After Plan 9 concluded, the emcee came back out on stage and warned everyone with weak constitutions or high moral fiber that the next few movies were definitely of an adult nature. (Apparently, Evanston has a curfew, and everyone under 18 had to leave.) He also warned that if you went outside the building you were effectively locked out until the next morning. Not a problem, I’m not going anywhere. I’ve made it past the Plan 9 hump, and it’ll be smooth sailing from here on out, I thought. But how could I have known that two films away sat a cinematic turd-burger of such biblical proportions that it would push my cinematic sensibilities way beyond critical mass.

But! Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, 'cuz we’ve got Pam Grier on deck. (Rahnnrrrrrrr.)

Wocka-chica-wocka-chica-wocka-chica! Pam Grier is Coffy. Surgical nurse by day. Avenging angel by night. Seems some bad dudes got her little sister addicted to drugs, and crippled here cop boyfriend, so Coffy will stop at nothing to bring those responsible down. And not three minutes into the film, Coffy has already blown a pimp’s head off with a shotgun and forced a drug pusher to overdose on his own junk. Several ass-whuppins, cat-fights, and gratuitous boob shots later, when Coffy discovers that Alan Arbus (Dr. Sidney Friedman from M*A*S*H) is Mr. Big, she manages to infiltrate and eliminate his syndicate with extreme prejudice. Total Body Count: Four pimps, three pushers, two corrupt cops, six henchmen, one prostitute, and one turncoat congressman.

You want a plot description? You can't handle a plot description! You weren't there, man. You just weren't there...

Some clown tries to find fulfillment by screwing everything that moves. I’m not kidding -- this guy would hump a bush if he thought there was a rabbit in it somewhere. Then he tells us all about it in song. Hands down, thee biggest, most pretentious piece of cinematic @#%* and over indulgence I’ve ever seen. All I can say is: Shame on you, Anthony Newly.

A funny thing happened on the way to the end of Merkin. When the second to last reel ended, the A&O film crew decided to appease the masses and interjected "The Mystery Short" before they were run out on a rail for subjecting everyone to the prior piece of crap. While I cringed in the back unaware, waiting for the end of Merkin, before my eyes appeared a crude animated short titled The Further Adventures of Super Screw that was like an old Hustler Chester the Molester cartoon come to life and gone horribly, horribly wrong. To keep this site at it’s PG-13 level I really can't go into too much detail, but for those of us who were there all I can say is: "BAD MONKEY! " But in the end, Super Screw served it’s purpose, diffusing the crowd long enough to finish the last reel of Merkin.

Hallelujah! Stick a fork in that thing. HELL YEAH! You don’t watch Merkin, you survive it -- and there should be some kind of medal for those who do. I know I’ll be carrying some emotional scars and baggage because of it for quite some time. But after a few, deep and cleansing breaths, I open my last bag of M&Ms and await the next feature. It can't get any worse than that, right?

Ah, back to the basics ... When the film opens on a beach and we spot a dead man with a spear sticking out of his chest, I got my biggest laugh by shouting "Look! It's Merkin!" drawing a chorus of chuckles from those hardy few who were still conscious at this hour. Since I had just bought this thing on DVD and the M&M’s just weren’t lasting, I decided to hit the vending machines again, hoping it would take my dollar bill this time. To my horror, the vending machine area was now fenced off, I assume, until morning. The trip wasn’t a total bust, though. I grabbed a B-Fest poster off the wall as a souvenir, and snatched the last two B-Fest cups on the way back into the theater, where I stretched out on the floor in time to see the Slime People’s infernal fog machine destroyed and the world saved. 

So we finally get around to The Lonely Lady, the film Bad Movie Planet sponsored. (Sorry, everybody.) Someday, I’m gonna have to ask Chris and Scott what exactly is the root cause of their Pia Zadora fixation. Anyways, I believe this film is Pia’s answer to her critics for her dubious Golden Globe win for Butterfly, where she plays a talented writer who gets tab-A [a yellow garden hose] inserted into slot-B [her naughty bits], and somehow this starts her down a road of sexual degradation that helps her ascend to the top of the Hollywood ladder. Once firmly entrenched, she writes her autobiography, and when that’s turned into a movie she’s up for an Oscar for best screenplay. She wins, but in a public display of soul cleansing, declines the award and confesses that she’s basically a slut and slept her way to the top.

Pia, Pia, Pia. Alas, The Lonely Lady concludes the naughty portion of our film-fest. (I'm still curious as to why they stuck The Slime People in the middle of it?) The lady with the cooler a couple of rows up is snoring loudly, and I’ll admit it, I’m starting to get really tired.

Oh my. What we have here is a 1950's exploitation piece disguised, rather clumsily, as an educational film, where a young couple feels they must have children "To have a truly content marriage." 

Unfortunately, no matter how hard they try, they can’t seem to make the miracle happen. So instead of settling down with a family, they’re stuck partying with their wild friends. And then one of these parties gets out of control as one girl starts to strip and eventually gets in to a hair-pulling catfight with another gal. A drunken sod strips down to his pants and passes out in a chair. And this has what to do with Test Tube Babies exactly? Hang on. You see, this latest debauchery was the last straw, so the couple turns to SCIENCE! to help them out. And once they find out the husband’s shooting blanks, we get a nice lecture on a new fangled technique called artificial insemination. But the doctor (Ed Wood regular Timothy Farrell) balks on one vital piece of information, and he never does reveal who the sperm donor was. (This might explain the doctor’s sly grin through most of the proceedings, however.) Democracy and the marriage are saved as SCIENCE! comes through.

The only two things I clearly remember about this movie was that one scene from it was used during the voice-over game on Who’s Line is it Anyway, and the guy who played the doctor also narrated Glen or Glenda. Beyond that -- not a whole lot.

Must stay awake. What’s next?

Aaaaugh! Ted V. Mikels!

Apparently the Haxan Cat Food Company has added a new secret ingredient in their cat chow -- human flesh! To do this, the proprietors pay the local gravedigger top dollar for fresh corpses. And when there aren’t any, he goes out and makes some. We are then entreated to several shots of dead bodies riding a conveyor belt into some kind of Rube Goldbergian Wood-Chipper Machine, where they're processed into some goopy-goop that plops into a bucket at the other end. However, when the local kitties eat the tainted cat food, they go berserk and attack their owners! This leads to the biggest laugh I had during the entire film-fest when the snoring lady with the cooler had no reaction when a cat killed its owner, but got very upset when the dead woman’s husband smashed the critter against the wall -- only to get even more upset during the cat autopsy!

Now hold on. I like cats. Have one of my own that is very dear to me, but this bit of skewered priorities had me giggling. Maybe it was the lack of sleep.

The local doctor and his snoopy nurse finally figure this all out, and then the snoopy nurse gets to play Penelope Pitstop and takes a ride on the conveyor before the bad guys are hoisted with their own patootie and ground into cat food themselves. Oh, the irony of it all.

This entire film looks like it was shot through one of my dirty socks. Okay! Okay! I nodded off during this movie, but I saw enough of it. Unfortunately, during one of my cat-naps [...sorry], I dreamt that our car got towed away.

Eep!