White Elephant Blogathon: Olga's Girls

Olga's Girls was followed up by the film Olga's House of Shame (which incidentally served as the inspiration for the title of the hit TV show Tyler Perry's House of Payne)

This article is ostensibly a review of the 1964 exploitation film Olga's Girls directed and (arguably) written by Joseph P. Mawra, but more importantly, it's the first rousing defense of the Hays Code from this side of the Christian right since well before the turn of the new millennium.

The Hays Code doesn't get a lot of love these days. It's remembered as an overbearing censorship tool that stunted Hollywood's creativity and resulted in movies where couples slept on opposite sides of the room lest they touch legs and accidentally conceive right there on screen. By the early 1960s, the Hays Code was already more or less irrelevant and on its way to eventual extinction. Before you knew it, Sex and the City: The Movie began pre-production.

Here my memory of film history begins to get a little bit fuzzy.

I think what happened was that for a time, everyone was pleased. In the 1950s and 60s, more and more quality movies came out as people discovered that sex and bad guys were kinda swell. Then disaster struck. Olga's Girls was released on an unsuspecting public, single-handedly engineering the argument for the reinforcement of the Hays Code and forcing the cast of Sex and the City 2 to flee to Morocco.

Never has one film done so much to convince me that censorship is right and in fact required to prevent directors from making movies wherein the prevailing emotional tone of each scene is "boobs."

Olga's Girls is the story of one small business woman's struggle to gain respect in the world of white slavery and drugs. We witness the often tortuous daily work routine of one Olga Q. Nolastname (Audrey Campbell) as it's explained to us by narrator Joel Holt (a man who went on to narrate many other films including the delightfully titled The 'Imp'probable Mr. Wee Gee). The narrator is there to fill us in on the back-stories of characters we will forget ever existed in the very next scene and also to elucidate the emotional tumult no doubt being felt by the various mute, dispassionate actors as they writhe around on the couch, in the shower and in handcuffs.

While Mr. Holt doesn't get any screen time, you might argue he's the film's true star as he lectures us on the Soviet origins of marijuana and the ins and outs of making drug slang sound goofy until we forget we aren't watching a poorly-sourced documentary with b-roll accidentally spliced in from Cinemax. He's the only memorable individual besides the boobular titular Olga.

Olga is not a well-liked lady. At first it may seem like this is due to her insistence on merrily ripping open everyone's shirts and beating them until they're made to bleed magic marker. But really it's because everyone is pissed off that she's the only one who gets to have a voice in the movie besides the narrator (who in turn is presumably pissed off because he doesn't get to show off his boobs). Olga also has this really neat trick where her mouth doesn't move when she speaks which makes it hard to tell if she's telepathically communicating her displeasure with everyone else in the room or dictating to the Livejournal in her head.

The plot bounces around both literally and figuratively, but settles on the journey to discover who the rat in Olga's whorehouse is and finishes with the defection and eventual reunification of Olga's Girls. Mr. Mawra tries to spice the proceedings up by sprinkling in sexy dance scenes with levels of sexiness ranging from "not very sexy" to "the uncomfortable feeling mom might have danced like that once."

Of course the real reason this movie was made was to satiate softcore S&M fans with Olga's "Dungeon of Persuasion," a dungeon where Olga I guess takes girls so she can persuade them torture really isn't so bad when it's being performed by someone who doesn't know how whilst wearing a leather smock ("The Cape of Persuasion"). These are some of the least distressing torture scenes ever committed to film. One girl is tied to a chair while wires are hooked up to her legs. Olga throws the power and much to our shock and horror, the poor girl's thighs are forced to jiggle playfully as the electricity courses through her veins. Also, it goes without saying that her boobs pop out. I believe it is during this same scene that we are treated to the following line: "Olga was sure that Judy wasn't the informant. She had been faithful to her for too long a time... but she just couldn't be sure."

Despite all this, I'm forced to admit that the non-torture portions of the film reminded me of Jean-Luc Goddard's 1962 classic Vivre sa vie, a movie about a prostitute filled with interesting cinematography and similarly bereft of a plot anyone cares about.

Worried that maybe I'd missed some hidden, deeper meaning lurking below the see-through negligee of the film, I turned on the commentary track helpfully included on the DVD. Within minutes, Audrey Campbell explained that they "never had a script of any sort... We just would kind of wing-it."

So I turned off the TV and concluded that Olga's Girls is a cry for help. I submit to you that it's an example of why we should never be trusted to make whatever we want because there is too great a risk that what we will come up with will be stupid. The director could not have made his intent clearer if he'd shouted at the top of his lungs, "Look! Look at the massively stupid shit we came up with when we weren't properly supervised!"

Personally, I don't find it hard to imagine that with a simple change of script, Olga's Girls could have been the next great screwball comedy. Instead we got this.

White Elephant Blogathon: The Gate (1987)

[This review is part of the White Elephant Blogathon, run by Paul Clark of Silly Hats Only.]

The Gate may not rank among the most widely remembered films of the ‘80s, nor will you find it on any but the most obscure awards lists, but let it stand proud as the film with the highest ratio of horror-movie tropes to minutes the world has ever seen. Clocking in at a bedtime-friendly 85 minutes, The Gate unleashes blood-red titles, dissonant stringed instruments, ominous mood lighting, a television set with bad reception (“They’re he-re!”), malfunctioning electrical equipment, a healthy abundance of slow zooms, close-ups, and jump-cuts, and a creepy doll. All this and mind you, we’ve barely moved passed the opening credits.

So now that we know where director Tibor Takács spent his modest budget (‘cause it wun’t on the acting), how much bang for his buck, fright for his franc, screams for his sickle did he manage to eek out? (Snap!) Well, that depends—are you the kind of person who is frightened by slow zooms and creepy dolls? A premature childhood viewing of Poltergeist renders that answer “yes” for me, but then again, I have been known to be frightened by my stuffed animals and people sneezing loudly in my vicinity.

Viewers made of sterner stuff might have trouble getting their fear on with this story of real estate development gone terribly awry. In The Gate, a typical suburban family finds, as so many typical suburban families of the ‘80s did, that they have unwittingly purchased a home with a compound interest rate of Evil. Young son Glen (Stephen Dorff, most noted for later providing the enthusiastic “ugh!” in the Lenny Kravitz cover of “American Woman”*) is left alone by his parents** in the care of flaky sister Alexandra (Christa Denton, mistakenly thought by the producers to be someone I should know by now). While Al devotes herself to catching the attention of that cute guy with the mullet who’s in all these films, Glen and his friend Terry (Louis Tripp) accidentally open a gateway to Hell in the backyard, unleashing a pint-sized demon horde, some powerful wind machines, and a serious case of the willies. What’s a kid with no last name to do?

Well, for starters, not much more than skulk around his house and jump at small noises. About 45 minutes into the movie I realized that, despite my rapidly developing ulcer, nothing scarier than an overwrought string sonata had actually happened. In the great Chekhovian tradition, Takács devotes most of that time to foreshadowing. There’s the introduction of the model rockets, the family shotgun, the of-course-there’s-no-workman-buried-in-our-walls speech to get through, so that all these things can be used in the second act without any ruinous sense of surprise. And indeed, if someone stubs their toe on it in act one, it will get used in act two, with the exception of the creepy doll, whose presence serves no other apparent purpose than to propel me into the lap of my viewing partner.

Evil, of course, will eventually be let loose through a very specific yet totally unavoidable series of events. These include runic recitation, animal sacrifice, and the levitation of a small child. (And who among us cannot say that we’ve accidentally done those things during a celestial alignment?) When the demons finally do take action, why Takács is so reluctant to do the reveal becomes immediately clear: much to the misfortune of my viewing partner, the creature effects of 1987 burst into full and glorious bloom. Glen and company are terrorized by a horde of ankle-biting mutant voles on whom no amount of zooming in quickly will make scary. Having worked so hard to build such feverous anticipation out of nothing at all, with the appearance of the zombie Lilliputian army, The Gate retains all the dramatic tension of An Evening with Julie Andrews. Don’t even get me started on Godzilla’s runty step-brother, who comes in at the finale to try and finish our heroes off.

Yet in all its hokiness, The Gate retains an endearing charm with its likely completely unwitting defiance of the sluts-die-first, black-people-second commandments of typical horror. Well, yeah, okay, it’s an easy trap to avoid when you’ve forgotten to cast black people in your movie, but when the irresistibly be-mulleted jerk who sends the family dog down the hellmouth receives no further comeuppance than a polite request to go home, it’s actually kind of hard to predict who will be off-ed and who spared.

Perhaps my praise of writer Michael Nankin's gentle touch is misplaced, however, since any subvention of the horror genre in the macro sense is more than vented in the scene-to-scene. When faced with a choice between pursuing logical action to stop the advancing horror and being dumb, characters inevitably go for the latter. Thus, finding that their house is possessed, Glen and Posse decide to escape through the back yard—where the demons came from. At another point, when confronted with an unexpected zombie, is Terry's first instinct a) run screaming; b) get the shotgun so artfully foreshadowed; or c) approach the zombie with open-minded curiosity? Hint: this scene does not end well for Terry.

This, too, has its brand of appeal, in the same way of wooden acting and feathered bangs, both also prominently featured. Ultimately, most of what does entertain in The Gate seems thoroughly unintentional and very likely done in the service of a PG-13 rating. Is the film's ideal audience probably barely pubescent? Yes and, if at all possible, sheltered from the last two decades of developments in special effects. But if you stand with us who are easily manipulated by off-key violin music and know that the stuffed animal revolution is coming, set pride aside and grab a friend with a comfortable lap. You’ll never read Gulliver’s Travels the same way again.


*The reviewer would like to thank IMDB for its excellence in the service of making it look like she knows what she’s talking about.

**Glen’s father, incidentally, is played by Donny Osmond of the Mirror Universe, the one who retired to South Jersey and didn’t win Dancing with the Stars.