Rub Her Weirdly: Cartoon Poon and Superhumanly Huge Pubes

The infantilization of adult entertainment in the ’70s remains endlessly fascinating and, curiously, unexamined. Or maybe that’s not so curious.

Because, really, is there really some intrepid cultural archaeologist who’d actually want to crack the psychosexual zeitgeist codes of X-rated “bedtime story” (nyuk-nyuk) chestnuts on the order of Alice in Wonderland (1976), The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio (1971), or the Rainbeaux Smith version of Cinderella (1977)?

I’ve long pondered a possible connection between all those grown-up genitals being injected into children’s favorites and the explosion of incest-themed hardcore the following decade, kicking off with Taboo in 1980 and culminating in the (non-related, har-har) Taboo American Style film series in 1986, the same year as the porn-busting Meese Commission.

Alas, Sex in the Comics (1973) points out that the carnal corruption of characters intended for juvenile consumption dates back at least to the advent of Tijuana Bibles, which were grimy, little under-the-counter comic books in which the likes of Popeye, Dagwood and even Felix the Cat indulged in all manner of erotic abandon.

Tijuana Bibles -- also known as Eight-Pagers -- defied all copyright laws and decency statutes, conceivable or otherwise. These illegally manufactured and distributed pamphlets flourished between the 1920s and the dawn of the swinging ’60s, with their popularity peaking during the Depression.

Nonetheless, I can recall ads for them – complete with timely characters like Snuffy Smith and Jiggs going at it -- in the back of slap mags well into the early 21st century. If I even knew where to pick up a slap mag anymore, I’d check to see if they were still there, and I bet they would be.

Sex in the Comics purports to bring classic Eight-Pagers to flesh-and-blood life, recreating the form’s cornball (yet frequently obscene) jokes, intense nudity, and oftentimes bizarre sexual practices with live humans.

With its painted sets and small cast changing (and changing out of) their costumes for each scenario, Sex in the Comics certainly conveys the cheapness of its source medium. The groaner jokes and limp parody names (Rick Lacy for Dick Tracy, Barney Gugle for Barney Google) also channel authenticity. But then Sex in the Comics takes its conjuring abilities to another level … a lower level.

Throughout the movie, icons of the funnies such as the aforementioned Tracy and Google are portrayed by men clad in genuinely horrifying rubber masks – dead-flesh looking things with pickle noses, no chins, and huge, expressionless white eyes.

These false faces will chill you to the bone (to suggest nothing of what they’ll do to your boner), and thus serve as a direct pipeline to Tijuana Bibles’ outlaw quality, when carrying a booklet in which Eugene the Jeep sticks it to Daisy Mae could get you in a heap of headaches.

Adding to the queasiness is Sex in the Comics’ attempt to portray panels of a comic strip changing by having jump cuts go into freeze-frames of these nauseating creatures and the naked ladies who spread for them. Forget the handheld-camera acrobatics of The Blair Witch Project or Rachel Getting Married – you want volcanic visual nausea, come here.

That the Sex action remains softcore and littered with multiple flaccid penises somehow adds to the overall sleaziness, especially when (as happened often in the original comics) a male character cornholes another male character who’s banging the first one’s wife. Imagine that and now imagine them doing it with slimy, cracking rubber eyeballs glued over their foreheads.

Sex in the Comics is available from Just for the Hell of It video. Do not pass up a chance to enjoy such punishment, particularly if you came of age during the Reign of the Tijuana Bible (or close enough to it), and/or you enjoy an unhealthy dose of trauma mixed with your vintage raunch, so you can maybe poke a stick or two (or a thousand or more) into that tightly locked cage of repressed memories.

See you in the funny papers.

***

The underlying appeal of the Teen Sex Comedy in its purest form is that it imbues its high-school heroes with super-powers far beyond those of any mortal acne-suffering adolescent.

Most often these super-powers seem subtle, but they are, in reality, as impossible as time-travel or magic erection-extension.

Nobody ever really had a perfect peep-hole set-up like the gang in Porky’s (1982), for example, and nobody ever really ran a brothel in his parent’s swanky suburban digs a la Tom Cruise in Risky Business (1983).

Even Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), with its abortion, betrayal, and abandonment issues, provides a pay-off in which Spicoli rescues Brooke Shields from drowning and then spends the reward money by hiring Van Halen to play his graduation party.

Nothing like that has ever happened to anybody, anywhere, and most especially not before they moved out of their childhood bedrooms.

Other Teen Sex Comedies push wish-fulfillment into supernatural realms, as with Scott Baio’s telekinetic top-popping in Zapped! (1982) and the obvious talents of The Invisible Kid (1988).

This brings us to Getting Lucky (1990), a zero-budget nerd-versus-jock farce that taps into, and makes good on, hormonally-enflamed adolescent male fantasy as no other film I can think of, and to literal degrees that I could not have possible imagined.

And this is McBeardo talking!

The set-up is conventional: While attempting to properly recycle a tossed-out beer bottle, geeky do-gooder and put-upon locker-room towel boy Bill (Steven Cooke) happens upon Lepke the Leprechaun (Gary Kluger), who is encased inside the brown glass. Lepke grants Bill three wishes.

Naturally, our guy cashes in the first one on date with blonde cheerleader Krissi (Lezlie Z. McCraw), much to the chagrin of campus basketball star and legendary date-rapise Tony Chanuka (Rick McDowell).

After overcoming a number of standard Teen Sex Comedy obstacles (prudish parents, bumbling cops, a principal with a masterfully homoerotic way of brandishing a spanking paddle), Lepke’s magic helps Bill land Krissi’s love, although it is odd that the film ends with a couple of 17-year-olds on their honeymoon.

What makes Getting Lucky a one-of-a-kind Teen Sex Comedy glandmark, however, is its incredible shrinking sequence about halfway through.

As Bill attempts to adjust Krissi’s bicycle seat, Lepke pulls a boner, and Bill ends up shrinking to about a half-inch in height. So when Krissi returns and hops on her bike, the only place for Bill to hide is inside her panties. Of course.

For the next 15 minutes of the movie, we see Micro Bill trapped between Krissi’s creamy thighs, clinging to strands of dark pubic hair, singularly and in bunches, and desperately attempting not to slip inside her vagina. His frantic flailing in the vicinity of Krissi’s clitoris, in fact, unleashes an enormous orgasm from her while she sits in class, during which Bill gets soaked by female ejaculate.

Are you getting all this? I mean, really? Comprende: what I just described really happens on-screen in Getting Lucky. We really do watch a shrunken doofus trapped inside a hot chicks’s muff. Granted the visuals effects are hilariously crappy, with billowing sheets for thighs and black garden-hoses representing Krissi’s short-and-curlies. But that just adds to the audacity, which compounds the charm, which is just … un-freakin’-believable!

Ultimately, Krissi and three fellow cheerleaders strip for a group shower. The other girls look a bit rough-and-tumble, particularly alongside the Alicia-Silverstone-ish Lezlie Z. McCraw, but they’re game to go full frontal.

Curiously, the leading lady keeps covered up top while eagerly pointing her naked (and sumptuous) seat-meat right at the camera.

Earlier in the movie, Krissy flashes fluffy (real) bush, and there’s also a scene in which Tony opens her bra, but it looks to be the work of a body double.

Specifically, the stunt-nipple appears to belong to co-star Jean Stewart, who gets as naked as possible in the shower, not knowing that Mini Bill is riding around her tits on a bar of soap.

Whatever Krissi’s reasons for mammary modesty, Getting Lucky does not lack for kick-ass female nudity. Nor can I downplay the lunacy factor.

For even beyond the riotous pubic hair sequence, there’s a moment when Tony is taken to the hospital for lodging a tennis racket in his rectum, followed by a climactic showdown between hero and villain that includes a surprise materialization of a foul-mouthed barbarian riding two Arabian steeds at once, with a foot on each. He shows up in the nick of time to donate a white horse to Bill.

And then there a couple of unshaven detectives making Miami Vice jokes a few years too late.

You get all this in Getting Lucky, which would be monumental at the height of utterly unhinged Teen Sex Comedy surrealism a la Screwballs (1983) and Surf II: The End of the Trilogy (1984), but consider that this film was made in the otherwise abysmal exploitation year of 1990 – a full high-school career after John Hughes iced the proper horny high-schooler saga once and forever with Pretty in Pink (1986).

Snap a towel in thanks, then, to Troma for resurrecting a treasure that, I must admit, I had never seen until now.

In fact, I had actually avoided Getting Lucky, given its too-late-in-the-game arrival date, along with the fact that what notoriety has achieved comes almost entirely from repeated airings on the wee-hour weekend cable series USA Up All Night.

I always resented Up All Night for A) showing R-rated schlock movies with just the schlock and none of the R-rated parts, and B) usurping Night Flight.

Still, Up All Night certainly beat the shit out of Mystery Science Theater as a means of discovering whacked-out cinema (although anal Super-AIDS beats Mystery Science Theater, too) and, by all accounts, USA left the pubic-ride in whenever they showed Getting Lucky. I like to imagine how sometimes-host Gilbert Gottfried might have riffed on this material.

Getting Lucky is the last great All-American Teen Sex Comedy of the genre’s Golden Age. Get yourself in front of it as soon as possible. Or behind it. That works, too.