Owned version: A DVD-R manufactured by Something Weird Video.
Acquired: February 22nd, 2008 from Something Weird.
Seen before?: Twice - once on December 31st, 2008 and once on March 4th, 2010. (The latter viewing resulted in this review, which sums it up pretty well.)
The joy of formula, pt. 2...
Since I don't have much to improve upon or change the previous review linked up there, I'd like to touch on something I find interesting about sex, voyeurism and the nudie-cutie as expressed in this specific iteration. Nudie-cuties, for the unfamiliar, are films in which elaborate excuses are devised for lucky men to play Peeping Tom to a host of unclothed beauties. This is effected via means supernatural (Like Wow!, in which a hobo finds magic X-ray glasses), professional (The "Imp"probable Mr. Wee Gee, featuring the famed photographer applying his trade to something other than headline-chasing) or fantastic (International Smorgasbroad, in which a cook dreams of past meals and the ladies that came with them), but the end result remains naked boobs. It's all variations on a theme, a dozen ways to say the same thing - a series of Playboy joke books scribbled out onto celluloid.
They are among the stupidest films ever made.
The important part, though, is that The Man exists. He's the gatekeeper, the carnival barker shilling carnal promises. This one man has something special about him, something that allows him to frolic in a wondrous world of pleasantly bare female flesh, and for the low low price of one movie ticket you can spend an hour in this paradise of pulchritude. As such, there's generally a leering quality to the films, one leavened by the good-natured fluffy idiocy endemic to the genre but there nonetheless; given that these films often play as feature-length Tex Avery wolf whistles, this is hardly surprising. This is then what's odd about The Adventures of Lucky Pierre - Lewis's chosen tour guide displays a spectacular indifference to the naked ladies around him.
The film is divided into five segments, each of which finds a way to deny the inherent voyeurism. The first segment has Pierre sketching nude models, and the fourth has him photographing nude models who keep disappearing when the shutter snaps; in both, he's too focused on the artistic endeavor to leer. (In the latter, indeed, he's far more excited by the camera than by the subject.) The second segment has him fixing a plumbing problem in a man's house, unaware of the man's wife showering five feet away from him. In the third segment, he stumbles over a pair of nude sunbathers while birdwatching. In each of these, his obliviousness can be excused to his concentration on his job. But it's the last segment that pushes this into fascinating territory. The final bit in Pierre has our chapeau-clad hero attending a drive-in movie theater showing nudie shorts. At last, we have an acknowledgement of desire - Pierre, finally, is One Of Us. But alas! Pierre is so fixated on the films he's there to see that he ignores the fact that the ticket taker and the concession girl are both nude right in front of him. And then a bus parks in front of him for the duration of the film, causing him to miss that too. It's as if Lewis and producer David Friedman decided to punish poor Pierre for not shedding his blinders.
Then, the payoff: As Pierre goes to wander off, he tosses away the dice that have been the film's motif and have, at the end of every segment, landed on ones. The dice this time roll seven. Nude women emerge from the background and Pierre, having finally broken the curse of snake-eyes, opens his eyes, sees them and rejoices. This admonishment to wake up, get off your duff and engage with the world around you is likely unintentional, just an unexpected double entendre bouncing off Lewis's burlesque-broad punchline. But there it is anyway. Call it How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tits.
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