Movie reports

I loved Lord Love a Duck when I was a kid.  It was the coolest movie ever.  Hot women in bikinis, rock music, Roddy McDowell running around doing magic shit, I loved it so much that I'd nearly burst with glee when it came on TV.  But the thing is, I never saw it from start to finish and I really didn't grasp what it was about beyond the hot women, Roddy McDowell doing shit, and the cool music.  So I watched it from start to finish the other day on Netflix and guess what?  It's the creepiest film ever made.

Roddy McDowell plays the smartest kind in his high school and he's smart enough to know he wants smokin' hot Tuesday Weld to be his girlfriend.  But once he tries to get her she rebuffs him, so of course he tries to give her everything she wants in order to make her fall in love with him.  But instead of falling in love with him, she just keeps using him until she gets what she wants and he ends up in jail.

How creepy is this movie?  Roddy McDowell's obsessive love for Tuesday Weld would be called stalking today.  He breaks in her house, the houses of her friends, and he insinuates himself in every corner or her life, I'm surprised he didn't tell her when to change her sanitary napkin.  But it gets creepier from there.  Turns out Tuesday lives with her hot single mom and they sleep in the same bedroom in twin beds.  Her father is estranged but when she wants something from hm she turns on her womanly charms to get it.  Tuesday and her creepy daddy go out to a drive in and feed each other food off their fingertips then he takes her shopping so she can buy some tight fitting cashmere sweaters which she models for him and as she shows him each one, he doesn't even try to hide how turned on she's getting him.  I expected him to start humping her in the changing room.

Then she decides she wants to get married so she can finally lose her cherry and Roddy helps her out.  She gets hitched but when married life isn't all she thinks it should be, she wants her new hubby dead.  And of course Roddy tries and tries to kill him.

This film is supposed to be a satire on teen culture of it's day and it succeeds some in that but mostly it's repellant.  I decided I hate it but I can't hate Tuesday Weld or Lola Albright, the woman who plays her mother.  They are too smokin' to to hate on. 

I had seen one of these films on PBS years ago, I think it was 42 Up, and it piqued my curiosity about the earlier ones.  So in the past two days I watched the first two in the series, 7 Up and 7 Plus Seven.  Both films are cute charming looks at life back in the 1960's.  The kids are mostly charmingly adorable, with a few exceptions.  I found most of the working class kids to be refreshingly honest and straight forward and the upper class kids to be infected with the prejudices of their parents, one little girl admits to not having met a black person and says she hopes she never does, now obviously that's her parents talking through her but it's still disturbing.  It's also kid of odd to hear the rich white kids talk about how much better things are for the colored peoples of England, as if they had a clue at those ages.

I've bookmarked the rest of the films and I'll making my way through them in the next few weeks.