*Get Candy Barr: The Small-Town Texas Runaway Who Became a Darling of the Mob and the Queen of Las Vegas Burlesque by Ted Schwarz on Amazon here*
This "nudie cutie" from the mid '60's is a painful film.
Lucifer (Max Gardens, billed as Manny Goodtimes) is bored in Hell and decides to try and entice the world's most faithful husband with a series of beautiful topless women. Jack Little, looking like a cross between Buddy Hackett and Eddie Munster, is the husband Ben-Hur Ova (get it? GET IT?). What follows over the next long sixty minutes is a series of awful, sleazy puns and jokes that makes Chuck Lorre look like Noel Coward, and tons of badly edited striptease routines.
The film may have been shot in a day, with the sometimes haggard-looking women added later. Candy Barr shows up only in a piece of one-reel, having nothing to do with the credited cast. And, oh, those credits. The performers and some of the crew are given stupid pun-laden names (the director is credited as Seymour Tokus...ha...). The film tries to be topical, mentioning "The Beverly Hillbillies," Walt Disney, and Playboy magazine, but some of the jokes are so old, and so bad, I honestly didn't "get" them. Gardens' clever asides to the camera also suck.
But we are here for the women! This was shot before genitalia could be shown onscreen, so we get topless women awkwardly showing off their backsides to the camera. The ladies must have taken the bus in from the afternoon show at the local burlesque club, none make an impression. Poor audiences back in the day had to endure a lot of stupid jokes and humor just to see a little skin, my heart goes out to them.
"My Tale is Hot" is pretty horrible, the same director would score better with "The Joys of Jezebel" a few years later.
Stats:
(1964) 60 min. (1/10)
-Written and Directed by Peter Perry, Jr.
-Cast: Jack Little, Max Gardens, Candy Barr, Carol Baughman, Monica Liljistrand, Gaby Martone, Barbara Nordin, Adele Rein, Karen Wyatt
-(Not Rated)
-Media Viewed: Home Video
