Screenpicks

by Sam Adams



Mau Contents: Ted Bonnitt’s Mau Mau Sex Sex examines the early days of exploitative filmmaking.

Twitch City

(Sundays at 11:30 p.m., Bravo)

The weird, witty Canadian sitcom starring Don McKellar as a TV-obsessed, sociopathically lazy agoraphobe starts a second run on Bravo. The first two episodes air Sunday at 11 p.m. and 1 a.m., followed by regular airings each Sunday at 11:30 p.m. At the moment, only the first seven-episode season is on the schedule, but a few politely worded e-mails — like the ones Bravo got when they unceremoniously ditched the final episode last time around, then went weeks without rescheduling it — should give them a nudge in the right direction.

Latino Film Fest

(Thu.-Sat., Nov. 1-3, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-893-4365, www.latnn.com/phillyfilm01/thirdrelease.html)

So maybe they haven’t learned that bringing anything with the words "New York" in the title to town isn’t the best way to woo Philadelphians, but cut the producers of the New York International Latino Film Festival a break; it’s not like they’ve got any competition in Philadelphia. Opening Thursday at 8 p.m. with the mother-daughter relationship drama The Blue Diner, the festival runs for three days at I-House, with after-parties scattered around the city. Saturday’s is the most promising lineup, with the P.O.V. documentary Take it From Me (6 p.m.) and the hip-hop themed docudrama Off the Hook (8 p.m.); Tania Cuevas-Martinez, director of the Mumia doc Voice of the Voiceless, will be on hand to answer questions after the film’s 4 p.m. screening.

Speaking of film fests, the 21st annual Jewish Film Fest opens this weekend as well, with screenings Nov. 3-5 of the foreskin comedy Cours Toujours (Dad on the Run). Check out Ryan Godfrey’s review to find out exactly what that means.

Secret Cinema: Disco 9000

(Fri., Nov. 2, 8 p.m., $5, The Print Center, 1614 Latimer St., www.voicenet.com/~jschwart)

No free beer this time around — hopefully a temporary aberration, we’re told — but still a chance to journey back to the land that natural fabrics forgot. The 1977 glitter-ball epic features music by the great Johnnie Taylor (of the not-so-great "Disco Lady") and a disco owner with a bodyguard named "Midget." What more could you want?

The John Waters Collection, Vols. 2 & 3

($29.95 DVD each)

New Line’s Waters anthology project hits its stride with this pair of twofers, all equipped with new audio commentaries. Vol. 2 charts the end of an era, beginning with the all-filth Desperate Living (1977) and closing with Polyester (1981), which featured Waters’ first celebrity casting — Tab Hunter as the gorgeous but heartless object of Divine’s affection — and his first baby steps toward the mainstream. (And it was still seven years until he got the financing for his next movie: Hairspray.) Despite the inspired decision to film in "Odorama" — the DVD comes packaged with a scratch ’n’ sniff card so you can savor the film in all its noisome glory — Polyester is neither fish nor fowl, even if it smells like both. You can feel Waters pulling in two directions, stuck between reliable shock tactics and the genuine pathos of Divine’s utterly miserable housewife; it’s the only one of his movies that feels cruel. Desperate Living, by contrast, is his most elaborately filthy film, featuring an entire town full of perverts, misfits and psychopaths. Despite Vincent Peranio’s deviously clever production design, Waters’ Mortville is still a concept too grand for the film’s budget, but it’s hard not to love a movie that climaxes with a crazed drag king getting a hideous sex change, severing the offending member and throwing it outside for a passing dog to eat.

Vol. 3 is the real stuff: Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble. Flamingos still stands as one of the landmarks of American outlaw cinema; Waters stomps on every form of good taste with unabashed glee. If there’s a more jaw-dropping line than "Do my balls, mama," I’ve yet to hear it. Technically, Female Trouble is better shot, more coherent and even more insanely creative, even if it’s not quite the sentimental favorite Flamingos is. As juvenile delinquent Dawn Davenport, who murders her parents with a Christmas tree when Santa Claus declines to give her cha-cha heels, Divine goes from rebellious schoolgirl to a kind of psychopathic performance artist, finally recognizing André Breton’s dream of the perfect surrealist act: firing a gun into an unsuspecting crowd. It’s doubtful that too many people still dismiss Waters out of hand, but a movie like Female Trouble reminds you what a revolutionary filmmaker he once was.

Mau Mau Sex Sex

(Thu., Nov. 1, 7:30 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., Nov. 2-3, 7:30 and 9:15 p.m.; Sun., Nov. 4, 7 p.m., Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org)

An affectionate look at the golden years of exploitation filmmaking, Ted Bonnitt’s documentary treats its subjects, 84-year-old Dan Sonney and 76-year-old David Friedman, with a kind of fond bemusement, even as it delves into their sometimes-absurd, sometimes-seedy pasts. Producing and directing movies with titles like She-Freak and Sex Maniac, the two flourished in the age when social mores moved ahead of legal restrictions, creating a vacuum that Sonney and Friedman happily filled with salacious films that skirted the boundaries of censorship. Moving from filmed burlesque acts to bogus nudist camp documentaries, into "nudie cuties" and eventually the unsavory "roughies" — quasi-S&M features that took advantage of the fact that it’s always been easier to get away with showing women being brutalized than having sex — Sonney and Friedman unapologetically changed with the times, always finding a way to shock and titillate their audiences. Eventually, Friedman struck up an alliance with Herschell Gordon Lewis of Blood Feast fame. More showmen than filmmakers — Friedman, a former Paramount publicist, now runs a carnival — the pair always promised more than they showed, and the same can be said of Mau Mau Sex Sex. Bonnitt is so tickled that his subjects now live more or less ordinary lives that he bogs the film down with footage of them swearing at traffic delays and washing dishes, often accompanied by smarmy oompah music. (He acts as if their age were amusing in itself.) You wish there were more of their mind-boggling, gloriously preposterous movies, but there’s still plenty to go around, and at a terse 80 minutes, Mau Mau Sex Sex obeys the cardinal rule: Always leave them wanting more.