Review for The Harry Novak Collection - Volume 1

I think I first heard about Harry Novak in the early eighties when I watched part of 'The Pigkeeper's Daughter' on VHS with some friends. Of course, by today's standards (or lack of 'em) it's all pretty tame stuff but I remember at the time feeling like I'd come of age movie-wise. The cheesy 'hicksploitation' narrative just about worked to glue together the gratuitous sex scenes into an almost cohesive whole. Of course this was just one of about a zillion movies produced by Novak during his halcyon years (sixties and early seventies) and he certainly gave Russ Meyer a run for his money before he, like many other dollar chasing Producers turned to hard-core. In fact, if you haven't seen at least one Novak movie starting with the (in)famous 'Box Office International ' logo then you've either led a sheltered life or you're a liar.

Harry H. Novak started out in the 40's & 50's as a campaign manager, promoting movies for RKO. Figuring that sex always packed the drive-ins and flea-pit cinemas that riddled the US at the time, he soon moved into some nudie-cutie action, which all looks decidedly tame today. He was rumoured to be the very last man on the lot when RKO buckled in 1957, he moved a block down and opened his own make-shift studio lot, turning out 'all color' nudie cutie movies which did great box office.

This set of Novak releases houses three of his many movies; the sublime psychedelic bad-trip, 'Mantis in Lace' (1968); the rather more innocent seeming 'nudie' flick, 'Kiss Me Quick', a sexy homage to 'The Munsters' and 'The Addams Family' from four years earlier and 'The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet' from 1969.

MANTIS IN LACE (AKA LILA)


"Mantis in Lace" (also titled "Lila") is a psychedelic grindhouse go-go-girl-goes-slasher movie from 1968, the vey height of summer of love zaniness on the Sunset strip. It tells the torrid tale of a bored Go-Go gal who is introduced to the crazy world of LSD - and the grim consequences thereafter.


Susan Stewart is a bored Go-Go gal (Lila) festooned in white leather-boots who dances to hip music in a Beatnik infested strip-joint. She takes a break and plays some pool with a hipster and they hit it off with some listless hippy talk ('You turn me on baby. What's your bag etc'). He agrees to go back to her pad, a deserted and derelict warehouse owned by her father with no electricity and a single mattress in the middle, surrounded by candles. After she pops some of his pills she does one last strip routine as an aperitif before the real deal. During the sex that follows she reaches for a nearby screwdriver and kills her new companion. Shocked by what she has done she (luckily) finds a meat cleaver to help dispose of his body.


Cue a couple of detectives who naturally assume the killer is male. Meantime Lila is making sure she doesn't waste her victim's acid stash and she becomes a more regular user. And then, predictably, the film cycles from strip joint to victim - one of whom is a psychologist who appears to suggest she may have been abused as a child which may explain why the acid creates such nightmares whilst having sex.


There's a lot of hand-held semi-documentary style footage in the film, probably as a result of low-to-no budget and shoot and run aesthetics, and it really adds to the demented charm of the thing. Directed by 'who-he' help-out man William Rostler, it's combination of dead-pan dialogue, fish-eye emotion and unadulterated sleaze means that it is almost the very definition of grind-house sleaze. There is no knowing irony here. This is the real deal - and worth the price of the set alone.

The period sound-track is perfect too, giving the whole film a disturbing Mansonesque undertone which is unsettling in the extreme. There are skin-shots aplenty, of course, but unless your thing is dark indeed there are precious few erotic thrills to be had.

And what's with the surreal phallic soft-fruit fear all about? Trippy times baby - and this needs to be seen as nature intended, at 2am with the curtains drawn, empty beer cans strewn across the floor and with your lids half-shut. Fantastic!

KISS ME QUICK!


I always assumed 'Kiss me quick' hats were a terribly British seaside thing but seemingly not. This was Novak's first film from 1964 and is real corker of the genre. Running in at just 60 minutes, it was shot in six days with a rented camera in card-board sets. That's pretty remarkable it's true but the sad truth is - it shows.

It's a very weird sci-fi spoof where an alien (wearing what looks like a kitchen implement on his head) is despatched to earth to research that mystery of all mysteries - women! After all, his boss thinks they would probably make ideal servants.


He is transported into the lab of Doctor Breedlove who has invented a cool machine that conveniently turns dreary earth females into sporting topless Go-Go dancers.


There's more than a whiff of 'Munsters' meets 'Addams Family' meets 'Lost in Space' about the movie, as well as unimaginative nods to Dr. Strangelove, as well as Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, enjoying something of a renaissance in the sixties when the movies began to air on TV.


The gags are all toe-curling and form the thinnest of excuses to bridge clips of nudie loveliness, the real reason punters were paying to watch. Some feminist viewers may take umbrage at the factory-line of topless beauties which, at one point, get labelled with stickers usually reserved for meat - like 'Prime' and 'Choice Cut', though it's difficult not to smirk at the sheer indefensible outrageousness of it all when viewed with a modern sensibility.

THE SECRET SEX LIVES OF ROMEO AND JULIET


The set ends with a later film, "The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet" which is probably the least enjoyable of the three, though it does serve to show the bridge that took place between the original nudie-cuties (Kiss me Quick) and the eventual foray into harder fare.

The Elizabethan bard's original play is just a trumped up excuse for some period costumes which merely add more layers to peel away than normal. The film starts with its hippy actors attempting some original Shakespearian dialogue though they quickly give up all pretence once the action hots up into an endless stream of multi-party orgies. Occasionally one of the actors will stop long enough to break down the fourth wall with joke fired straight to camera - though god knows why. It's by far the most explicit of the three movies included in the set and yet, ironically, also by far the most tedious.


The transfers are fine and probably as good as they'll get for such a marginal release. "Mantis in Lace" and "Kiss Me Quick!" are in OAR of 1.33:1 but 'Secret Lives' is given a non-anamorphic 1.66:1 framing which is disappointing. 'Kiss Me Quick' has an audio commentary with Mike Varney of Something weird Video fame outtng Novak through the paces wth some great period anecdotes. You also get the trailers. All in all a good value set and a welcome release. I look forward to finding out what will make up Volume Two!