Short Takes: ‘In the Eye of the Hurricane’ (1971) ★★★

Ruth (Analía Gadé), a wealthy, well-put-together blonde with a fondness for beige fashions and Kent cigarettes, leaves her husband Michel (Tony Kendall) for Paul (Jean Sorel). It appears to be an amicable separation. Michel tries to persuade Ruth to stay—or at least stay long enough for a farewell fuck—but then politely steps aside when Paul arrives to take Ruth away to “the villa.” The lovers’ first few days at the seaside mansion are blissful, though Ruth (and the audience) doesn’t know what to make of the sudden appearance of Paul’s gigolo friend Roland (Maurizio Bonuglia), but she quickly warms up to him always hanging around the movie’s periphery. Less so Danielle (Rosanna Yanni), the sexually ambiguous redhead who’s rented the house next door.

But there are more unwelcome developments threatening Ruth’s happiness than a layabout stud with a pencil ’stache or a shapely switch-hitter, such as narrowly avoiding a deadly crash when her brakes give out while speeding along a narrow highway, and almost asphyxiating when her scuba tank runs out of air during a diving expedition. Both incidents are dismissed as coincidental malfunctions, but Ruth is sure that someone is trying to kill...Paul. It’s only later that she realizes she’s the one who’s In the Eye of the Hurricane (a.k.a. El ojo del huracán).

Even the poster art for In the Eye of the Hurricane
and Paranoia complement each other.

This Spanish-Italian co-production had been on my watchlist for a while, and so it was a pleasant surprise when it popped up on Tubi, under the title The Fox with the Velvet Tail. It’s more a Eurotrash thriller than giallo, which is fine by me. If you liked Umberto Lenzi’s 1969 thriller Paranoia (a.k.a. Orgasmo)—and I count it among my favorites—then you should enjoy In the Eye of the Hurricane. In fact, Paranoia and Hurricane would make a great double feature, as both movies share a lot of similarities: beautiful rich women living in secluded villas, lovers with suspect motives, semi-explicit sex scenes, and bratty bisexual babes.

But as much as Paranoia and Hurricane complement each other, they are not equal. Paranoia is better, but Hurricane is classier. Not only does Hurricane director José María Forqué present his leading lady in a more glamorous light, he also injects his movie with a lot of visual style, such as a dizzying make-out scene between Sorel, hanging upside down from a tree branch, and a topless Gadé (too bad about the shitty day-for-night scenes). The version of Hurricane streaming on Tubi is English dubbed, which makes it difficult to accurately judge the acting, though fortunately none of the actors on screen have their performances sabotaged by awful voice actors. Forqué’s script, co-written with Rafael Azcona and Mario di Nardo, is deceptively simple—too simple, I initially thought, until the final denouement that surprised me with its cleverness. The point of Roland’s presence is never really explained, though the final seconds before the end credits spark plenty of speculation. At the risk of a minor spoiler, I’ll just say Ruth should have fun with him (Roland is cute, in a smarmy sort of way) but maybe keep a gun handy. Roland’s up to something.

Michel’s (Tony Kendall) inability to properly tie a tie may not be what
drove Ruth (Analia Gadé) to leave him, but I’m sure it was a factor.

Short Takes: ‘The Love Machine’ (1971) ★★

There’s a reason The Love Machine
doesn't share the same cult status as
Valley of the Dolls.

Twentieth Century Fox’s adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls was lambasted by critics upon its 1967 release, but that didn’t stop audiences from recognizing its awesomeness and turning it into a huge hit. So, it was inevitable Susann’s follow-up bestselling novel, The Love Machine, would also be adapted for the big screen, by Columbia Pictures this time out.

This time, instead of dolls it’s dick that drives characters to ruin, specifically the one attached to its main character Robin Stone (John Phillip Law). Stone is a New York City newscaster/manwhore, who moistens the panties of Judith Austin (Dyan Cannon), the much younger wife of IBC network head Gregory Austin (Robert Ryan). Judith, pussy aquiver, urges her oblivious hubby to make Robin IBC’s new anchorman. It’s not long before Robin is named head of the network’s news division, and Judith shows up expecting to be thanked hard and often. Robin is happy to oblige, especially now that his model girlfriend/doormat Amanda (Jodi Wexler) is out of the way, having killed herself after Robin dumped her. Judith, however, won’t disappear so easily.

The Judith and Robin business is mostly confined to the movie’s second half. The first half focuses more on Robin treating Amanda like shit, even hitting her when she tries to leave his apartment early in the morning because she must get ready for a photo shoot, and butting heads with IBC’s programming head, Danton Miller (Jackie Cooper). There’s also an underdeveloped subplot about a hack comic, Christie Lane (Shecky Greene), who hosts a schlocky-but-successful variety show on IBC, getting involved with Amanda briefly before entering a transactional relationship with IBC’s publicist/“celebrity fucker” Ethel Evans (Maureen Arthur). Flitting about the movie’s periphery is openly gay fashion photographer and Robin’s best friend Jerry Nelson (David Hemmings), who holds out hope he can get his hands on the love machine one day.

The Love Machine is no Valley of the Dolls, though it offers some campy fun here and there. Dyan Cannon is miscast (an older actress like Lola Albright or Eleanor Parker would’ve been a better fit even if they had less marquee value), her portrayal of Judith rendering her less a calculating ballbreaker than a bratty high schooler, but at least Cannon understood the assignment. Same goes for Hemmings, whose performance is one of the more entertaining ones in the movie, stereotypical though it may be. Unfortunately, John Phillip Law mistook his character’s name as a character trait, acting like a stone and robbing the movie of much of its entertainment value. He’s attractive, yes, but totally unbelievable as a “love machine.” (BTW, “the love machine” of the title is primarily referring to television itself, though that point gets lost when the movie focuses more on Robin’s compulsive need to fuck as many women as possible.)

Director Jack Haley, Jr., does the movie no favors by simultaneously mimicking Valley (cheesy fashion advertisements, an author cameo, plus two Dionne Warwick songs) while also including some self-aware camp, such as having the Hallelujah Chorus play as Danton Miller exits Gregory Austin’s office, relieved he was not summoned there to be fired. And don’t expect its R-rating to up the ante. Though you get some fleeting glimpses of bare tits and ass (including Law’s) and a couple of f-bombs (but way more f-slurs, especially in the movie’s homophobic last act), they do little to amp up the sleaze. In the end, the movie adaptation of The Love Machine never establishes itself as anything more than a cheap imitation. All that said, it’s still more enjoyable than the turgid 1975 adaptation of Susann’s third novel, Once is Not Enough.

Double Takes: ‘Minx’ (2022-2023) ★★★ ½ / ‘Spread’ (2024) ★★

Minx, a show about a magazine that
features pictures of penises, ended up
being cancelled by dicks—twice.

Feminists and pornography have long had a contentious relationship, especially during porn’s “Golden Age” of the 1970s and ’80s, so wouldn’t it be funny if a staunch feminist found herself working in the very industry she abhors?

If we’re talking about the recent series Minx, the answer is a resounding yes. In this twice-cancelled series, idealistic Vassar grad Joyce Prigger (well-played by the wonderfully named Ophelia Lovibond) thinks readers of the early 1970s would be eager to read her feminist magazine, The Matriarchy Awakens. Unfortunately for her, the publishers she pitches it to aren’t—except one, Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson, also excellent), who runs Bottom Dollar Publishing, producer of skin mags with titles like Lusty Lesbos, Giant Juggs and Feet Feet Feet. He just wants a few changes, in writing style (“When I read it, I feel like a fucking teacher is yelling at me.”) and, most importantly, incorporating photos of naked men. Joyce balks, but her older sister Shelly (Lennon Parham) convinces her to take advantage of the opportunity, reminding her that it’s unrealistic to expect everything she wants. And so, The Matriarchy Awakens gets watered down into a cross between Ms. Magazine Lite and Playgirl: Minx.

Despite having plenty of lube, the Bottom Dollar office/studio is not a well-oiled machine, the operation only loosely supervised by Doug, with his assistant (and sometimes girlfriend) Tina (Idara Victor) frequently stepping in to reign in the chaos. Joyce learns her staff is comprised mostly of Bambi (Jessica Lowe), a nude model now working as “centerfold coordinator” (“I made it up. Doesn’t it sound fancy?”), and Richie (Oscar Montoya), the company’s make-up artist and sole gay male employee, as Minx’s photographer (“[N]one of the other guys want to shoot wieners,” Bambi explains).

Though it’s tempting to dismiss the show as Diane and Sam Make a Porno Mag, Minx has more going for it than that. Joyce struggles to reconcile her feminist ideals (and intellectual snobbery) with the business of selling skin mags, reluctantly accepting she’s becoming the face of sex positive feminism. Doug is cool when controversy makes Minx a best seller, but its high profile also attracts the attention of a Phyllis Schlafly-type city commissioner (Amy Landecker), though what nearly finishes his company is a “Men’s Rights” protest that turns violent. Meanwhile, Richie begins to feel he’s betraying his own community photographing models for the female gaze when Minx owes part of its success to gay readers. And Shelly and her husband Lenny (Rich Sommer) decide to take full advantage of changing mores to spice up their sex life (i.e., they become swingers).

I wanted to watch Minx when it first premiered on HBO Max, but before I could get around to it the show, which had been renewed for a second season, was abruptly cancelled and yanked from the platform. Starz came to the rescue, only to cancel it as well. Then the series landed on Tubi, America’s dumping ground for discarded content. But the series was abandoned way too soon and fully deserved a third season. As it is, viewers will be left wanting to know if Minx will be wrestled away from Constance (Elizabeth Perkins, who became Stockard Channing when we weren’t looking), the wealthy businesswoman who gradually takes over the magazine in season two; if Bambi joins the People’s Temple; and if show runners will ever realize they could audition some ambitious porn stars to do guest spots as Minx centerfolds instead of relying so heavily on prosthetic dicks. Sadly, we’ll never know.

Spread is better than one might expect,
but it’s hardly worth your (or Harvey
 Keitel’s) time.

Staying on Tubi, we go from an unwanted sit-com set in the swinging ’70s to an unasked-for “Tubi Original” movie set in the present day. Spread is about a struggling young journalist, Ruby (Elizabeth Gillies), who out of desperation takes a temp job at the floundering skin magazine/Hustler riff, the titular Spread, only to become invested in saving the magazine from being shut down. (Her big solution: introducing the editorial staff to the existence of social media. In the 2020s.)

Speaking of taking jobs out of desperation, Spread is run by Frank, played by HARVEY KEITEL! Yes, regularly-cast-by-Martin Scorsese-and-Quentin Tarantino Harvey Keitel. In a Tubi Original. It’s not easy getting old in Hollywood…

In fairness, while Spread is no Taxi Driver or Pulp Fiction, it’s better than one would expect of a Tubi Original. Its production values are at the higher end of mid, and all actors give professional performances if not necessarily likable ones. As one might expect, Keitel gives the most nuanced performance, actually managing to pull at my diseased heartstrings, though the tear he brought to my eye might have more to do with my thinking of how sad it is that Harvey Keitel is accepting roles in Tubi Originals than the plight of his character. Gillies also gets a special shout-out, her performance reminiscent of a Mean Girls era (a.k.a. pre-trainwreck) Lindsay Lohan.

But while Spread is better made than expected, it fails as a comedy. Spread doesn’t set a high bar for itself, so I guess it’s not surprising it mines laughs from raunchy vocabulary words like analingus and from dildos (writer Buffy Charlet and/or director Ellie Kanner find the mere existence of sex toys hilarious). Those jokes are too obvious to pass up. Less forgivable is Spread reducing its characters to caricatures. Ruby describes herself as a feminist, though her commitment to the cause doesn’t go much deeper than putting a “Feminist as Fuck” sticker on her cubicle. What Ruby is, really, is an entitled white girl, appalled that she must take a job she feels is beneath her when she should be working at The Sophisticate, this movie’s fictional stand-in for Vanity Fair.

Yet Ruby is easier to warm up to than other characters, who are either assholes for the sake of being assholes, like editorial assistant Leslie (Bryan Craig), a gel-bombed douchebag who appears to have wandered in from giving nerds wedgies in a different movie, or simply goofy/weird, like Nelson (Blake Harrison), the socially awkward IT guy, and Prudence (Teri Polo), the flighty receptionist. Only David Allan Pearson as Hank, the too-old-for-this-shit editor of the Pussy Quest page, got a genuine laugh out of me.

Minx succeeds by focusing on its characters as they navigate the changing world of the early 1970s. Spread, on the other hand, has little to say, preferring to task its lead with re-organizing the office dildo closet because aren’t dildos funny? Unfortunately for Spread, not nearly enough.

Short Takes: ‘Swallowed’ (2022) ★★★

Not to be confused with Swallow [NSFW].

A body horror movie written and directed by the same man who gave us Jamie Marks is Dead and The Passenger, with full frontal male nudity and featuring the star of Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge as a vicious queen? You don’t have to ask me twice.

Making Carter Smith’s Swallowed even more intriguing—for me, at least—is Smith makes his story decidedly queer. When we first meet one of its protagonists, Benjamin (Cooper Koch, recently in Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menedez Story), he’s celebrating his impending escape from his dead-end hometown in rural Canada, his joining an L.A. gay porn studio’s stable being his all-expense-paid ticket to a more exciting life. His best friend Dom (Jose Colon) thinks Ben is naïve (“Those guys are going to want all that money back, man”), but celebrates with him, nevertheless. Dom is supposedly straight, yet it’s obvious he’s not that straight. Just as obvious is Ben very much hoping tonight’s the night they take their friendship up a notch, or at the very least, Dom consents to a farewell BJ. Alas, despite pointing our minds in that direction, the movie’s title is not an oral sex reference.

On the drive home Dom takes a detour to check on his cousin, DiDi. He and Didi had worked out a deal to smuggle some drugs into the U.S, the money from which Dom was going to give to Ben as a going away present (dude, you could’ve just agreed to let Ben blow you). Except, Didi is now too stoned to act as the go-between, so Dom now must deal with her girlfriend Alice (Jena Malone), who is neither congenial nor compromising, pulling a gun when Dom balks at having to swallow condoms stuffed with product. That gun also comes in handy when Ben needs to be convinced to swallow some condoms as well.

Crossing the border into Maine is the easy part, it turns out. Complications arise when Dom attempts shitting out the contraband and discovers it’s not a drug—but its bite can induce a high. By the time Alice arrives to retrieve the product, she finds Dom catatonic and pants-less and Ben freaking the fuck out. Her boss Rich (Mark Patton) isn’t going to like this.

Though Swallowed is labeled a body horror, don’t go in expecting Cronenberg (David or Brandon) wrapped in a rainbow flag. It feels more like a homoerotic crime thriller, with the tension derived from the unpredictable situation Ben and Dom find themselves in, without any grotesque physical transformations (you can expect some blood and shit, however, as well as one prosthetic dick* that’s almost convincing). Smith has shown in his other films that he can get a lot from a limited budget, and he gets more than his money’s worth with Koch, Colon, Malone and Patton, all great in their roles. Unfortunately, Smith tacked on a silly epilogue that’s tonally at odds with everything that came before it and dismisses all Ben has gone through. It doesn’t ruin the movie, but it did leave a sour taste in my mouth.

*Not counted as the movie’s full-frontal male nudity.

Short Takes: ‘A Fever in the Blood’ (1961) ★★ ½

What’s the Fever in the Blood? Not
what this poster is selling.

Though the title (and poster for) A Fever in the Blood suggests a lurid melodrama about philandering husbands and horny housewives, it is actually a discount All the King’s Men, about three men—Judge Hoffman (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.), District Attorney Dan Callahan (Jack Kelly, quickly taking it up to 11), and Sen. Alex Simon (a smarmy Don Ameche)—vying for the governor’s seat of an unnamed state (but probably California). Also, Angie Dickinson is in this movie.

Hoffman and Callahan are friends at the beginning of the movie, with Hoffman asking the D.A. to join him on campaign trail as the lieutenant governor candidate. Callahan is flattered, saying he’d never really considered the office. That is, until Walter Thornwall (Rhodes Reason), the nephew of the former governor, is charged—wrongly—with murdering his adulterous wife. Prosecuting the high-profile case ignites Callahan’s political ambitions, only he is not content to be Hoffman’s running mate, he wants the governor’s office for himself. When Sen. Simon approaches him about supporting his campaign for governor—Simon wanting the seat so he can have more control over state delegates for a planned run for President—Callahan’s confidence in his electability is further bolstered and just like that he’s an asshole.

Thornwall’s trial ends up in Hoffman’s court (awk-ward). The avuncular judge does his best to keep politics out of the trial but it’s clear no one else got the memo. Callahan grandstands for the jury (and press), and Sen. Simon attempts to sway Hoffman with a quid pro quo offer if he declares a mistrial. Hoffman refuses the senator’s bribe but agrees to remain silent on the incident at the request of Simon’s trophy wife Cathy (Dickinson), who not-so-secretly loves the judge. Hoffman’s moral backbone develops scoliosis, however, and he decides to fight as dirty as his opponents.

A Fever in the Blood, based on William Pearson’s 1959 novel, has the makings of A Serious Movie with Important Themes—like The Young Philadelphians, helmed by the same director, Vincent Sherman. But Fever has more in common with the TV movies Sherman would direct later in his career, playing more like a two-hour pilot for a TV series than a big screen drama. The TV comparison is further exacerbated by the cast of TV regulars: Zimbalist (77 Sunset Strip), Kelly (Maverick), Dickinson (a movie star, but also future star of TV’s Police Woman), Robert Colbert (The Time Tunnel) and Carroll O’Connor (All in the Family).

Though it’s not as grand—or as sexy—as Warner Bros. wanted audiences to believe, A Fever in the Blood is still pretty damn entertaining (it’s not like a bad TV movie). The story about politics corrupting even the best of men is evergreen (no one will buy the ending though, especially today), and the script by Roy Huggins (also a TV veteran) and Harry Kleiner provides plenty of twists and turns, with a healthy amount of camp. Only Dickinson disappoints, cast as little more than set decoration, in one scene literally reduced to just sitting there and looking pretty while the men talk.