And so, the emissary in question, a hapless boob by the name of Sterilox (Coe), is teleported to Earth and into the secret lair of Dr. Breedlove (Gardens).
A man of maniacal mad science, who majored in aphrodisiacs, apparently, Breedlove does his best to educate his dense alien friend on the fine art of the female form by giving him a tour of his mansion / castle, where each room is filled to overflowing with the target gender in question.
Girls with names like Boobra (Natasha), Barebra (Bibi), Kissme (De Witt), Hotty Totty Banks), Gertie Tassle (Currier), Gigi String (Donna), Lotta Cash (Lucky) and Gina Catchafanni (Hall).
Zingers fly, and brassieres disappear. Followed by more stripping, dancing, and ah-lotta ogling, punctuated by visits from Dracula, the Mummy, and an extended cameo by Frankenstein's Monster; thus proving once again, some movies can actually be even more insane than they sound on paper...
Here it is, Fellow Programs, the film on which exploitation pioneer Harry Novak's Boxoffice International empire was built: Peter Perry’s Kiss Me Quick (1964); a Nudie-Cutie that put the Bonk in the Totally Bonkers.
“The logical outgrowth of both the Burlesque film and the Nudist Camp movies of the 1950s, the Nudie-Cuties were usually comedies, often starring old burlesque comics, and filled with the kind of cornball gags that, by comparison, made the average dirty joke seem sophisticated,” said cult filmmaker Frank Henenlotter (Something Weird Video, 2001).
“In an era when almost anything sexual could be considered obscene, their sole purpose was to display naked women. And they were undoubtedly the stupidest films on the face of the earth.”
Henenlotter, who directed Basket Case (1982), Brain Damage (1988) and Frankenhooker (1990), provided the liner notes for Something Weird Video’s release of the Nudie-Cuties Kiss Me Quick and Bob Cresse’s House on Bare Mountain (1962), which were, along with Stephen Apostolof’s Orgy of the Dead (1965), to my knowledge the only bona fide Monster-Cuties.
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“[They] were sex films without any sex,” said Henenlotter, while grasping to explain the Nudie-Cutie phenomenon:
“Men wandered through these Nudie-Cuties smiling, staring, photographing and peeping at naked women without any real human contact with them. Lust was something done furtively and always remained unfulfilled. (Or in the case of Kiss Me Quick, sidestepped completely by making the male characters sexless buffoons.) Women became so objectified that they seemed to exist in a world outside and beyond that of man. It’s as if we’re watching two different alien races whirl madly about one another without ever once connecting.”
Pioneered by others, these things really didn’t hit the mainstream until Russ Meyer released The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), which inspired the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis to make The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961) and Boin-n-g (1963), Arch Hall Sr. to don some Magic Spectacles (1961), and Barry Mahon to explore the 1,000 Shapes of a Female (1963) before going Nudes and Nuts (1963).
And Francis Ford Coppola started his storied film career shooting things like Tonight For Sure (1962), where a cowboy keeps seeing naked cowgirls after getting conked in the head, and The Bellboy and the Playgirls (1962), where he added nude inserts to an imported German film to punch it up for the America distributors.
A personal favorite was John Wallis’ Adam and 6 Eves (1962), where a lonely prospector with a dubious treasure map gets lost in the deserts of Mexico with a talking mule named Toby. And there he was, desperate, out of water, when suddenly, there appeared an oasis inhabited with six nubile nymphs, who cavorted around on some playground equipment cleverly disguised as trees, shrubs and vines. And they were totally starkers!
Much sun-bathing, rain dancing, and general interpretive hip-shaking ensued. But despite all of this booberific temptation, much to the chagrin of Toby, who, turns out, really had a talent for spinning puns and double entendre, the hunt for the treasure continued in spite of all this bumpin' and grinding. And just when our oblivious hero thought he'd found the buried treasure at last, turns out he hadn't. In the end, Toby swears it was all a mirage, but who can say for sure.
“Seen today,” said Henenlotter, “the average Nudie-Cutie looks like a dirty movie made for little boys.” That seems fair.
Speaking of little boys, a concurrent fad of the 1960s, of course, was a resurgent Monster boom, thanks to things like the Shock! TV packages, local Creature Features and Horror Hosts, Aurora model kits, and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. When Kiss Me Quick hit theaters, The Munsters (1964) and The Addams Family (1964) were on the air, so something creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky was definitely in the air.
Said Henenlotter, “Whether it was Kong carrying Fay Wray, Dracula and his women, or even the Amazing Colossal Man pausing from his Las Vegas rampage to stop and leer into the window of a pretty young woman taking a bath, monsters have always echoed the sexual lust of the Id. And boys, who, like most monsters, are not in control of their growing bodies, have always inherently understood this.”
Trying to tap into all of that and make some money, Harry Novak had worked at RKO Pictures in the 1940s, where he eventually became the head of their west coast booking department. And in that capacity, he handled, on top of other things, and ironically enough, the distribution of Walt Disney’s animated features and shorts. When RKO folded, Novak served as their hatchet-man, who handed out pink slips and liquidated assets until the once fabled studio ceased to exist around 1957.
Novak then went to work for Seymour Brode and his JEM distributors, who imported bawdy foreign films -- mostly the Carry On films from Anglo-Amalgamated / The Rank Organization, which started with Carry on Sergeant (1958) and ended with Carry on Emmannuelle (1978).
With his RKO connections, Novak was a valuable asset to the company, who helped buoy things since Brode had a rather dubious reputation. And so, it was Novak who booked Lewis and Dave Friedman’s Blood Feast (1963) for Brode; and with a few cuts, introduced the film to mainstream audiences.
In 1964, simmering animosities with the boss saw Novak dismissed from JEM and forming his own distribution company, Boxoffice International. And here, Novak decided to take the next step and go into production for himself.
As the legend goes, Novak teamed up with Pete Perry and Max Gardens, who converted an empty storefront into a makeshift studio.
Perry got his start as an associate producer on W. Merle Connell’s The Flesh Merchant (alias The Wild and the Wicked, 1956), a dirty little sleaze-noir, where a girl hoping for Hollywood stardom winds up working in a brothel. And after producing Girl with an Itch (1958), Perry directed his first film, Revenge of the Virgins (1959), penned by none other than Edward D. Wood Jr., where a tribe of female natives vow to run invasive settlers off their sacred ground.
His first Nudie-Cutie was Mr. Peters’ Pets (1962), where a man huffs some “magical ambrosia” that turns him into a doppelganger of several women's pets so he can spy on their owners while they’re nude. This was followed by Knockers Up (1963), where a man takes an exotic potion that turns him invisible and plays the peeping tom with impunity.
Perry would wind up making about a dozen of these things, all under aliases ranging from Dick Crane, A.J. Gaylord, and Arthur P. Stootsberry. He was credited as Seymour Tuchus on Kiss Me Quick -- only there weren’t any credits because the production was so cheap and threadbare they didn’t have any. They just announced them orally when the film began.
“The whole production took six days,” Novak recalled to Mike Vraney on the commentary track on that Something Weird DVD. “We shot it over two weekends.”
Apparently, one of the patron saints of independent productions back in the day were camera shops that were closed over the weekends. More than once have I heard stories where filmmakers would rent the equipment on a Friday for one day, but then wouldn’t have to return it until the shop reopened on Monday, giving them two days for free. Novak admitted they pulled the same con, and probably more than once
Max Gardens, meanwhile, was the owner and operator of the Gayety Theater (alias the Gaiety Theater) in downtown Los Angeles, which specialized in burlesque but was also equipped to show features and shorts. Gardens would co-produce the film with Novak, as well as star in the film as Dr. Breedlove under the alias of Manny Goodtimes.
In fact, the film was shot under the title of Dr. Breedlove, which was most likely a play on Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Now, that seem year, Ray Dennis Steckler was about to release a film called The Incredibly Strange Creature: Or Why I Stopped Living and Became a Mixed-up Zombie, which got him slapped with a lawsuit by Columbia Pictures, but this was settled out of court with a name change to The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies!!? (1964).
It’s a pretty good bet that Novak and Gardens were aware of this, too, what with their production sharing the same cinematographer as Steckler in Lazlo Kovacs (-- and more on him in a sec), which might’ve scared them into a title change.
And speaking of lawsuits, I have no idea how Kiss Me Quick got away with those monster makeups, whose likenesses were protected IP by the highly litigious Universal Studios and their rabid trademark lawyers. When Vraney asked Novak about this, his answer on whether he feared they might get sued or not was fairly hysterical:
“What for?! It’s got tits and ass in it!” said an indignant Novak. “Their picture doesn’t have tits and ass in it. The only time you’d see this picture is if you went into one of those theaters, with your doodle cup, and you watched the people around you and they’re all laughing.” The long and the short, Vraney concluded, they never got caught.
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Now, the one area where the production didn’t skimp was on those monster makeups and costuming. Breedlove’s was pretty terrible, sure (-- you can actually see where his glasses have rubbed the greasepaint off his nose), but the vampire and mummy efforts were pretty good. And that Frankenstein Monster was outstanding.
Gardens and co-star Frank Coe would pull double duty. Gardens would play the vampire and Coe would play the thumb-sucking Monster of Frankenstein. (The mummy was never identified.)
(L-R) Barbara Steele and Harry Novak.
Alas, whoever pulled off these makeups remains anonymous. Vraney almost got them identified, coaxing production stories out of the elder Novak, who was in the midst of explaining who did them when he got distracted by something in the film -- most likely a pair of breasts, and they never circled back to it.
Overall, the commentary track is highly informative and very entertaining, which was interrupted on several more occasions when Novak would suddenly stop and shout out, “Look at those tits!” But not in a lewd or lascivious way, but in true appreciation of the female form. In fact, Novak went on to explain his disdain for breast augmentation surgeries, and the secrets of how to tell the real ones from the fake ones. “All my girls were natural.”
As for the bevy of beauties on display in the buff, most were strippers borrowed from Gardens’ stage shows. But Novak also claimed several of them were Columbia Studio Slay Girls, a term used for female extras used to spice up variety shows and the like. All worked under a pseudonym here.
Novak also claimed several big studio stars would hang around the set. And while he refused to name names, one of them, who was married, hooked up with one of the girls that led to his eventual divorce.
Of course, even though the country’s moral code was starting to crumble, cinematically speaking, there were still rules. “You could shoot all the boobs you wanted, but you couldn’t show any pubic hair,” explained Novak. So it was a lot of derrieres, breasts, and strategically placed furniture and scientific doo-dads.
As mentioned, shooting all of this was Kovacs. “He came from Hungary, and he couldn’t get a job because he didn’t belong to the union,” said Novak. “Lazlo couldn’t get into the union. His English wasn’t very good, and therefore, nobody would give him a job. But we didn’t care where he was from or whether he belonged to the union or not.”
Lazlo Kovacs.
Kovacs fled Hungary in 1956 with his friend and fellow cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond when the Soviet Union sent in the tanks to quash dissent. Both were film students at the time and managed to capture the invasion on film; and when they managed to reach the United States, they sold their footage to CBS.
From there, working as Leslie or Lester Kovacs -- or in this case, Art Radford, he would kick around the outskirts of Hollywood, shooting things for the exploitation market. (Zsigmond would follow a similar career path.)
Said Vraney, “Lazlo’s camerawork on [Kiss Me Quick] is famous for the idea that the camera is right up against the flesh; [the camera’s eye] is, like, as close to the body as humanly possible and just kinda following the contours of the women.”
Kovacs would also shoot The Wonderful World of Girls (1965), Mondo Mod (1967) and Lila (1968) for Novak, and then A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine (1966) and The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966) for Dave Friedman.
He would then graduate to American International for Psych-Out (1968) and The Savage Seven (1968) before teaming up with Peter Bogdanovich on Targets (1968), which led to Bob Rafelson and Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970), which in turn led to things like Paper Moon (1973), Shampoo (1975) and Ghostbusters (1984).
“If we needed him and we had no money, Lazlo would come and shoot for us for nothing,” said Novak.
Now, here is where I would usually dovetail around and dive back into the plot of the movie in question, only the plot of Kiss Me Quick is the equivalent of diving into the deep end of an empty cement pond.
Basically, through dubious scientific methods, Sterilox and Breedlove observe more women in several stages of undress as they frolic around the castle -- in the pool, in the gym, in the lab, until Sterilox is convinced they need some of these prime specimens back on Buttless, which Breedlove happily provides. And that’s about it, really; which, I guess, brings us to the ever-lovin'...
When it was released in ‘64, Kiss Me Quick would also mark the end of an era, for good or ill, as real monsters and perverted psychos started to seep in as the Nudie-Cutie was displaced by the Roughie.
In the Roughies, the tease was replaced with open violence and sadism as things got much less grab-fanny and way more explicit in films like White Slaves of Chinatown (1964), where Mistress Olga whipped her bound captives, or the likes of Scum of the Earth (1963) and The Defilers (1965).
And while I do agree with Mr. Henenlotter that most Nudie-Cuties were pretty dumb and awfully tedious to sit through, that is so not the case with Kiss Me Quick. This thing is so weird, and so demented, and so ... boggling of mind, that I kept cackling and cracking up through the whole thing.
In front of the camera, Max Gardens appears to be a natural ham, whose Breedlove is a bizarre mash-up of Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, and Peter Sellers' errant right hand from Dr. Strangelove.
Coe, meanwhile, does a passable Stan Laurel impersonation as the clueless Sterilox. “[Coe] came from the moon,” said Novak. “He just dropped off here for a short time.”
Of course, all that beautiful eye-candy to gawk at doesn't hurt this slapdash production either; and it certainly helps to have Kovacs behind the camera, whose set-ups and angles aren't shy at all and gets you up close and personal with all the curves and contours of Breedlove's beauties.
The Montreal Star (May 15, 1970).
Also, good luck in getting those rocking riffs the girls danced to out of your head once the film ends. The music is credited to The Gallstones -- most likely the house band of Gardens’ Gayety Theater. A full soundtrack is a mere pipe-dream, but I can tell you a rip of “The Nudie Watusi” has been my personal ringtone going on 12 years now.
Add it all up and you've got something that is a lot more silly than sleazy, but most folks will probably just find it all irredeemably stupid. I don’t know, perhaps Novak summed up the experience of watching Kiss Me Quick best:
“This was a Nudie-Cutie. This was a Hotsy-Totsy. You couldn’t go wrong with this. It wasn’t lewd. It wasn’t obscene. It wasn’t a cheater. People got what they paid for. And they could laugh at it.”
Thus, if you have to see one Nudie-Cutie to make your life complete, then Kiss Me Quick is just what the demented doctor ordered. Just consider this entire write-up as a warning label on the possible side-effects and you should be good to go.
Originally posted on October 26, 2024, at Confirmed, Alan_01.
Kiss Me Quick (1964) Fantasy Films :: Box Office International / P: Harry Novak, Max Gardens / D: Peter Perry Jr. / W: Peter Perry Jr. / C: Laszlo Kovacs / S: Max Gardens, Frank A. Coe, Natasha, Jackie De Witt, Claudia Banks
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