A Beautiful Fraud

Maybe I’m just being cranky because I’m old enough to remember the Buzzcocks the first time around, and maybe hearing one of their songs in an ad for AARP only makes me feel that much older, but come on: Didn’t anyone over at the American Association of Retired Persons bother to listen to the lyrics of “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays” before they OK’d it for that new ad campaign? The song itself is three minutes of pure pop perfection and supreme irony. The speedy and compulsively hummable chorus used in the AARP ad does in fact assert that “everybody’s happy nowadays,” but what you don’t hear in the ad is a totally wired Pete Shelley declaring that “life’s an illusion, love is a dream,” and all this blinding “happiness” is what’s keeping him from knowing what love and life really are. A perfect sentiment for pushing mood-altering, mind-numbing antidepressants, but retirement benefits?

Inspired by such a total disconnect between an advertiser's intent and the ad's actual content — instances in which our own knowledge of the original song totally undercuts what's being sold — I’ve started a list of commercials that feature totally inappropriate songs; of course I'd appreciate any suggestions you savvy-media critics out there care to offer. I remember hearing the Jesus and Mary Chain’s smack-soaked “Happy When It Rains” in a car ad — they just replayed that ironic “And I’m happy now... ” refrain over and over and cut it before vocalist Jim Reid got to the part about how he’s only happy when it pours. Such careful editing is also the secret behind Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines ongoing use of Iggy Pop’s wonderfully sleazy “Lust for Life” over scenes of happy families enjoying all the fun the company’s ships have to offer. But anyone who’s actually heard the whole song — or has seen Trainspotting — knows that whoever put the ad together is conveniently leaving out all those lyrics about liquor, drugs, flesh machines, torture films, lotion and striptease. (Wikipedia actually accuses the ad of changing the line “liquor and drugs” to “looks so fine,” but that I don’t remember.)

The worst offender I can think of has got to be that long-running Phillips Electronics campaign that used a snippet from the well-known Beatles hit “Getting Better” to underline the latest innovation heralded in the ad. The commercial modestly reflects that “I have to admit it's getting better, a little better all the time.” But just about everyone who has had access to a radio at anytime during the past 40 years can't help but sing the very next line, slipped in by John Lennon but conveniently left out of the spot: “It can’t get much worse.” Are such low expectations something you'd really want associated with your brand?

The amazingly cool San Francisco-based DVD label/theater Other Cinema is making it very easy to spend that $10 bill Grandma sent you for Christmas plus all that Hanukah gelt by releasing two incredible films: Tribulation 99 (which is one of my all time favorite movies and deserves a posting all its own, so more about that next time) and -- drum roll, please -- Mike Kuchar's legendary 1965 opus Sins of the Fleshapoids, a movie I'd only heard about and never thought I'd get to see. Thanks, OC!

If you've never heard of them -- and don't worry, a lot of people haven't -- Bronx-born Mike and his twin brother George Kuchar became fixtures on the thriving New York City underground film movement of the 1960s with their no-budget Super-8 and 16mm extravaganzas that, by all accounts, live up to their incredible titles: "I Was a Teenage Rumpot," "Corruption of the Damned," "Hold Me While I'm Naked," "Color Me Shameless." Shooting a cast of non-actors -- usually their friends or other artists/filmmakers -- in their own apartments, the Kuchars would spin bizarre, campy tales they usually made up as they went along. (You can find a really good summary of their life and work here.) Sins of the Fleshapoids is among the best known, and it shouldn't be missed by any lover of off-center cinema. Set 1 million years in the future, it depicts a hedonistic human society grown dependent on their humanoid robots -- the Fleshapoids of the title. Lolling about on divans while snacking on Clark bars and bags of Wise potato chips, these decadent latter-day Ancient Romans have become less human than the machines they abuse, while the Fleshapoids prove themselves to be more human than human.

Sound familiar? The film has been credited with influencing everything from Blade Runner to Barbarella, and rightfully so. This homemade, Kodachrome sci-fi fantasy recalls everything the Kuchar brothers love -- color, Douglas Sirk, German Expressionism, muscle-man movies, makeup -- and runs no longer than 45 precious minutes, but each one is just about perfect in a campy, pop-art kind of way. The spotless print featured on Other Cinema's release comes with an entertaining audio commentary by Mike Kuchar and the always insightful film archivist and writer Jack Stevenson that offers a priceless glimpse of a film scene that's long gone, and conveys a strong sense of just how much fun making these movies must have been. Also on the disc are two rare Kuchar shorts -- "The Secret of Wendel Samson," featuring the artist Red Grooms trapped in a giant spider's web, and the wonderfully titled "The Craven Sluck" -- that alone are worth the price of the DVD. So what are you waiting for? Buy now, foolish human!

It’s that time of year again: My esteemed colleague Maitland McDonagh (aka FlickChick) and I put our little heads together and came up with our list of what we thought were the best and worst movies of the year, and those films that we knew we should feel a little ashamed about liking as much as we did – our guilty pleasures. We also came of up with a short list of titles that were just so off-the-wall, movies that aimed so high but hit so wide of the mark that we felt they needed special category ("What the...?") all their own. So check out our list here. Then come on back and give me (or FlickChick) a piece of your mind. Rant, rave and rate your own best and worst, and please let us know about anything you feel particularly guilty about loving that we might have missed. And have a wonderful, safe and movie filled holiday season.

Ken

Turistas opens today, and even though I didn't like it very much (the setup's great, but there's entirely too much running and screaming in the dark for my taste; you can check out my full review here), the film still stands as another interesting entry into what's shaping up to be a new trend in horror movies: Let's call it worst-case-scenario, vacations-from-hell movies. We've seen holiday trips gone bad before, in movies as old The Most Dangerous Game and The Naked Prey, and as diverse as 2,000 Maniacs!, The Beach, Wolf Creek and the 1979 TV-movie A Vacation in Hell with Maureen McCormack (Marcia Brady) and Barbara Feldon (Agent 99). But there's a new, interestingly anti-American slant to these more recent movies, as well as an unusual amount of sadism: They positively delight in the spectacle of ugly American tourists getting their comeuppance from locals who've had enough of their bad behavior. Most interestingly of all, the majority are from American directors.

The first — and so far, the best — of the them is obviously Hostel, Eli Roth's shocker about a trio of American frat types who are lured to a hostel deep in Slovakia with the promise of babes and booze, but who wind up covered in a whole lot of blood, and it's all their own. A big part of this movie's deeply sick fun is watching these obnoxious guys get a bit more than they really deserve. Without giving too much away, Turistas is also about how the behavior of U.S. tourists — and, by extension, the U.S. as a world power — comes back to bite them in the collective ass. Turistas suggests that indebted and easily exploited countries like Brazil may find new and very painful ways of making globalization work for them. The kids who come to South America for fun in the sun learn that free trade cuts both ways, and payback can be a real bitch.

I haven't had a chance to check out makeup-effects guru Ryan Nicholson's Live Feed, which went straight to DVD and sports box art that looks exactly like the Hostel knockoff it swears it isn't. Live Feed appears to be about five Western friends visiting China who find themselves trapped inside a squalid porn theater with a mad butcher threatening to turn them into tasty delicacies for Chinese consumption. The early trailers for Hostel II are already in theaters (you can check it out here), but I never put too much stock in sequels. I'm holding out for the film version of Scott Smith's recent best-selling novel The Ruins, in which a group of U.S. tourists are stranded on a Mexican hilltop and become plant food for a vicious, flowered vine (that's right, a vine). In the right hands, The Ruins could turn out to be the cycle's ne plus ultra. Smith himself drafted the screenplay, and word is that Ben Stiller's production company has bought the rights, but the success of the film will depend entirely on the effects team. If Smith can get someone who can make a plant look scary, they might have a hit on their hands.

Like a lot of people, I believe horror movies can tell us a lot about what's going on within our cultural psyche, particular in times of national turmoil. I would suggest finding a copy of Robin Wood's seminal essay on '70s horror entitled "An Introduction to the American Horror Film" to get a brilliant look at what movies like Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre have to say about America during and after Vietnam. I wonder what movies like Hostel and Turistas are expressing. The last time I left the U.S. as a tourist was back in February, when we were already three years into the war in Iraq. A number of people kidded me about trying to pass myself off as a Canadian before seriously recommending that I leave my Yankees cap at home. Luckily, no one in Europe seemed to notice — or care — that I was an American: They were far more annoyed by all the German tourists. Now there's a group that deserves a horror cycle all its own.

She's lying on her back, screaming in mortal agony as hands dig deep into her abdomen and tear the wriggling, blood slicked creature from her body. "Alien 5"? The sickest horror movie ever made? Nope — it's just the home video from Anna Nicole Smith's Bahamian C-section, which she and her ersatz-husband Howard K. Stern proudly shared with Anna's adoring public on Entertainment Tonight. The tape was made during the September 7 birth of Anna and Howard's (or so he says) baby daughter, Dannielynn Hope, just three days before the death of Anna's 20-year-old son, Daniel. I was lucky enough to catch the event (the birth, not the death) in rerun first thing this morning before I even had time to down my breakfast, which is the only thing that saved me from throwing it back up. In the segment, Anna and Stern sit down with ET's Mark Steine, who's already looking a little green around the gills. Anna tells us how the doctors advised her to have her baby by Caesarian 'cause the baby had grown so large "it was gonna bust my womb." Thanks for that. With our collective gorge now on the rise, ET cuts right to the videotape. As Anna lies sweating and screaming — she claims she had an epidural, but it wasn't working — Stern loving captures it all on video, coaching her along with what turns into weird call and response amid the mother-to-be's moans.

"You're having a baby!"
"I'm having a baby… I'm having a baby…"
"She's beautiful!"
"She's beautiful…"

For the big finale, Dannielynn Hope is pulled from Anna's by now seriously busted womb and given to her mommy. Sitting on her couch months after the event, even Anna can't bear to watch. "I swear, it was just my insides being ripped out," she fondly remembers with a disgusted shiver. Well, that's one way of looking at it. Thanks for sharing, guys.

I haven't seen Sofia Coppola's spun-candy take on the life of Marie Antoinette yet, but I've got to laugh at the way Columbia Pictures has decided to market the film. At the end of the latest promotional trailer, in which the teen queen (played by Kirsten Dunst) is seen flitting about lavishily appointed rooms of Versailles as Gang of Four's "Natural's Not in It" blasts on the soundtrack, then traveling in he royal coach through the misty, early morning countryside to the melancholy strains of New Order's "Ceremony," these words appear: "Based on a True Story." I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. I know Coppola has been taken to task for her apparent political indifference and the historical inaccuracy of a film that purports to tell the story of an important real-life figure whose death marked one the most momentous occaisions in the history of Western Europe — the French Revolution. Since getting booed at Cannes — those French tend to take their own history very seriously — Coppola has maintained that she never intended to make a politically minded, factually responsible docudrama, but rather a period piece that would portray Marie Antoinette as a flesh-and-blood young woman in terms a modern audience might better understand. To do that, she needed to take certain liberties, like fudging the facts, using unaccented, vernacular dialogue and an '80s pop soundtrack. OK, I get it. Derek Jarman (Caravaggio) and Ken Russell (Mahler) did this sort of thing years ago, and whether I agree with Coppola's approach will have to wait until I actually see the film and read a book or two about the ill-fated queen. My question is this: Is Columbia Pictures trying to deflect further criticism by positioning the film as a fictional drama that's only loosely based on real-life events with what amounts to a disclaimer? Or are they afraid that a big part of the target audience may not know that Marie Antoinette was a real person? Or maybe it's something else entirely. I noticed the same strategy used in the ad campaign for a very different kind of movie, Steve Zaillian's recent adapation of Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men. Instead of selling the film as a movie based on a famous, Pulitzer-winning book, the trailer took advantage of the fact that Warren originally based his 1946 masterpiece on the rise and fall of Louisiana Governor Huey Long and went for the old "Based on a True Story" angle instead of mentioning anything about Warren or his Pulitzer. Do we no longer care about French history or great literature? Could it be that that same mania that sells E! True Hollywood Stories, reality-TV shows and ficitonal "memoirs" like A Million Little Pieces is now being used to boost movies like Marie Antoinette and All the King's Men?

Looks like the subjects of two past posts -- Nancy Grace and horror writers -- met head on in last week's issue of Entertainment Weekly when the King of Horror, Stephen King, weighed in on the subject of Grace, and man, it's the grisliest things he's written since Misery. I've never really been a big fan of King's prose, but I have to say, I read this piece twice. (You can read it yourself here.) Kings begins by briefly mentioning fellow novelist John Grisham's new book, An Innocent Man: Murder and Justice in a Small Town, a nonfiction account of a wrongful execution and the vagaries of justice. King then tears into Grace for her on-air treatment Melinda Duckett, the disturbed mother of a missing 2-year-old who blew her brains out in a closet shortly after undergoing an accusatory, eviscerating interview with the CNN "legal expert." King never lets up for a second. In the course of his article, he refers Ms. Grace as the following:

1. "the Darth Vader of CNN Headline News"
2. "the belle of the Freakers Ball"
3. " puffy-cheeked, helmet-haired, heavy-lidded, strangely expressionless"

He pretty much says flat out that Grace has Melinda Duckett's blood on her hands, and concludes with a reference to his own novel, The Running Man, in which ghoulish television viewers watch as contestants run themselves to death on live TV:

"I never expected to see anything remotely like it for real, but I never imagined Nancy Grace...and I've got a pretty nasty imagination."

Wow. I did my best, but it takes a real horror writer to capture the essence of evil that is the horrible Nancy Grace.

Has anyone else seen the trailer for Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning? (No? Check it out here.) If you ask me, this prequel, which is set in 1969 and promises to give the cannibalistic Hewitt clan's backstory, looks pretty much like all those TCM sequels and that totally unnecessary 2003 remake: we've got some running, some screaming and a lot of buzzing chainsaws. But you can bet I'll be there when the film opens on October 4, and for one reason: The script is based on a story by David Schow.

Next to Dennis Etchison and Ramsey Campbell, Schow is one my favorite horror writers. In addition to writing the screenplays for the original Crow (great), the second TCM remake, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (not great, but underrated), and two of Showtime's recent Masters of Horror entries (Tom Holland's fun We All Scream for Ice Cream and Larry Cohen's Pick Me Up), Schow's novels and short stories show him to be one of the rare horror writers whose fiction is consistently good and often so grisly his name has become synonymous with the whole "splatterpunk" thing -- extreme horror with a no-holds-barred attitude toward blood and gristle. He's also got a surprisingly subtle touch -- one of my favorite Schow tales, "One for the Horrors," which can be found in the excellent collection Seeing Red, is about a grieving widower who discovers the essence of horror in an old movie house -- which gives me hope that TCM: The Beginning just might be a cut above the rest.

Has anyone else seen the trailer for Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning? (No? Check it out here.) If you ask me, this prequel, which is set in 1969 and promises to give the cannibalistic Hewitt clan's backstory, looks pretty much like all those TCM sequels and that totally unnecessary 2003 remake: we've got some running, some screaming and a lot of buzzing chainsaws. But you can bet I'll be there when the film opens on October 4, and for one reason: The script is based on a story by David Schow.

Next to Dennis Etchison and Ramsey Campbell, Schow is one my favorite horror writers. In addition to writing the screenplays for the original Crow (great), the second TCM remake, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (not great, but underrated), and two of Showtime's recent Masters of Horror entries (Tom Holland's fun We All Scream for Ice Cream and Larry Cohen's Pick Me Up), Schow's novels and short stories show him to be one of the rare horror writers whose fiction is consistently good and often so grisly his name has become synonymous with the whole "splatterpunk" thing -- extreme horror with a no-holds-barred attitude toward blood and gristle. He's also got a surprisingly subtle touch -- one of my favorite Schow tales, "One for the Horrors," which can be found in the excellent collection Seeing Red, is about a grieving widower who discovers the essence of horror in an old movie house -- which gives me hope that TCM: The Beginning just might be a cut above the rest.

I never thought it would happen, but today I found myself not only agreeing with MSNBC commentator Tucker Carlson, but actually cheering him on. The reason: Carlson called CNN's legal analyst Nancy Grace and host of the nightly Nancy Grace a "reckless gasbag." Personally, I would have stuck "self-righteous " and maybe even "self-important" between "reckless" and "gasbag," but on the whole I couldn't have put it any better. Carlson whipped out this perfectly apt description while interviewing a former FBI profiler about the suicide of Melinda Duckett, a distraught, 21-year-old Florida mother who shot herself one day after an on-air interview with Grace. For the past two weeks, Duckett had been dealing with the devastating fact that her 2-year-old son, Trenton, had disappeared from her home. Duckett claims that she first noticed her son was missing when she went to check on him at around 9 pm on the night of August 27, when she found his toddler bed empty and the screen covering his bedroom window slashed. Not everything about Duckett's story adds up: She refused to take a lie-detector test and the details of the hours leading up to Trenton's disappearance are still vague (though perhaps not to the police). Those ambiguities, however, apparently equal culpability in the mind of former special prosecutor Grace, who proceeded to cross-examine Duckett as if she were on the witness stand, then got a psychologist to comment on Duckett's suspiciously calm demeanor immediately afterward. By all accounts (I myself have not seen the interview, but you can read the entire transcript here), the notoriously pugnacious Grace berated Duckett, pounding on her desk as she shouted "Where were you?! Why aren't you telling us what happened that day?!"

I've always found Nancy Grace objectionable. The way she constantly spins the murder of her fiancé ? a horrible moment that Grace herself witnessed and which served as the catalyst for her career switch from academia to criminal law ? as her "story" is both self-serving and in terrible taste. And while her work with victims' advocacy groups has been certainly creditable, the rhetoric accompanying her personal crusade to put suspects behind bars has always made her sound less like a soundly judicious prosecutor than a reckless vigilante. But where would Nancy Grace be without her criminals? Grace has built her television career smacking her lips over every lurid detail of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson, JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Petersen, and the disappearance of Natalee Holloway has been an excuse for countless hours of airtime. Now, as the host of her own show, it seems Nancy can do whatever she likes: She can report on an unfolding criminal investigation, argue with her guests over the specifics of the case, and interview people involved, including possible suspects. She can even do all three at once, which is what she did to Melinda Duckett.

Who knows what Melinda Duckett did or what she was suffering when she agreed to appear on Nancy Grace for what would turn out to be a brutal on-air interrogation by an uninformed, publicity-seeking celebrity who had no business cross-examining her. Duckett may have already been close to suicide before that "on air" sign flashed red at CNN (she was in the middle of a messy divorce and recently lost her job), but it's clear that her treatment at the hands of Nancy Grace didn't help her already fragile mental state, or the police investigation into her son's disappearance. Nancy Grace needs to remember that she's no longer a prosecutor, and hopefully by the time this mess is over, she won't be anyone's "legal analyst," either.

Make no mistake: I absolutely hate “best of” lists. They’re usually thrown together at the end of the year by burnt-out reviewers exhausted by the ridiculous number of movies released in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas in frantic bids to either cop Oscar noms or make a critic’s best-of-the-year list. And I’m sorry, I don’t care who you are and how much time you have on your hands, there’s no way any one list maker can see everything, so it’s inevitable that some movies won’t even be in the running. Who’s to say that those missing few aren’t the best movies of the year? But the real problem with such listings is that they tend to reflect what still fresh in a critic’s mind at the expense of movies that have opened earlier in the year. So before fall arrives and the onslaught of holiday movies begins and Dreamgirls and Rocky Balboa come to wipe out all memory of what came before, I figured I’d take a look back over the past eight months and put together a short, randomly arranged baker's dozen of what I’ve really liked, with links to the original review. Now bear in mind that I haven’t seen everything – I still haven’t seen Superman Returns -- so please don’t scream at me if you don’t see your favorite movie of the year below. But do post your own picks and I’ll be sure to add them to my much longer “to see” list.

1. Something New
2. Half Nelson
3. The Descent
4. United 93
5. Little Miss Sunshine
6. Mutual Appreciation (opens Sept. 1)
7. Quinceanera
8. Eight Below (I cried.)
9. Over the Hedge
10. Wordplay
11. Curious George (I cried three times. Not sure why. Don't really want to know.)
12. Down in the Valley
13. Twelve and Holding

Twenty years after Andie Walsh picked icky Blane McDonnagh over Duckie, one of cinema’s greatest wrongs has finally been put right. If you dig deep enough on the extras menu of the soon-to-be-released “Everything’s Duckie Edition” DVD of John Hughes' classic ‘80s teen movie Pretty in Pink, you’ll find an interesting discussion about the original ending for the film that Hughes wrote and director Howard Deutch shot, before a booing test audience resulted in a quick reshoot and the loathsome ending we all know and hate. In it – and stop reading right now if you seriously don’t know what’s coming – Andie gives Blane the boot and she and Duckie dance a final dance at the prom, in the moonlight. Sigh.

In an illuminating interview included in the “Lost Dance: The Original Ending” special feature, Molly Ringwald, who of course played Andie, claims she herself wasn’t really feeling that original ending (which, by the way, did wind up in the novelization of the movie) because she says she personally didn’t share that kind of chemistry with Jon Cryer (who’s portrayal of Duckie always struck me as a little, well, gay). Ringwald says it would have been akin to Andie winding up with her own brother, but had the producers gone with their original casting choice for Duckie — Robert Downey Jr., whom she found dreamy – the Andie-Duckie outcome might have worked.

All of which means I’m going to have to adjust my standard anti-Hughes rant, in which I accuse him of being the consummate Reagan-era filmmaker who translated grasping capitalist desire into glossy, deceptively harmless fantasies in which poor kids lose out and noncornformists either adapt or suffer (although Some Kind of Wonderful, which also comes to DVD as a special collector's edition on August 29, still gives me a stomachache). But the fact that Hughes and Deutch would be so willing to “forget the politics,” as Deutch himself puts it, and just let the pretty girl get the cute guy (how totally ‘80s) still leaves a bad taste. And even had they gone with the original ending, it still would not have altered the fact that the delightfully inconoclastic Iona (Annie Potts) gives herself a yuppie makeover to satisfy her own “richie” boyfriend. Or that Andie would borrow, then thoughtlessly destroy, Iona’s vintage taffeta prom dress just to create that pink monstrosity that doesn’t even look pretty on Molly Ringwald. Or that Andrew McCarthy keeps doing that weird thing with his eyes.

It’s the next best thing to the office dead pool: Along with wagers on the outcomes of the World Cup and NASCAR, an online gambling service calling itself BetUS.com is now taking bets on who will be Lindsay Lohan’s next victim in what’s shaping up to be a disturbing pattern of serial rage not seen since, well, Lindsay’s dad. According to a recent BetUS.com press release, whoever bet on Sean “Diddy” Combs to be next on old “Firecrotch”’s hit list — a tally that’s already included the likes of Hilary Duff and Ashlee Simpson — won big after she lit into him at an NYC club while taking a break from screaming at Paris Hilton. According to the odds, Nicole Richie (2-1) and Mischa Barton (3-1) are in for a whuppin’, but with a cumulative weight that won’t even break them into the light flyweight category, they’re hardly worth the pride of Long Island’s time. My money’s on 50 Cent: He’s the definite long shot here, but with 20-1 odds, I’d get rich or die tryin’. But would even Lindsay dare get mouthy with a guy who titled his last album The Massacre?

I really had no idea how huge the Christian home-entertainment biz had become until a few weeks ago when I was idly scanning the list of DVD releases on Amazon.com to see what was heading to video stores in the coming weeks. There, smack dab between Back Door to Hell and Cannibal ("She's Dying to Eat You!") was something called Bible Code: Exposing the Truth. But that wasn't all. Coming right after Cheaper by the Dozen 2: Widescreen Edition was a long series of individual DVDs gathered into groups with titles like The Christian Catalyst Collection and The Essential Bible Truth Treasury Series. Not only were an overwhelming number of them being released by the successful Christian media company Vision Video, but a huge percentage were hitting the streets on Tuesday, May 22. So I thinks to myself, what gives? Easter has come and gone and, mercifully, Christmas is still a long ways away. And then it hit me. The arrival of Children's Heroes from Christian History Vols. 1, 2 & 3 et al had been cannily scheduled to coincide with one of the biggest religious events of the year: The release of Opie Howard's The Da Vinci Code on May 19. Call it a Christian counterattack, if you will. So in the interest of serving anyone who might have had their faith shaken and stirred by Howard's Hollywood hokum, I've come up with a short buyers guide to what looks to be the cream of last week's Christian bumper crop. I should perhaps admit straight off that I haven't watched a blessed one.

Biblical Mysteries: Ark of the Covenant
Enigma of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Faith & Science: Who Is the True Jesus?
Faith Under Fire
Incomparable Christ #1: The Original Jesus
Jesus Stories
Jesus: "Who Do Men Say That I Am?"
Passion in Jerusalem
Picture Perfect Jesus
The Way of the Cross: Meditations on Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus

Not that O.C., silly. I'm talking about Oh! Calcutta!, the infamous musical that opened on Broadway in 1969 and made theater history by featuring extensive male and female nudity, simulated whoopee, and dance numbers and comedy sketches revolving around — you guessed it — sex.

Coming in the wake of the groundbreaking "American tribal love-rock" musical Hair, in which cast members shocked staid theatergoers by appearing on stage in the raw, Oh! Calcutta! aimed to up the ante by pushing nudity and sexual situations front and center. But the original O.C. was no mere skin show: The book – really a series of blackout sketches à la Saturday Night Live — was written by the likes of John Lennon, Sam Shepard and even Sam Beckett, the music was cowritten by Peter "P.D.Q. Bach" Schickele, and the whole thing was “devised” by the famous British drama critic Kenneth Tynan. Calculatedly controversial, the show delivered everything it promised, and proved to be an enormous hit: It ran for over 17 years on Broadway.

Struck from the only existing videotape made of the original stage production in 1970 (it looks like it was shot for TV broadcast), this unexpected DVD release looks surprisingly fresh, but that's about the only thing about Oh! Calcutta! that has stood the test of time. All the dirty talk and the silly glee based in gratuitous nudity — the very stuff that helped disguise the show's musty vaudeville roots and bawdy music-hall mind-set and led audiences into thinking they were seeing something innovative — now seems downright juvenile, and the baroque soft-rock score and groovy optical effects badly date the 26-year-old production. And while no longer shocking, a few of the raunchier sketches do leave a sour taste — it's hard to imagine that anyone ever found rape amusing, even back in 1969 — and the presence of Bill Macy in the cast means you’ll have to look at Maude's husband Walter naked. Nevertheless, Oh! Calcutta! remains a fascinating cultural artifact that reflects just how the theatrical mainstream attempted to exploit the newfound sexual freedom of the '60s and the recent relaxation of obscenity laws. Needless to say, it's strictly for adults only.