Monster Mush

While Doris Wishman was busy pouring out her existential misery on sullen New York audiences, our good friend Harry Novak was plotting his own revolution.
In 1957, Novak was wading through the rapid collapse of Howard Hughes’ ailing giant RKO Pictures. Once the head of distribution at the company, he was now tasked with shutting down all of it’s west coast offices, giving employees their walking papers and liquidating their cars and furniture. Not one to wallow in unemployment, Harry joined forces with a few longtime friends, the frequently aliased director Peter Perry, and Max Gardens, owner of the Gaiety Theater chain, to form Box Office International Pictures, the mantle under which he would peddle prolific amounts of smut for the next decade. After a few years of distributing mostly foreign pseudo documentary sex films, he decided it was time to make a film of his own. Thus was born Kiss Me Quick! crown jewel of the nudie-cuties.

A word of explanation is probably in order. Nudie-cuties can be seen as a natural offshoot of the slow and agonizing death of burlesque houses. Now people could watch jiggling flesh and borscht belt comedy in the comfort of a darkened movie theater, without all that pesky reality getting in the way. Kind of says something about the fifties, doesn’t it? A steady stream of nearly indistinguishable nudie flicks came pouring out of theaters for nearly a decade, and were clearly declining in popularity by the mid sixties, when Novak breathed new life into the genre by tapping into another pulsing vein running under the skin of Camelot: Monsters.
In the early sixties, for some thoroughly inexplicable reason, audiences abandoned the nuclear mutations that had kept them scared throughout the fifties, and turned instead to the warm, comforting bosom of their parents’ monsters - the innocuous delights of Frankenstein and Dracula, of wolfmen and mummies and other moldy creatures of the night.
So the equation goes: Tits+Monsters = obscene amounts of money.
And it worked. The film opened nationwide with the help of Max Gardens and the Gaiety, and was still being shown up to ten years later in theaters across the country.
Actually watching Kiss Me Quick! is something akin to auto-hypnosis. The plot, such as it exists, primarily concerns a dim-witted alien named Sterilox, dispatched from the Buttless Galaxy (I wish I were making that up), to collect earth females to use as slaves. He appears, conveniently enough, in a lab run by a mad scientist bent on creating the perfect woman (and played by Max Gardens himself, no less). From there, well… let’s just say the word plot doesn’t really apply any longer. Soon enough, an hour and fifteen minutes have passed, and you have no idea how you’ve spent them. But damned if it wasn’t pleasant.
It scarcely matters, of course. The damage had been done. Novak had hit something big, the ripe undercurrent of repressed fear and desire in Cold War America, and his grip on the collective crotch of the country wouldn’t loosen for decades to come.
Like it or not, the self proclaimed “king of sexploitation” was here to stay.

As always, available from Something Weird Video