TEENAGE MOTHER

(1967; Jerry Gross)

A life spent in purgatory, waiting… for this?! Many years ago I saw an exploitation preview so sleazy, so incredibly nasty, it’s haunted me ever since. I’ve mimicked that greasy venom-spewing, cigar-chomping narrator countless times, vulgarly exhorting “Teenage Mutha!” to anyone foolish enough to stand for it. I’d dreamed up an infinitely dark, corrosive abyss, an unholy well seething bile and contaminants of the vilest order- the only place unbridled teenage lust could rightfully call “home“. And now I’ve found it. The infamous exploitation classic. Yep…

Ummm… okay, for starters the writer/producer/director Jerry Gross seems pre-occupied with race cars. Those swingin’ high school kids sure dig racing. Okay, this is a movie about a pregnant teen, right?! PLEASE!!! Uhhh… no. Nobody has sex in this film. And at no time does anyone get pregnant(!). Ever! What the?! Doesn’t happen. A dumb girl named Arlene LIES about getting pregnant. And, furthermore, Jerry Gross LIES even bigger with the misleading title and dirty, nasty, lying whore of an ad campaign.

TEENAGE MOTHER does have a fairly coherent premise, I guess... It’s a creaky potboiler about a Swedish hygiene teacher who stirs up controversy in the small, all-American community she’s settled into. It seems she wants to teach sex education to the students… Big fuckin deal, right? There’s a scummy pot dealer (named Duke, no less) who tries to steal the dumb girl away from the good kid, Tony. The local gangster who supplies the grass to Duke decides he wants to get rid of the sex-ed teacher because… well, because she gives him bad vibes (good enough?). Duke attempts to rape the Swede, but is interrupted by “coach” (Fred Willard, completely wooden in his film debut).

The groovy kids down at the “Action House” convulse rigidly to the tepid beats of “The Young Set”, proving once and forever that white kids only think they can dance. When would-be rapist Duke makes a break for hare-brained Arlene, nice-guy Tony kicks his butt. I think that about sums it all up. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention… the audience is ambushed at the end by stock footage of a real birth (ala MOM AND DAD). And it is incredibly DISTURBING. Unless I just hallucinated (a distinct possibility...), they used something like a car-jack to remove a baby from the womb. I think this is so the audience didn’t burn the theaters down in protest.

I smell conspiracy here. It’s as if the producers deliberately set out to trick anyone with a pulse into thinking they were in for some cheap thrills. Hey kid, you wanna see something real boss? Ahhh… the old bloody finger in the box trick. Ha ha. Lame. Oh, before you go off all half-cocked, check THIS out! You see, I told you so… hey, don’t give me that look. All right, to hell with you then.

PRELUDE TO HAPPINESS

(1975; Gidney Talley Jr.)

“Amputee fetish” cult classic, earnest to goodness love story… or both? PRELUDE TO HAPPINESS is the story of Susan Imes (real amputee Rose Petra), a young, pretty blonde in love, breezily skipping down the primrose path until “the accident”. When she wakes up in the hospital unaware of being hit by a car, a doctor informs her where she is and why, “There’s no delicate way to put it… (insert schmaltzy musical foreshadowing here) Your leg has been amputated”. After a few days, poor Sue is handling things as well as can be expected, until her fiance finally shows up to visit and announce he’s canceling the wedding and leaving her to protect his image. Bummer. Make sure to have plenty of tissue handy to keep from blubbering uncontrollably during these oh so tender moments.

I have to admit being caught completely off guard by this movie. I was expecting something rather exploitive and instead found an earnest love story starring a one-legged woman. Okay, earnest love story ala “General Hospital”, but… Obviously, Susan’s devastated by her boyfriend’s abandonment and starts to pout a lot and reject the rehabilitation process. This gets the attention of young, handsome and saintly Dr. Steve Hartman (Gary Davis), who attempts to help her get settled back onto her feet (er, um… foot) by getting her a job at the hospital.

As it turns out, she’s a registered nurse and we get a great scene in which she bugs out her eyes uncontrollably (and freezes in her duties) at the arrival of an accident victim with badly mangled legs. This draws a vicious backhand from an elder surgeon, but afterwards she is coddled by the good Dr. Steve, who then rescues her from a couple of would-be rapists in an alley.

When she invites him to attend a pool party for which she could find no date, we catch the good doctor ogling her bikini parts and getting visibly jealous when she dances with a greasy-looking hippy. She then plays a love song on her guitar, they make goo goo eyes at each other and soon they are falling in love, complicating his impending engagement to prissy high maintenance bitch, Tiffany (sassy Carol Sowa), who rounds out the triangle… “I imagine you were out with your one-legged bitch again!”. 

Perhaps it was the dizzying array of wobbly boom mikes dipping into the frame or maybe it was just the frequent bad acting and latent cheapness of it all, but I had a creeping feeling throughout that Johnny Wad was lurking nearby with his hands down his pants. This may have had something to do with my buddy (who gave this copy to me) categorizing it as “amputee porn”. I mean, seriously, who in their right mind could pass on that? Alas, no porn here, but many surprisingly racy and gratuitous shots of pouty, voluptuous Susan hobbling around in her panties and bra and also in a bikini (and what a lovely stump it is!).

Regardless of how shoddy the production is or how well it succeeds, there is a lot of sincerity in PRELUDE, especially in woeful, sweet Rose Petra (in her only film role). And though it begins to feel more and more like a bad soap opera, it is one of a kind and truly, strangely engaging throughout. Sure, it may have it’s share of “you see… amputees can be sexy, too” moments, but I resoundingly reject the “amputee fetish” status the film has garnered. Acrotomophiliacs the world over may scream to high Heaven upon reading this, but I think they’ve essentially hijacked this one for their own rather nefarious purposes. Alright, a bit harsh…I mean, I guess I get it. Okay, let’s just not go there.