Rating: D
Dir: Lou Campa
Star: Janet Banzet, Donny Lee, Bella Donna, Frank Spencer
To whom it may concern. I wish to register a complaint, regarding this copy of Mini-Skirt Love, which I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique. It contains precisely no mini-skirts. Such blatantly false advertising cannot be allowed to continue, and I demand an immediate refund of the… sixty minutes I spent watching this. Ok, “watching” is likely a bit of a stretch. After the first ten, which felt the length of a COVID lockdown, and were about as enjoyable, my attention might not have been entirely focused on this grindhouse cheapie. That cat-litter box wasn’t going to clean itself now, was it? And a better artistic metaphor for this movie than that, is hard to imagine.
At least it goes to show that incest porn has been around for as long as I’ve been alive. The one here consists of Billy (Lee), 15-going-on-35, mother Sarah (Donna) and father Steve (Spender). Billy’s “innocent” photography uncovers Mom’s affair, causing Dad to get mad. This is a bit hypocritical, considering he just spent the afternoon miscegenating with a black hooker in a motel room. The resulting fracas ends in Steve being stabbed, Sarah being sent off to the loony bin, and Auntie Janet (Banzet) coming over to “take care” of Billy, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. She also takes care of a passing Avon lady, while Billy takes photos, and when Sarah eventually gets released, she’s soon getting milk delivered, again IYKWIM.
It’s painful in just about every way, with the participants and the photography perpetually duelling with each other, as to who can be the ugliest. While the official release date is 1967, it feels like it could well be from a decade earlier, and simply did not get released at the time it was shot. This would explain the black-and-white photography, the failure to take advantage of laxer late sixties censorship, and the absence of mini-skirts. Alternatively, it could just be badly out-dated and poorly made – certainly a viable option. Man, how bad must life have been in the sixties, when this was the kind of thing you needed to resort to, for your cheap thrills.
The print on the Internet Archive has badly out of sync sound. I can’t say this hurt the film; indeed, it may have lent it an unwarranted air of artistic innovation. It’s not as if there’s a great deal of dialogue (moans and grunting sounds likely outnumber lines), and the performances are such, that having readings which don’t match the on-screen body language, is not a huge problem either. There is a certain car-crash sensibility here, as you wonder what the hell anyone involved on this could possibly have been thinking. However, that lasts maybe a quarter of an hour, before you realize the answer doesn’t matter. Apathy then set in for me. Artistically, you’d be better off browsing the “family” category on Pornhub.