Flicks With Chicks : Pacific Banana (1981)

Alyson Best as Mandy

The Story

Martin Budd (Graeme Blundell) is a pilot for Blandings Airlines. After his employer's wife, Lady Blandings, tries to force herself on him, first during a private flight and secondly in her chauffeur-driven limousine, Martin develops a sexual disfunction. When attempting sex he sneezes and loses his erection. This is depicted by a shot of a windsock deflating. Sir Harry Blandings (Alan Hopgood) sees Martin fall out of the limo and sneeze, while a dishevelled Lady Blandings informs him she has been molested.

Blandings fires Martin, but not before showing him off to his daughter, Julia (Helen Hemingway), and explaining that this is what a sex maniac looks like. For Julia it is love at first sight. After his wife is gone, Harry explains that he knows what she is like and that he will send Martin to work as a pilot for Banana Airlines. On his way there he is picked up by a sexy woman who tries to seduce him. When he finds out that she is Blandings' other daughter Penny he sneezes and goes limp.

Banana Airlines seems to consist of only one plane, and a pretty clapped-out one at that. The other pilot is an inveterate lady's man by the name of Paul Davidson (Robin Stewart) who is engaged to both of the airline hostesses - Sally (Deborah Gray) and Mandy (Alyson Best), but still finds time to cheat on them with a string of other women.

Once Paul, Sally and Mandy find out about Martin's problem they try to help him with it. When the plane is chartered by Candy Bubbles (Luan Peters) to carry a bunch of swingers to Club Candy (her cut-price answer to Club Med), she and her club hostesses lend a hand.

Julia Blandings keeps stowing away aboard the plane and popping up to declare her undying love for Martin, which just panics him even more.

While jealous husbands and jealous hosties pursue Paul, Candy finally resorts to a primitive ritual which involves her baring her boobs and which is liable to arouse not just every man on the island, but the slumbering volcano as well.

But perhaps it is true love in the person of Julia which will, after all, provide the cure for what ails our hero.

The Director

John D. Lamond was once the king of Aussie skin flicks. He began in 1975 with a mondo style documentary called Australia After Dark. This was to be a look at the sinister and sleazy side of Australian life. The only problem was that in 1975 Lamond found it hard to find anything sinister or sleazy going on to film, so he had to create his own black mass and kinky orgy, the latter scene featuring a well-known gay television personality sporting leather gear. Next came The ABC of Love and Sex : Australia Style (1978) - a softcore sex film posing as as a sex education documentary and featuring women in leotards fondling giant penis statues. Also in 1978, Lamond made his most popular film Felicity, an Emmanuelle imitation about a plucky school girl who travels to Hong Kong and finds herself on a journey of sexual discovery. After that he turned to the popular slasher film genre with Nightmares (1980). Pacific Banana appears to have been Lamond's last real success. He directed a couple more films in Australia - Breakfast in Paris (1982) and A Slice of Life (1983), a comedy about vasectomy, and he wrote and produced a science fiction adventure called Sky Pirates (1986). Since then he's made a couple of obscure thrillers shot in Asia. But his appearance in Mark Hartley's documentary Not Quite Hollywood (2008) and the DVD releases of a number of his films has brought him back into the public eye, and now he is planning to direct two new movies - a noirish thriller and a dramady as well as executive produce some others. Check out this article for more on these current projects.

The Writer

Alan Hopgood is a writer and an actor. In Pacific Banana he plays the role of Sir Harry Blandings. He wrote the script for the famous Australian sex comedy Alvin Purple (1973) which made a star of actor Graeme Blundell. He also wrote its sequel and the television series which followed. He has written for famous television soaps such as Bellbird (1967), The Flying Doctors (1987-1991) and Neighbours (1998-2001). As an actor he has been a regular on Australian television. He played the part of Wally Wallace in 75 episodes of Prisoner. Films in which he as acted include My Brilliant Career (1979), The  Blue Lagoon (1980) and Roadgames (1981). Clearly Lamond thought that, by reuniting Hopgood and Blundell, he might end up with a hit like Alvin Purple. Certainly he and Hopgood were hoping it would be the first of a series. It didn't turn out that way. Hopgood was disappointed with the way Lamond cheapened his script, adding a pie fight sequence, etc. He feels that it was the director's fault that they didn't end up with a successful series of films.

The Actors

Graeme Blundell became a household name in Australia playing the role of Alvin Purple in the film of the same name. This tale of an ordinary guy who is unaccountably irresistible to women was a huge success, taking advantage of the recently created R-rating and paving the way for a string of raunchy romps like Pacific Banana. He has had an extensive career in film and television and even appeared in Star Wars : Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005). He has also worked extensively in the theatre and was the author of a best-selling biography of Australian television personality Graham Kennedy.

Robin Stewart is an English actor perhaps best known for his role as Mike Abbott in the sitcom Bless This House (1971-1976) starring Sid James and as Leyland Van Helsing in the Hammer Films / Shaw Brothers collaboration The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974).

Deborah Gray adorned the cover of Australian Playboy in March 1981 as well as appearing in three other issues of the magazine. She became famous in 1977 playing the character of Miss Hemingway on the notorious Australian soap Number 96. Miss Hemingway was a serial exhibitionist who would appear in public in a long fur coat only to drop it and reveal that she was completely naked underneath. Her public exposures and trips to the psychiatrist in hopes of finding a cure for her behaviour were  a highlight of the show towards the end of its run. As well as playing the role of Sally, she and Luan Peters co-wrote and sang the film's catchy theme song. She went on to have a pop music career in the late seventies. Now she writes witchcraft books and has put out a jazz album.

Alyson Best appeared on a number of television soap operas, including having a main role in the short-lived Holiday Island (1981) of which her bikini-clad form was the major appeal. She also appeared a number of movies, including Harlequin (1980), with Robert Powell and David Hemmings, and Paul Cox's brilliant Man of Flowers (1983). She had a very appealing girl-next-door quality and often got her gear off on film. John Lamond claims she walked around nude for much of the time they were filming Pacific Banana. She hasn't acted on television or film since 1986.

Helen Hemingway was born in 1953. This would mean she was 28 when she played the role of Julia Blandings, running around in a school uniform. So the voice over narration which describes her as "mutton dressed up as lamb" is accurate. Her acting career was a fairly modest one. She appeared in three television series and two movies. The other movie was the cult horror film Patrick (1978). A pity. After seeing her sexy and charming performance in this film I would have liked to see more of her.

Luan Peters did a lot of television in Britain including two appearances on Doctor Who. She also appeared in two Hammer vampire films - Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1971).

Hedley Cullen who has a brief non-speaking role as an airline passenger who leeringly looks up Deborah Gray's skirt was better known as Adelaide television horror host Deadly Earnest.

The Review

John Lamond's movies are not what you would call high-class cinema, but unlike many other auteurs who chased the drive-in dollar he kept the production values high on his movies. They might be dumb exploitation movies, but they always looked good. And Pacific Banana is no exception. The girls are gorgeous and artfully photographed. The scenery often spectacular. And the acting is good enough for the requirements of the script. Graeme Blundell, in particular, has always been a fine comic actor. The gags in the film, and especially the campy narration, are more likely to induce groans than giggles, but it really doesn't matter. The characters are likeable, the actors and actresses good looking, and watching them fly around a number of Pacific islands having sexy adventures is a pleasant way to spend an hour and a half.

The Book

There was a tie-in paperback based on the film written by someone with the unlikely name of Aldor Flagg. It isn't very good. The plot differs in some areas from the movie, but it really has nothing to offer as the film's appeal is in its visuals and not in its plot or dialogue.

Flicks with Chicks : The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961)

The Adventures of Lucky Pierre was the film that kicked off David F. Friedman's success as a producer. For many years he'd been in the film distribution business, and a year before making this film he'd teamed up with director Herschell Gordon Lewis for a black and white drama called Living Venus (1960) about a man who starts a men's magazine (inspired by the story of Hugh Heffner). But it was not until ex-burlesque dancer Rose La Rose suggested that he shoot some colour equivalents to the black and white nudie shorts that were popular with customers at the strip joint she ran in Toledo, that Friedman came up with the idea of a colour nudie comedy which would consist of a series of short sketches with a baggy pants style comic as a connecting character and each section featuring different young women shedding their clothes. This was not a new idea. Russ Meyer had done the same thing a couple of years earlier with The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), but for Friedman and Lewis it turned out to be a ticket to success.

First they had to come up with a title. From their school days they remembered a series of dirty jokes about a fortunate Frenchman named Lucky Pierre who always found himself in sexy situations. (In the movie the character only speaks in the first episode, and he is not French.) It took them all of six hours to write a script. As Friedman said at the time, "This isn't Gone with the Wind..."

The next task was to find six attractive young women who were prepared to bare all on the silver screen. A much harder task in 1961 than it would be today. First Friedman made the rounds of the strip joints, but didn't manage to find the fresh flowers he sought. “They looked good in the stills,” he said. “In person they looked like they’d come from a chorus of fifty - some where younger, but most where fifty.” Eventually he managed to find a very pretty girl in her twenties by the name of Linda Cotton. She was from the Deep South and had a horrible accent, but that was O.K. It wouldn’t be a speaking part.

Next they found their star in funny-looking club comic Billy Falbo, who had played a small role in Living Venus. He might have been a bottom-of-the-barrel comic purveying prehistoric gags at Elks conventions, but he wasn't going to sell himself short. "You guys'll have to deal with my agent," he told them. "I'll tell you now, I don't come cheap. Especially for moom pictures." After some hard bargaining they got him for $500 for four days. "If you go another day, it's another hundred and fifty," the agent warned. "If I go over four days, I'm broke," Friedman assured him.

Our Hero

While on a sales trip to Minneapolis, Friedman was lucky enough to discover a model agency which had about fifty good-looking young women on its books who would work nude. After spending an afternoon over the onerous task of surveying what eight of them had to offer, he selected two blondes, both with the surname Olsen, though no relations. When he arrived back in Chicago he found that Lewis had hired another three girls. He was happy that the casting of the females was complete, but less so that the women his partner had selected looked like they could have been the Olsen girls' moms.

Also in the cast was Bill Kerwin, playing an angry husband. Kerwin appeared in many Lewis/Friedman productions, including Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs! He had a long career in both television and exploitation movies.

Bill Kerwin

Cast and crew expenditures on the film totalled $2,450. Lewis did the camerawork and Friedman the sound recording. They were the entire crew. Lewis composed the score and wrote the title song. The soundtrack was played by two musicians, Lewis himself on organ and his friend Larry Wellington on drums, xylophone and saxophone. Friedman was the recording engineer. The total cost of the production came to $7,138.46 which meant there was enough left of the $7,500 invested to pay for posters, pressbooks and trailers.

Friedman made a deal with the owner of the Fox Theatre in Minneapolis, an ex-burlesque joint turned movie house, that he could have the world premiere of The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, as long as Friedman and his partner's got an unheard of 35% of the gross. In the first week, the gross was $12,000. In the three weeks the film played in that one cinema, they almost recouped their original investment.

To those born after it was made, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre must seem like an artefact of some long  dead civilisation. I was born a year after it was unleashed upon the world, and that was, as far as I remember it, a very different world from the one we live in now. This was a time when sexy movies had no sex in them. When nudity alone threatened the very foundations of western civilisation. In the years that followed, these movies would get weirder and weirder. We had Nude on the Moon (1961) in which astronauts discover a "nudist colony" on the moon populated by telepathic men and women wearing gold lamé briefs and Naked Complex (1963) in which a psychiatrist tries to cure the hero's fear of women by taking him to see a snake dancer at a seedy nightclub. It's not just the gorgeous (and sometimes not so gorgeous) naked women that make these films fun to watch, it is also the fact that they are batshit crazy.

Which leads us nicely to the film's pre-title sequence. The only one with spoken dialogue. Pierre is a cigar-smoking psychiatrist and his woman patient is complaining that she feels as if people are staring at her everywhere she goes. All we can see is her high heals and Pierre is lost in a game of noughts and crosses. "Why should people be staring at you?" he asks. "The whole idea is ridiculous!" You don't exactly have to be M. Night Shyamalan to guess that, when she stands up, she is wearing nothing but those shoes.

Pardon My Pigments is the title of the next sequence which finds three nude models posing for painter Pierre in an field. When they finally get a look at his painting - an abstract - they break it over his head.

The Plumber's Friend finds Pierre at work mending the pipes in a couple's bathroom. Neither he, nor the husband, seem to notice when the wife comes in and takes a bath, even though, at one point, she hands Pierre a wrench. As she slowly towels off her luscious nude body, Pierre just sits their playing with his tool. Errr, so to speak. But once she is dressed again, they both see each other, she runs and fetches her husband and Pierre is forced to demonstrate the work he has been doing, of course ending up being sprayed by the shower.

In For the Birds Pierre is a amateur ornithologist who ends up watching birds of a different kind with his binoculars. On his lunch break out in the woods he spots two women who are in the mood for a bit of sunbathing. One, a stacked redhead in purple capri pants, he takes a fancy to. The other, an older brunette, he doesn't. Unluckily for him, it is the brunette who strips completely nude, while the redhead just fiddles with her top. His time up, Pierre walks off in disgust, at which moment the redhead finally bares her breasts.

Next we find Pierre as The Photographer's Apprentice. Much like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, Pierre decides to play while the master is away. He's just sweeping up the studio when models start to arrive. He pretends to be the photographer and gets them to strip off, but, when he photographs them, they disappear.

Friedman and Lewis really outdid themselves with the film's closing segment - Drive-In Me Crazy - which was also the most challenging to film, as they were shooting nude girls in a real drive-in during the day time.

Pierre drives 124 miles to a drive-in which is playing a double feature of I Was a Teenage Nudist and 10 Days in a Nudist Camp, plus 65 cartoons! When he drives in he finds that the girl in the ticket booth is naked, as are the other girls who serve him popcorn. Up first is the short subject Picnic at the Playground - "In Glorious Black & White on Our New NARROW SCREEN". It turns out the stars of the film are the same girls who work in the drive-in. They lay down a picnic blanket, strip off all of their clothes and start playing with a football shaped beach ball. At one stage they throw the ball off of the screen. It lands in Pierre's lap in his car. One of the girls waves to him to throw it back, so he does, and she catches it. Then the girl's climb on the monkey bars. "Want to See These Beauties in Color?" asks the screen. For a few moments we see the lovelies smiling, waving their hands around and shaking their boobies in full glorious colour. And then another message comes up - "That's All - You Only Paid to See Black & White!" Back to black and white as they continue to play on the play equipment. Finally, just as the sign announcing the main attraction comes up, a truck parks in front of Pierre obscuring his view of the screen. When it moves away, the show is over.

 The drive-in sequence is actually surprisingly imaginative. It would be 24 more years before Woody Allen would have characters in a movie theatre interacting with those on screen in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Of course Buster Keaton had stepped into the movie screen in Sherlock Jr. (1924) and Daffy Duck had had his onscreen life totally screwed up by the mystery animator in Chuck Jones' classic cartoon Duck Amuck (1953). But in 1961 it was still very "meta" to have an interactive drive-in screen.

Throughout the movie, Pierre has been throwing a pair of dice and coming up with snake eyes. In a brief epilogue he is walking dejectedly past a forest. Nude girls look out from behind the trees. He decides to give the dice one more try. And he throws a seven! Joyously he runs off into the woods to join the frolicking naked girls. Isn't there a lesson there for all of us?

I think the philosophy of the nudie cutie is that the sight of nude girls will reduce the intelligence of male audience members sufficiently to render the corny jokes actually funny. I don't know about anyone else, but it works for me.

One last strange footnote on The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is that it inspired an actual work of literature, a novel of the same name by Robert Coover, which apparently deals with the misadventures of a porn star who wanders around a city called Cinecity with his cock hanging out of his pants. While it was, supposedly, inspired by the film, it would appear to be very different in tone, judging by the fact that one critic said it had too many torture scenes in it. Then again, perhaps watching The Adventures of Lucky Pierre might be considered torture to those who don't like bad movies.

Much of the information on the making of The Adventures of Lucky Pierre comes from David F. Friedman's wonderful autobiography A Youth in Babylon : Confessions of a Trash-Film King.

The film can be purchased on DVD-R or download from Something Weird Video.

King of the Crotch Operas - David F. Friedman RIP (1923-2011)

The name David F. Friedman won't get a mention in any academic course on the history of cinema and none of his films are ever going to get into one of those books of movies you must see before you die, but he brought entertainment to the masses in a way that Godard and Bergman couldn't. He was the first to admit that most of the films he produced were not very good, but he had fun making them and audiences kept coming back for more. At heart he remained the carny that he was before he got into the film business. He entertained by showing people things they had never seen on the big screen before, first nudity, then gore, and later sex. He was the Mighty Monarch of Exploitation, one of a merry band of confidence men (and women) who made up for their lack of skill in filmmaking by including in their films various salacious or shocking ingredients that mainstream Hollywood would not touch. But even more than the visuals in the films themselves what counted was the way they were sold. More was always promised than could possibly be delivered, but that was half the fun. Friedman's philosophy was that you "sell the sizzle not the steak". This is why he was not keen on the arrival of hardcore porn features which actually delivered on his false promises. To him this was poor business. But he did relent and produce some better than average hardcore porn features in the seventies and early eighties.

Friedman's cinematic output falls into a series of genres, each characterising a period in his career. After learning the exploitation film business while working for Kroger Babb, producer of the notorious sex education movie Mom and Dad (1945), with its then shocking birth of a baby sequence, Friedman teamed up with director Herschell Gordon Lewis in 1961 to make a nudie cutie called The Adventures of Lucky Pierre. While loops featuring cute girls cavorting nude had been popular in penny arcades and sold to collectors through the mail for years, it was Russ Meyer who established the nudie cutie feature as a new genre of motion picture in 1959 with The Immoral Mr. Teas. As with any hugely popular innovation, poor imitations of Meyer's work proliferated. Both Teas and Lucky Pierre consisted of a loosely connected series of corny gags featuring beautiful nude women. The spirit was that of burlesque theatre which had always mixed beautiful scantily clad women with low brow gags and slapstick. Friedman and Lewis followed up this very successful first collaboration with two nudist camp movies. One of the key tricks of the exploitation business was to use the pretence of education to justify the presentation of salacious material. Typically, the nudist camp films which proliferated in the early sixties presented serious, somewhat melodramatic, stories of individuals defending their right to nude recreation in the face of conservative members of their community who are worried that the local nudist camp was a front for some kind of depravity. Narration informed us of the emotional and physical benefits of getting our gear off in a communal setting. But the businessmen who snuck into "art cinemas" on their lunch break to lap up all that fascinating flesh were very unlikely to answer the siren call to nude living. The next Gordon/Friedman collaboration was a self-parody called B-O-I-N-G!!! which dealt with the misadventures of two sleazy filmmakers making a movie called "Nature's Nudnicks".

But, by 1963, audiences were starting to get bored with the nudie cuties. After Friedman saw a performance of Paris's Grand Guignol (a theatre which presented gruesome simulations of dismemberment and disembowelling), he decided that, since people were bored with nude bodies, the only way forward was to start exposing internal organs. He and Lewis made the infamous Blood Feast. A leg came off, a brain was removed and a woman's tongue was ripped out of her mouth, all in blood-drenched close-ups. When the film hit drive-ins audiences went wild. People screamed, fainted and threw up, and then came back for more. In Baltimore a young John Waters peered over the back fence of his local drive-in and saw something that would help to inspire him to become a filmmaker. Friedman and Lewis made two more gore pictures together - Two Thousand Maniacs and Color Me Blood Red - as well as more nudies before going their separate ways. (They would team up again in 2002 to make a sequel to Blood Feast.) One of the last of those original collaborations was a film called Scum of the Earth (1963), which pointed the way to the next stage in Friedman's career. This was one of the first of what were known as "roughies". The roughies were generally shot in black and white and had very melodramatic stories filled with violence, including sexual violence, and general depravity. They usually contained nudity, but often less of it than the cuties, but added sex scenes to the mix. Of course the sex scenes were not very explicit at all, but the overall atmosphere was of something dark and kinky and forbidden.

Friedman was not an auteur. While he sometimes did some directing, he was almost never the credited director on any of his features. He did, however, write or co-write most of the scripts. While he may have produced films by many different directors, you can see Friedman's creative stamp on every film. Friedman's best roughie was called The Defilers (1965). He borrowed the basic plot idea from William Wyler's The Collector (based on the novel by John Fowles) which had just come out. But in Friedman's movie there was more than one collector. It told of a pair of sadistic delinquents who kidnap a girl and subject her to sexual torment. The director was Lee Frost, who would go on to make many notoriously sadistic exploitation pictures. Friedman made a couple more roughies with other directors, but it was a film he made in 1966 which became the blueprint for the type of picture which would be  his specialty for the rest of his career.

The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill was a colourful tongue-in-cheek period sex romp directed by Pete Perry. This was the first of a series of sexy spoofs which would take on various established Hollywood genres, including western (Brand of Shame (1968)), science fiction (Space-Thing (1968)), Valley of the Dolls-style showbiz melodrama (Starlet! (1969)), jungle adventure (Trader Hornee (1970)) and the swashbuckler (The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (1972)). He referred to these pictures as "crotch operas" or "crotch hoppers". He found the desperation of the patrons of adult cinemas to see naked flesh kind of ridiculous so he expressed that in the parodic nature of many of his films. Even when he made some softcore films which played it straight, one feels that, for him, it was all one big lark. Irony was never lost on him, such as that of being a Jewish man playing a sadistic Nazi officer in his friend Bob Cresse's Love Camp 7 (1969). And he would also produce the most notorious of all Nazi-sploitation pictures Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. (1975), which was shot by director Don Edmonds on sets left over from Hogan's Heroes.

Of all his films, Friedman's personal favourite was She-Freak (1967) a low rent remake of Tod Browning's Freaks (1932). He loved it best because it was filmed at a carnival. Friedman was a carny first and foremost and his films were just like a carnival ride. The sex romps were never quite as exciting as you hoped they would be. They left you feeling dissatisfied. But there was only one answer for that. To step aboard the next one.

Films like Blood Feast and Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS get a lot of attention on horror fan sites, so I've decided to pay my tribute to the great man by watching his sex comedy films and reviewing them here, beginning with The Adventures of Lucky Pierre and finishing with his first hardcore film 7 into Snowy (1978).

Friedman's autobiography A Youth in Babylon is one of the best books ever written on the exploitation movie business. Unfortunately his promised sequel Kings of Bablylon never made it into print.

Buy Friedman's movies from Something Weird Video :