On the surface, this is your regular old New World Pictures fare. All of the ingredients are here, such as a goofball story, gratuitous nudity, a sense of humor about itself, and Dick Miller. It stands out for being an unmistakably feminist work. Yes, writer/director Barbara Peeters (one of the few women making exploitation films at the time) has to fill out Roger Corman’s flesh quota and get some breasts up on those drive-in screens, but she does something subversive with it.
The key scene is a moment early in the film in an art class when one of the boys is embarrassed when he’s seen toting around a photo of a topless woman. Rather than recoil from it and treat the guy like a jerk, the lady art teacher (blonde beauty Pat Anderson) talks about the photo as a piece of art and a strikingly mature discussion about the myth of “obscenity” follows. “A woman’s lips, her eyes, her body, is that obscene?” she asks her class. None of them have an argument.
What I love about it is that Peeters is not apologizing for the gleeful nudity that follows. She’s also not saying “Corman made me do it”. Rather, she very clearly and very amiably says, “Okay, boobs—so what? What’s the big deal? What is it that we’re afraid of here? Huh?”
I don’t have an argument, either.
The plot of the film is three lightweight plots about three educated young nubile farm girls from Iowa who get hired on as temp-to-hire summer school teachers in Hollywood, CA. They’re all friends who take the same westbound bus. One is an art teacher, one is a chemistry teacher and one is a gym teacher. One wants to hook up with a rich man, one just wants to get hired on as a full-time teacher and one wants to make a difference by assembling a girls football team in, according to the film, the only state in 1974 that was open to that. All three get involved in their own misadventures with sexist suitors, the sexist system and sleeping with a student. All three occasionally have dinner together at home while wearing bikinis for some reason.
Meanwhile, we root for the women to prevail. They’re held to standards that the men who terrorize them would never hold for themselves. Peeters makes us feel that.
And maybe the resolution to this shit isn’t some neat and tidy package, but total chaos! Sometimes that’s the best way to dispense with old ideas that deserve to be sent out to pasture. Flip the game board across the room and start over.
By the way, I’m of the view that A LOT of exploitation movies are feminist.
What’s the slasher movie formula? A murderous male brute is defeated by a smart female.
What’s the women-in-prison movie formula? We want those girls to break out and plant about twenty bullets in every sleazeball who tried to feel them up between the bars.
The difference between then and now is that we’re more self-conscious about it. Films today italicize, highlight and underline their progressive messages. They want the dumbest blogger in the world to be able to see it.
Once upon a time though, they used to sneak it out. They used to want to make guys who were there for the naked girls to end up cheering on a struggling women’s high school football team.
I don’t know if the films back then were better, but they are a lot more interesting to talk about.