The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968)

For a long time this film has sat on my “must watch list” with the XXX 2012 Summer Olympics underway now was as fitting a time as any to watch The Year of the Sex Olympics.

It only took 40 years for most of this to come true.

This 1968 television play takes place in a near future where all of the world is controlled via television programs. Human emotions and impulses are held in check by programming designed to turn them off from eating or reproducing. Shows about sex and food dominate the airwaves. The world has been split into two classes of humans – the high-achievers or those that produce television shows and the low-achievers or the audience that consumes the programming.

In the effort to create a new show a television producer suggests a program where a couple is banished to a remote island and forced to survive without technology. If this all sounds familiar it is probably because we have seen numerous reality television shows with a similar premise. Of course, this film predates all of them. It also touches upon so many other modern television trends.

Were this film made today it could be easily seen as a satire of so many shows: Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, Big Brother, Survivor, Frontier House, even numerous food related programs. They are not far from the shows in this film, things like Art Sex or Sports Sex or my favorite show of the future which appears to be two grown men sitting in a vat of mashed potatoes fling lumps of potatoes at one another’s face. That’s a show we need today. That feels like something you’d see on South Park if they were to send-up the gluttonous food porn shows clogging up are modern channels.

As funny as some of the programming imagined in The Year of the Sex Olympics, this television movie is less satirical and more cautionary. It warns us of a future when we are both controlled and manipulated by television.  At worst, it predicts a time when real people’s lives are drastically changed, even ruined, for the entertainment of others. One can see this film having a kinship with movies like The Truman Show or The Secret Cinema (which came out the same year).

The film also examines whether we are born and bound to particular social classes or if we can rise above limitations. In this sense The Year of the Sex Olympics feels akin to Gattaca. However, the production design budget for this film is far less than Gattaca. The future envisioned in The Year of the Sex Olympics is very much a mash-up Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and 60′s mod-on-a-dime fashion and decor. This is not to disparage the look of The Year of the Sex Olympics, if anything the look is dated, but fun and fashionable; certainly not forgettable. Factoids on-line tell me that the film wast shot in color, but that to-date no color version of the film exists. I can only imagine how wild some of the sets and costumes must look in color.

Behold, the future. Now, imagine it in color.

Perfect, this film is not. Its story and the ideas at play are far more interesting than all aspects of its execution. There are times when the technical and financial limitations of the production remind you that this is a tele-play. Toward the films climax, when part of the story moves to exteriors the framing and compositions begin to take on a highly cinematic style. Still, the acting, reaches emotional levels that feel a bit…well…theatrical. If one can look past the expressive eyes and dramatic gestures, there is more intelligence and quality in The Year of the Sex Olympics than is to be expected. I’m left wondering why it took me so long to get around to watching this truly entertaining and engrossing film.

Today, the notion of reality television is less novel and more-or-less a far reaching genre with various sub-genres. To be warned of its effects on both subject and viewer may feel unnecessary. A whole generation has grown up bombarded with reality based television for them is probably normal.  I am sure that at the time of its first broadcast the concept of real people over-indulging in sex and food or putting their lives on display 24-hours a day might have been received as impossibly silly or paranoid or fantastically fearful. However, today, The Year of the Sex Olympics feels all too real and worth watching.

You can check it out in its entirety on YouTube, for now. No telling how long the future will be around for your viewing pleasure.

Vigilante Force (1977)

Jan Michael Vincent and Kris Kristofferson star as two brothers trying to clean-up a California town. We can tell they are related because they both sure do squint a whole lot. They squint and they don’t button their shirts.

Vigilante Force holds the record for the most unbuttoned shirts in a single film. Before you get too excited, let me add that all of these shirts are worn (or semi-worn) by males. Normally, in a film like this I would expect it to be the females who suffer from a button shortage, but we don’t even get glimpse of topless-female panic during a brothel raid.

This film is rather restrained. Vigilanter Force is ripe hickploitation material, but it never really pushes the limits of taste. Things heat up when it is clear that Kristofferson is no savior.  The last third of the film builds to a brother vs. brother, action showdown worth sticking around for, even if you don’t like shirtless dudes or squinting. There’s also an amazing stock of kooks and background characters, not to mention some rather nice hand-held, camera work during a street fight that could be mistaken for documentary.

Matthew Samuel Smith Collection vol. 1

John Cassavetes once said, “Anyone who can make a film, I already love.”  I doubt Cassavetes ever meet Matthew Samuel Smith.

Is “Souther Depression” just a nude version of Peckinpah’s “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia”?

Southern Depression is gratuitous nudity, that is neither sexy nor decipherable, sprinkled with un-terrifying horror, and mixed with a droning soundtrack that plays like Danzig mutilating the Velvet Underground. If there is a plot, I couldn’t find it. Perhaps, it was buried beneath the awful cinematography and clumsy editing. I think the whole picture was edited in camera, but maybe I’m just making excuses. I did that a lot while watching this picture.

As I sat their struggling to make out an image I would scratch my head and wonder if the deficiencies were by design. I fancied the filmmaker to be some sort of Jack Smith merged with Harmony Korine, pushing boundaries of taste and playing with formats. I imagined the editing working along some elaborate structuralist scheme. I wondered just how one could make such a lousy digital transfer of a film without trying to make their movie look like a scrambled cable channel. I think my brain did all of this to protect itself from the sheer ineptitude that makes Southern Depression an endurance test of the mind and eyes. Surely, this is a great contendor for the title of the worst movie I have ever viewed.

Matthew Samuel Smith has a thing for severed heads.

As for the other film in the collection, Blood Summer is only better in the fact that it is more forgettable. It’s so forgettable that I’m struggling now, only hours later, to remember the plot. Technically, the film is a notch better, but that’s not saying much. Insufferable is still insufferable and that’s the only way to summarize Matthew Samuel Smith. His work is not so bad that it is good, but so bad that only those desperate to embrace something different would be willing to say they enjoyed these films or appreciated Smith for making them.

These two films appear on a disc labeled “Vol. 1″. I suppose that means there are other Matthew Samuel Smith films out there. I won’t be looking for them. Unlike Cassavetes, I don’t know if I can love someone just because they made a film. Then again, Cassavetes also said this of filmmakers, ” I feel sorry if they don’t put any thought in it because then they missed the boat.” I don’t think Matthew Samuel Smith even knows there is a boat to miss.

I guess when you go looking for bad (but enjoyable) cinema, as I sometimes do, you occasionally end up is a mess like this.