The Pigkeeper's Daughter / Sassy Sue

Rating:
Summary: Golly! This is a delightful...
Review: heapin' helpin' of hillbilly hilarity. Moonshine, incest, bestiality, it's all here! The two fine young fillies in the bathtub together in Sassy Sue is more than worth the price of this DVD! Wooh darlin'! Stereotypical? Yes. Ridiculous? Yes. I wish all the films that are featured in the trailers were available. Take a swig o' 'shine, grab yer cuzzin, and enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Golly! This is a delightful...
Review: heapin' helpin' of hillbilly hilarity. Moonshine, incest, bestiality, it's all here! The two fine young fillies in the bathtub together in Sassy Sue is more than worth the price of this DVD! Wooh darlin'! Stereotypical? Yes. Ridiculous? Yes. I wish all the films that are featured in the trailers were available. Take a swig o' 'shine, grab yer cuzzin, and enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Pigs, Cows, And Custom Toilet Seats
Review: I like Something Weird video productions in general, but this feature is way outside of any genre I normally like. I was strongly recommended this video as a specimen of spectacularly bad acting and plot developments, and in that regard I was not disappointed: these films have some of the worst acting ever exposed to celluloid. Before I go further, let me get it right out in the open that the actors in these films are with two exceptions so homely that you can utterly forget about the titillation factor. Yuck. (The exceptions are Terry Gibson, the actual pigkeeper's daughter, and Sharon Kelly, who later went on to work in adult films.) These films were shot in the early 1970s by schlockmeister Harry Novak and were independently released as "Restricted Admission", thus bypassing the rating system. They are racy, no doubt, but are about a contemporary R-rating for the most part. They are also just grisly to watch. Particularly offensive is the drunken moonshiner in "Sassy Sue" who the women find absolutely irresistible, despite the fact that he is almost exclusively seen in long johns the color of Pepto-Bismol.

I really like classic examples of horrible cinema, and both of these features qualify, especially in the plot and acting department. You will be hard pressed to find worse (although if you check my reviews closely you can find exactly one) in the history of the screen. "The Pigkeeper's Daughter" concerns itself with Moonbeam Swiner, who loves her hogs, particularly one named "Lord Hamilton" (don't ask me, I have no clue...) and her mother's attempt to get her married off as she is already 19. Fortunately a lotion and emollient salesman with a penchant for singing contemporaneously composed songs happens by. (You may want to turn the sound down when he sings; it is beyond the threshold of pain for most people.) I thought that it couldn't get worse. How wrong I was.

"Sassy Sue" is about a drunk moonshiner, his enormous wife (who has the least fortunate outhouse related scene I have ever seen or ever hope to see), and his halfwit son who is in love with Sassy Sue. The plot of this one, believe it or not, revolves around dad's custom made toilet seat and outhouse bench manufacturing business, and the romance it brings him (ponder that for just a second...), Junior's desire to become a mechanic (he performs some amusingly inept major surgery on a truck at one point), and the parent's joint desire to fix Junior up with a proper girl.

The acting is just mind-numbing. Ditto for direction: Ed Wood on his worst day couldn't have done this badly. I thought I was out of the woods when I was done with the features, but not so fast: "The Old Man's Bride", a 32 minute black and white short is a bonus, and may (no kidding this time) be the single worst film of any sort ever made. Ever. It is indescribable. My favorite part is the "scrounging to borrow used underwear" segment, which, I think was supposed to be sexy, but was most decidedly anything but sexy. Also watch out for some startling acting styles and, shall we say, rather poorly executed vocal dubbing. Way worse than anything from either Harold P. Warren, or for that matter, Jerry Warren. Do not miss this short. It sets the bar for all other movies to try to crawl under.

There are also some campy trailers for other Novak country bumpkin movies, some of which may actually be worse than these. All in all, I like bad cinema, and this is bad, so I would have expected to like it more, but the films revolved around homely people acting like complete gooberheads too much for my taste. Compared to these films "Inbred Rednecks" has a quiet dignity. Two stars, one for each attractive performer. Some people will really like this, most will find it unfulfilling and actually quite boring.

By the way, did I mention that Sassy Sue is a cow?



Rating:
Summary: Epitome of softcore corn pone
Review: This DVD features two classics of the 1970's skin flick country bumpkin genre produced by Harry Novak. Just so no one is confused, these are low-budget, poorly-acted soft-core movies but despite that have a charm of their own. If you ever sneaked into a R-rated drive-in movie you probably have memories of these types of films, where the clothes come off quickly and often, and the plots are as thin as the Daisy Dukes the girls wear.

Sassy Sue features Sharon Kelly (who later went on to X-rated fame) plus several other starlets whose careers probably didn't go much beyond this film, their main qualifications being a willingness for nudity. John Tull plays the brain-damaged yet sensitive Junior, who prefers cattle to women, and actually provides more than a bit of humor. I actually found myself singing the inane theme song "Junior's in love with Sassy Sue".

Pigkeeper's Daughter features a bunch of women with large breasts and not much else, but hey you don't buy these movies expecting Meryl Streep and Orson Welles. The viewer has the comfortable feeling that he/she can act better than anyone in this movie.

The extra features are excellent and numerous. This DVD is a bargain for those who enjoy this type of thing, not that anyone would admit to it.

Rating:
Summary: Epitome of softcore corn pone
Review: This is another of SWV's Double Feature Disks that I genuinely love. Both films are honest-to-goodness soft-core so-bad-they're-good fun, plus the disk is packed with extras. I wasn't quite as enamored of the short subjects this time out, but the trailers (and there are many) are Fantastic! Just try watching all these then even thinking of the title "Midnight Plow-Boy" without breaking into hysterics. It cannot be done! Anyway, the first movie is sort of a "traveling salesman joke come to life" about Moonbeam and her Ma and Pa and their pig farm. The folks think Moonbeam's fixin to be a spinster and are blissfully ignorant of her porkfests with good ol' Jasper from up yonder. The second feature is much the same in that Junior's Pa thinks his son needs to learn something about sex. What the ol' man takes the film's running time to figure (and what we know by the end of the opening credits) is that, as the song says, "Junior's in love with Sassy Sue!" That is, he commits acts of bestiality upon the family cow at every given opportunity. I know, it sounds sick, but believe me this is soft core country. No one is really doing anything they're pretending to do and that fact becomes rather obvious because these people can't act with or without their clothes, with or without dialogue. And that only makes it all the better.

Rating:
Summary: PURE GOOD NATURED FILTH
Review: This is another of SWV's Double Feature Disks that I genuinely love. Both films are honest-to-goodness soft-core so-bad-they're-good fun, plus the disk is packed with extras. I wasn't quite as enamored of the short subjects this time out, but the trailers (and there are many) are Fantastic! Just try watching all these then even thinking of the title "Midnight Plow-Boy" without breaking into hysterics. It cannot be done! Anyway, the first movie is sort of a "traveling salesman joke come to life" about Moonbeam and her Ma and Pa and their pig farm. The folks think Moonbeam's fixin to be a spinster and are blissfully ignorant of her porkfests with good ol' Jasper from up yonder. The second feature is much the same in that Junior's Pa thinks his son needs to learn something about sex. What the ol' man takes the film's running time to figure (and what we know by the end of the opening credits) is that, as the song says, "Junior's in love with Sassy Sue!" That is, he commits acts of bestiality upon the family cow at every given opportunity. I know, it sounds sick, but believe me this is soft core country. No one is really doing anything they're pretending to do and that fact becomes rather obvious because these people can't act with or without their clothes, with or without dialogue. And that only makes it all the better.

Rating:
Summary: Cows and Udders
Review: Up until three months ago, I was ignorant of producer Harry Novak, his soft-X filmographry or Something Weird Video, the Seattle company that's preserved these nuggets of drive-in history. Now that I've learned about them, I thank God for all three. Both "The Pigkeeper's Daughter" and "Sassy Sue" are goofy hillbilly humpathons that offer plenty of laughs, though most are of the unintentional kind. "The Pigkeeper's Daughter" has qualities more closely associated with porn: Wretched acting, a mere hint of a plot and even less of a script, and lots of extended sex scenes (which are pretty explicit for a softie). Terry Gibson (in the title role) and Patty Smith (a.k.a. Peggy Church) are about the only people anyone would want to see have sex. There's a surprising amount of male nudity--unfortunately it's in the form of out-of-shape John Keith and skinny Peter James (who has some nasty looking teeth). And what happened to the "actress" playing Gibson's mama? Her breasts look chafed and there's a horrible bruise across her lower back. Was she beaten into taking this role? (This might explain her performance.) By comparison, "Sassy Sue"--the story of a young man, his cow, and the women who try to come between them--is a much more polished effort. The acting is a little better (though it's still bad), the cast is more effective and there's actually some genuine laughs. A definite highpoint in this one is John Tull's tryst with one of the horny babes wanting some backwoods boffing ("It would help if you mooed a little," he snipes). The sex--although simulated and not quite as explicit as that in "Pigkeeper's Daughter" (there's a moment in the final scene that pushes the boundaries of softcore, however)--seems a little more genuine in "Sassy Sue." Both movies are raunchy fun, though "Pigkeeper's Daughter" is raunchier and "Sassy Sue" is more fun. Better than both movies are the trailers for other similarly-themed Harry Novak productions, like "Midnight Plowboy," "Country Cuzzins" and "Tobacco Roody." Fans of large breasts and trash cinema will definitely want to add this to their collection.