lothario that managed to seduce and Svengali starlets left and right with all the panache of a cult leader. He punished them, he rationed them, he took them for granted and damned if they didn't have a continual flow of cream in their jeans for him. So, of course, he's a personal hero of mine.

SLOGAN is little-seen yet best-known for being the cinematic mirror to Gainsbourg and nymph co-star Jane Birkin's real-life romance, and, really, that's honestly too bad. SLOGAN is a brilliantly cool, undeniably nihilistic, fantastically aloof tribute to the power and glory of completely self-defeating behaviors. The kind of behaviors that tend to make life interesting, mostly if you're a Frenchman with an inferiority complex.

Gainsbourg is a successful ad-man with a pregnant wife who is totally cool with him having affairs. Progressive! While she's on bed-rest, he's on head-rest, tearing up the countryside with his 18-year-old conquest whom, at parties, he blatantly refers to as his “little house-wrecker” in an effort to exude power over her through degradation. Thankfully, she doesn't mind as she's massively bi-polar (before this was even a diagnosis, obviously—back then it was simply called “quirky”) and fabulously fickle.

Unlike Faithfull, who's GIRL character is irritating because of her constant need to express opinions and thoughts, Birkin is refreshingly sexy because she plays a character (or does she?) that has none of her own. She's a sex-pot puppet and Gainsbourg has definitely got his hand way up her ass. That's sexist to say, sure, but it's nothing Gainsbourg didn't sing about or act on or believe in himself. He was an emotional enigma, but he was no self-serving hypocrite.

GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE, for all it's faults, and SLOGAN, for all it's triumphs, make for a classy, stylized Euro-counterculture double-feature, the kind where you'll want to chain-smoke fondue-dipped Gitanes to capture a true swingin' 60s holy experience.

I AM VIRGIN: I am virgin, hear me snore!

I AM VIRGIN: UNRATED DIRECTOR'S CUT
Starring Adam Davis, Melinda Ausserer, Ron Jeremy
Directed by Sean Skelding
IMD/Cheezy Flicks
Review by Louis Fowler

I can totally identify with the protagonist of I AM VIRGIN: I'm not worried about finding food or shelter if a pandemic kills off most of humanity; I'm worried about finding recreational intercourse. Straight up, I'm not even gonna BS you people. It'll be easy enough to find food and shelter, but what about feminine fallout companionship? Will I ever again get some of that strange that I bitterly remember as I roam the wastelands? And if I do, will it be of the whore-rifically mutated variety? Or will I have to resort to found blow-up dolls of Alexis Amore with real hair--that's fallen out due to the grotesque radiation levels, natch—just to even have the slightest of non-nuclear related dingle-tingles again?

It makes me cry at night just thinking about it.

But, sadly, and as much as I'd like to, I just can't identify with the filmmakers behind I AM VIRGIN, because, instead of running with the brilliant idea of looking for love in all the bombed places—something that could have been a most hilarious ribald teen-sex apocalypti-comedy—they eschew all cleverness in favor of sub-par Seduction Cinema-esque simulated dry-humping from skanky tatted-up slatterns who have probably been rejected from Suicide Girls numerous times, and you know how them nasty chicks ain't picky.

Young Robby has been taught by his parents that sex will kill you. No matter what. While they were alive, this was just fine—it was easy to deal with being a nerdy virgin when you had a support system. But, when a plague turns the remaining survivors into insatiable silicone-based sex-vampires, it becomes harder and harder, ahem, to keep his burgeouning boner buried deep in his dungarees. Every building he breaks into, there are at least three-to-five post-consumer recycled alterna-lesbians scissoring emotionlessly, hands practically outstretched for that $50 paycheck. Every grocery store he shops at, muscular dudes who resemble the greasy sax-player from THE LOST BOYS feign heterosexuality and grind themselves deep into these feminine personifications of daddy issues. Does Robby give into his mortal lust and become a member of the undead just to make his own member finally get head?

I fast-forwarded through each of the brutally de-rotic sex scenes, making the total real running time of I AM VIRGIN around, oh, thirty minutes. And the whole thing is 90 minutes. It's so depressing. Why would the filmmakers waste all this time, money and energy to make a below-average, above-the-waist soft-core waste of time? Hasn't the internet put a stake through the heart of these cock-teasing no-penetration straight-to-DVD flicks yet? And, even worse, why didn't they just actually try to make a real movie? Did they just have the idea, but nowhere near enough talent to actually do anything with it? Did they leave the only copy of the screenplay on top of their car and a heavy wind came along, blowing white sheets of paper everywhere and they were only able to recover around ten or twelve pages? I wish we were given some sort of justification!

Oops, I almost forgot: my sans dong doppelganger, Ron Jeremy, makes a very funny cameo, resulting in around eleven inches of laughs. And that's really ten more than I AM VIRGIN deserved.

TRANSYLMANIA: Dracula: Dumb and Loving It!

TRANSYLMANIA: UNRATED EDITION
Starring Patrick Cavanaugh, James DeBello, Jennifer Lyons
Directed by David and Scott Hillenbrand
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Review by Louis Fowler

Why do scabs like Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer get to have their brutally unimaginative pop-trend rip-off riffs, like the recently excreted TWILIGHT make-em-up VAMPIRES SUCK, put into every Goddamned theater in America, yet the Hillenbrand Brother's latest opus, TRANSYLMANIA, was relegated to a few small dollar movie runs and a bland straight-to-DVD premiere a week later? I'm willing to bet—and, yes, this would be the saddest wager in the history of gambling—that TRANSYLMANIA is a far funnier, far more engaging and, definitely a far more creative take on the current cinematic vampire trend than the aforementioned VAMPIRES SUCK. It would have to be.

The reason I say that is because while TRANSYLMANIA is utterly idiotic—and oh boy, is it—at least it tries in it's little heart to be somewhat original. It desperately wants to give you a bit of a fresh story, no matter how stupid that story might be. At least it is a story. The Hillenbrands know that any ol' hacks can do a scene-by-scene Xerox parody of TWILIGHT—all you gotta do is have a couple of scenes where, say, Paris Hilton gets hit with a car driven by a fat Edward Cullen who just punched a werewolf in the nuts that shat out an Oompa Loompa that immediately started singing “Who Let the Dogs Out”. See how easy that was? Let me do that half a dozen more times. Where's my twelve picture deal, assholes?

When it comes to goofy horror parodies, I definitely fall on the Mel Brooks side of things, and, no, TRANSYLMANIA is no YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, but it sure is a good as DRACULA: DEAD AND LOVING IT. And I liked DRACULA: DEAD AND LOVING IT. Make fun of the conventions, make fun of the cliches, make fun of the idea of horror movies. TRANSYLMANIA does that like clockwork. It doesn't do a great job of it, sure, but at least it shows up to work on time.

Best described as NATIONAL LAMPOON'S DORM DAZE 3: MY VACATION WITH DRACULA AND BONGS AND LESBIANS, because, well, that's what it is, the characters you've grown to know and love from the previous DORM DAZE movies get accepted to partake in an exchange program in, wait for it, Transylvania. In the first five minutes, multiple lubed bags of weed are shoved deep inside rectums, a dick gets slammed in a laptop computer and, most imaginatively, a Yakuza fucks a bootleg inflatable doll. Humpbacked hotties get humped, a nubile airhead sexpot gets possessed by a long-dead sorceress, one of the gang is mistaken for a vampire lord and, God bless 'em, a midget shows up. Of course there's a midget. There's always gotta be a midget.

And I appreciated it. I really did. I had a good time and I laughed more than I probably should have. Does that make me a bad person? Maybe. But keep this in mind: VAMPIRES SUCK has, so far, made over $30 million at the box office. No part of that money came from me. You tell me: who's the real evil?

Mull that over while I wait for TRANSYLMANIA 2, or NATIONAL LAMPOON'S DORM DAZE 4 or...hmmm...wait, what's this? According to IMDB, a little seen American movie called, awkwardly enough, THE AMERICAN POOP MOVIE, is known in Thailand as DORM DAZE 4. Now that I really want to see!