For a brief period in the 60s, the nudie cutie sub-genre founds its footing.
The Immoral Mr. Teas, Russ Meyer’s uber-cheap $24,000-dollar production grossed $1 million + bucks in 1959, as a kind of lecher version of Man with the X-Ray Eyes, in which a man has the ability to see through women’s clothing.
Kiss Me Quick pledged the very same fraternity, a club which included in its membership criteria, women in various states of undress, and precious little else.
As Greg Merritt put it in Celluloid Mavericks: The History of American Independent Film, “if you had $30,000, something resembling a script, and two weeks to shoot, you could slap together a flick that could turn a profit.”
In this episode of the Really Awful Movies Podcast, we examine the context in which a film like Kiss Me Quick soared into the public consciousness.
The plot? Obviously, it’s as scant as the clothing…
The planet Buttless is a male-only planet and its leader sends his emissary to earth to find “the perfect female specimen.” He’s aided in this quest by a mad scientist, Dr. Breedlove, but really, it’s all about the surf music, pasties, the go-go dancing and the groan-worthy Vaudeville zingers in this shoestring Harry Novak production (read about Novak, the so-called Sexploitation King)
With a growing acceptance of cinematic nudity, the nudie cutie genre had a very short shelf life indeed and fizzled out by the mid 60s, but not before the likes of Ed Wood got in on the action with Orgy of the Dead, as well as Herschell Gordon Lewis/David F Freeman with The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (have a listen to our interview with the legendary HG Lewis here)
We love genre film — any and all genres — and Kiss Me Quick is an interesting curio from the exploitation era.
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There are some good nudie cuties (this is one of them), but I appreciate them more for what they led to. The sexploitation of the 60s and 70s was progressively more lawless and just plain crazy.
The nudie cuties with monsters were still far more entertaining than the nudist camp exposes. They’re innocent and sort of fun, like kids movies with boobs.
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