Here are three truths in our society: You’re going to die one day, rent is always going to be too damned high, and somewhere, an oversexed teenage couple is going to fuck up and produce cute little burdens of joy and dirty diapers.
On a cold October night a long time ago, I was conceived by a late-teens newlywed couple comprised of a beer-drinking, dope-smoking guitarist and a goody-two-shoes Christian farm girl. At the end of the following July, I was hatched. From that point, it was a hell-bent roller-coaster ride of backwoods car chases, numerous visits by the cops, horrific scenes of domestic abuse, emergency-room trips, emotional breakdowns, and foreboding messages scrawled in blood on the kitchen floor. Good times.
Cut to 2012. This Thursday marks another birthday for me. Daddy has been five years in the dirt because of drink, and mama has been made tougher than leather because of the whole shitty experience with him. I’m pretty tough myself, even though I’ve got more issues than a warehouse full of unsold Playboys.
Sometimes teenage pregnancies work out with little drama, but from most of what I’ve seen, they sadly don’t. Chalk it up to living in a small town where the kids apparently never get told about things such as Trojans or the pill. Hell, when Octomom can make a masturbation video and sell the thing through a porn company, you know the subject of childbirth has been well covered by our society’s brilliantly useless media machine.
As always, scandalous maternity makes good exploitation fare, especially in these days of reality television trash. MTV jumped on the vapid realism bandwagon with shows such as 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom, the latter of which featured one teen mommy who’s now doing a nickel in the joint for dealing crack. I was once afraid that they were glamorizing the concept of getting knocked up, but then again, it’s been happening since we were able to rut and propagate the species. Most pregnancy flicks are Hollywood or made-for-TV fluff, or worse, porn flicks catering to guys who make a fetish of getting a little too close to the birthing experience after conception. As always, I leave it to the low-budget producers of beautiful cinematic garbage to find a way to exploit and make a small buck from the subject of pregnancy, teenage or otherwise.
TEENAGE MOTHER
"HOW MUCH DA YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX?" What can you say about a teenage pregnancy movie that starts out with stock-car racing while department-store intercom music plays in the background? Jerry Gross, the mastermind behind such drive-in classics such as I Drink Your Blood and The Cheerleaders, brings us this little slice of late-60s local drama with a trailer featuring the slogan, "TEENAGE MUTHA! MEANS NINE MONTHS-A TRUBBA!" The relatively tame high-school melodrama (made to deceptively look far more trashy in the film’s trailer) is centered around bubble-headed sexpot Arlene Sue and an attractive Euro-dame Sex-Ed teacher who spends most of the movie looking like she’d rather be in Dresden during the Allied bombings. Arlene Sue gets knocked up and the crusading Sex-Ed teacher gets blamed for the information she’s imparted upon the students and then is nearly raped by the local high-school drug dealers. No nudity in this one unless you count the creepy Technicolor footage of an actual birth, but it’s a wild and badly acted little trip worth checking out if only for cute girls decked out in the latest Kmart fashions and guys who look like stunt doubles for the cast of My Three Sons.
YOU’VE RUINED ME, EDDIE! (AKA A Touch Of Flesh)
"Maybe the whole world’s crazy…crazy sick!" Eddie is an orphanage-raised, good-natured, and handsome doofus in a Florida small town who spends his time getting nekkid and having sexy times with Joan, the daughter of the town’s richest guy. Eventually, he knocks her up and in a twist of usual movie happenings, SHE wants the abortion and cements this by saying, "Are you crazy?! I don’t want to get married, much less have a baby! We’ve got to do something about this and quick!" Eddie, on the other hand, wants to keep the kid and somehow raise it on his own. The whole thing is a sordid mess of backwater seediness and shady swampland real-estate deals, but it manages to be entertaining all the way through. This features some of the most indignant and over-the-top acting you’d expect from a cast who more than likely stumbled their way through dinner theater before happening upon this casting opportunity. Exemplifying this is the brilliant portrayal of Joan as a spoiled-brat rich girl who goes off her nut and decides to retroactively abort Eddie with a .38 revolver. Good stuff!
THE SHAME OF PATTY SMITH
Patty Smith has been having a pretty bad week. First, while driving home with her boyfriend, she’s gang-raped by a gang of greaser punks while said boyfriend is held at knifepoint and forced to watch. After that, during a creepily calm drive home, she decides against reporting the assault and the boyfriend decides the best course of action is for her to "get a good night’s sleep and forget all about it." That 60s-era preventive care solves everything, doesn’t it? Then, despite her pleading, her friendly family doctor won’t let her abort the kid because it’s illegal in the state. He lectures her about Hippocratic oaths and adoptions. She eventually finds a doctor who wants $600 in twenties for the procedure, and then lectures her about his breaking the law when she can’t get the cash! She tries to get the cash from a local church, but that blows up in her face when the priest goes nutzoid. From there, her only option is a retired pharmacist who finally gets rid of the kid. This is exploitation at its most bleak and serious, and is one big lecture on abortion law reform for the era. It’s on the same DVD as You’ve Ruined Me, Eddie! Highly depressing and recommended only if you’re into abortion drama.
SAVED!
Are you ready to get knocked up in the name of the Lamb? This one is rated PG-13 for “Strong thematic issues involving teens including sexuality, smoking and foul language.” That’s usually enough to push me straight away from even seeing a movie (the rating and teens, I mean, not the sex, smoking or foul language), but this one had an interesting premise. Mary is an Über-Christian girl in a parochial high school who is convinced by a near-drowning-induced vision of Christ to help out her boyfriend who just came out of the closet. She decides that the best way to get him back into Jesus’s flock of heterosexuals is to screw his brains out. She gets accidentally knocked up in the process. From there, it’s a funny little ride of religious peer ostracism, hellish repression, Mandy Moore performing drive-by interventions, exorcisms from a van, and stock teenage drama. It all takes place among the most ridiculously fundamental Christian backdrop I’ve seen since I was invited to a local Christian Rock festival years ago for the purpose of liquor, drugs, and kinky sex in a tent. Reality couldn’t serve up the Jesus-freakin’ lifestyle this rich if it tried. I surprisingly enjoyed this one.
INSEMINOID
Thanks to the miracles of science fiction and UFO conspiracy theorists, I can mention an issue that few people know about and no one really knows about: DEEP SPACE ALIEN RAPE PREGNANCY! And you thought aliens were only all about the butt-probing! This British piece of horribly acted low-budget poop is often thought to be an Alien ripoff, but that’s not the case at all. A deep-space archeological team encounters some kind of disturbance which causes a few crew members to lose it and die horribly through actions such as fellating air-tubes while cutting their feet off with miniature chainsaw-type tools. After that, a female crew member is sexually assaulted by some kind of alien with pea-soup semen through his plastic tube penis. Groovy imagery there. She then becomes a psychotic cannibal with superhuman strength hell-bent on protecting her otherworldly bun in the oven at all costs. It’s cheap, stupid, and highly entertaining.
I have to end this here because either my water just broke or I’ve involuntarily pissed myself. I’m off to the hospital in either case. See you next time!
a clothes line haha
Also, The Demon Seed,(and Rosemary’s Baby)
THAT was the shame of Patti Smith???? I thought marrying Fred “Sonic” Smith was.
OOOPS, different Patti Smith. NEVER mind…………….
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