BEAUTIES AND THE BEAST

DESPERATELY SEEKING YETI!

The movie opens with a weird narrator, who never appear again in the movie, who sits half obscured by bushes, crouching with binoculars, and tells us; “That the story we are about to see, could be real.” Welcome to the incredibly inept Bigfoot movie “Beauties and the Beast”. Our good friend Bigfoot is stomping around in the forest looking for women he can kidnap and bring to his nearby cave to do god knows what.

Okay, let me just pause here for a minute... I really don’t know how to describe the plot of this movie, there is nothing in this film that has anything to do with the rest of the film. There are some scenes in the beginning of Bigfoot kidnapping more nubile girls, some scenes of Uschi Digard arriving to a cabin with her friend. And some hippies popping up out of nowhere like so much else in the film. I’ve got a headache already…

Beauties and the beast from 1974 is one incredibly stupid little movie and trying to sum up the nonexistent plot is really hard, I’m sorry I did my best… But this is not the kind of movie you’d be watching if you are into unnecessary things like plot, acting, continuity or dialogue. So what are we left with if you strip all these elements from the film? Sex, boobies and some of the most incredibly hilarious lines and sequences in a Bigfoot movie you’ll ever see. Most of the time it felt like I was watching a Doris Wishman feature, for those of you who don’t know what that means; Bad dubbing, hilarious dialogue, no sync, barely any continuity, overlong shots and a lot of library cues. The plot in the movie changes almost abruptly in every scene, making it very hard to follow what goes on. It’s very probable that the crew rewrote the script for every scene they shot. There is even some sequences during the last part of the movie where, the hippies have been bathing and running around in the nude, and in the next scene, Digard and another girl is running through the woods witch is now covered in snow, dressed in a heavy jackets.

The thing that probably will attract most viewers to this film is to se the talents of Swedish bombshell Uschi Digard, and I’m not talking about her acting talents. Her acting in this movie is so horrible that it’s almost not funny, luckily it doesn’t go long before the” unholy two” are being flashed before the camera, and every detail about her acting abilities are quickly forgotten. Most of the sex scenes in the film work pretty well, although some of them are a bit too long. To my big disappointment, there are no scenes of Bigfoot-on-woman action, besides for a brief breast fondling scene featuring our hairy friend. There are some really hilarious and bizarre moments in the film, a long surreal dream sequence where two naked girls have a western duel, complete with gun belts right above their muffs. And my favorite scene; a tender love scene becomes unexpectedly broken up when the couple rolls over on a rubber duck which gives off a loud squeaking noise (!?!?!).The movie is so stupid, so surreal, so inept, and yet so much fun! So if you are like me, a fan of these superbly stupid sex films from the golden age of smut, a little Bigfoot only sweetens the deal! Dig in!!

MONDO FREUDO

The scenes in this film are real - too real for the immature!

How about another trip around the world with Lee Frost and bob Cresse? This time it will be even spicier than the last time. Directing their focus now, almost entirely on the subject of sex, we are invited into Mondo Freudo, the Freudian world. “A world full of sex, sex symbols and the strange and unusual lore that governs them.” The film opens up with shots of various people frolicking at the beach in California¨, filmed with a telescopic lens. This shot serves only as an appetizer as the following sequence is of the same beach, only at night, now filmed with an infrared camera. Trying to capture a couple having sex, all they find is an young couple making out. Let’s move on. We are informed that we are Hollywood, later the same night, to film the many strip clubs featured in the film. The narrator tells us how the rules in the US apply to topless dancers and what they can and can’t expose to the leering audience.And on that note we are quickly swooped to London and to new strip clubs, from private to public ones, giving us mundane facts about the British legal system concerning striptease and nudity. After visiting a couple of the more seedy clubs of London we get to see the prostitutes, hanging their photos and phone numbers on billboards, since streetwalking prostitutes are illegal in England. We visit two of these working girls, hoping to get a demonstration of their lesbian skills for the camera, but they will only perform if the camera is off. When the camera is mercilessly turned off, we head back to the US to San Francisco, were we witness a topless fashion show, the Kabuki watusi club and oil painting on naked women. Following the shots of women with red paint all over their bodies, we travel on, south of the border, to Tijuana. Here the camera reveals poverty in an Indian village, were girls are sold into slavery as prostitutes. Showing us one of these slave auctions, the narrator happily informs us that the girls are better off working as private sex slaves and in local strip clubs. On that reassuring note, we leave Mexico and go to New York to se a black mass performed by witches on a loft near Times Square, and more prostitutes filmed with “hidden cameras”.
Staying on the topic on prostitution, we head to the east, for Japan to learn that prostitution, striptease and S&M clubs are legal, showing us footage from one of these “sadism” clubs. Our final destination is Germany were we are titillated with a scene from a restaurant which features some high class entertainment; Mud wrestling!

Mondo Freudo, filmed in 1966, probably back to back with Mondo Bizarro, has the focus entirely on the subject of sex. As you may have guessed the only thing we ever get to see are the buttocks and breasts of the women in front of the camera and nothing else. One should think that a Mondo film with a more focused objective would be a good thing, but Frost and Cresse hasn’t managed to do anything particularly good with the film. Most of the narration is just as stupid or even more stupid than it was in Mondo Bizarro, and many of the scenes are done in the same fashion. Again they are using the ever hip “hidden” camera and telescopic lens, trying desperately to add more to the movie. To be honest, the topless girls got boring after 20 minutes and there really isn’t anything else to this film other than topless girls. It’s also apparent that they tried to mask the obvious fact that it is a nudie picture by inserting too much useless and boring “facts” about the legal system around the world concerning nudity and sex, comparing each countries laws on the subject. As with Mondo Bizarro, it is very difficult to tell which of the footage is real and what is faked, when all of the club scenes seem to be filmed inside a tiny set. One improvement is that we get to see a little bit more of each location we are going to, but also here is it hard to tell if it is stock footage. Mondo Freudo is easily the weakest entry in the Mondo genre I’ve seen so far, and I can’t really recommend this to anyone, you’re actually better off watching Mondo Bizarro again.