Bittersweet Infamy - #54 - Sexcula

Episode Date: October 2, 2022

Halloween special! Taylor tells Josie about Canada’s infamous lost-and-found ‘70s vampire porno. Plus: the ballad of Art Nouveau, Joni Mitchell's controversial alter ego.

Hey there, Taylor here from the podcast you're just about to listen to. This episode of Bitter Sweet Infamy is about a porn, which means we will be very graphically and explicitly discussing sexual matters. If you want to listen to this one without headphones, you might want to wait until the kids have left the house to go trick-or-treating. We'll also be having a grown-up conversation about blackface. If you're down with all of that, then wipe your feet off on the mat and come on into our haunted house of horrors.

Welcome to Trick-or-Treat Infamy. Welcome to Bitter Sweet Infamy. I'm Josie Mitchell. I'm Taylor Basso. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in Infamy. The shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, but the stories are always sweet. What kind of Halloween candy do you have, Taylor?

I am so glad you asked. I have the mix of the ass, the Kit Kat, the coffee crisp, the arrow. It's a little bit of bubbly action there, too. And then I've got some Smarties, but not the American ones, the Canadian ones, which are slightly different. Dude, the coffee crisp and the arrow, we don't get those down here. That's like a... Y'all don't have arrows?

Canadian. When you get them, you would get them like you would Cadbury, you know, or wine gummies or something like that. They would be like in the foreign candy aisle kind of thing. You wouldn't get them in a Halloween pack. All the good candy sounds like. Yeah. Well, we get them all together in the Nestle pack.

They're very infamous. Give them a Google. Happy... What's it called? Trick or treat? Trick or treat, Infamy. Trick or treat. Trick or treat.

Infamy. Infamy. Infamy. Yes. Is that what you're gonna be for Halloween? You're going to dress as Infamy? I think that for Halloween, I'm going to dress as Parappa the Rapper, if I get invited to anything.

Okay. Or maybe just around the house. So Parappa the Rapper, for those of you who don't know, is a rapping dog from the PlayStation 1 game of the same name, and he's very cute. He learns, he apprentices under all of the great masters, chop chop master onion. What are you going to be for Halloween? Should I save that for our next Halloween episode? Maybe.

Maybe. Because I don't know yet. The last few years have been kind of like a mad dash. So we've done, like, Miksh and I will like do a couple's costume that involves Beeman. So like one year, we did Jurassic Park, and so he was, life will find a way. He was, what's that actor's name? Jeff Goldblum. So Miksh was Jeff Goldblum, and I was Laura Dern, and Beeman was a little like Brontosaurus.

We got him a little. That's very cute. Yeah. It was, it was pretty cute. I don't know if it was properly executed. It was a little hard to tell what we were, but Beeman was cute, so that was okay. It was a good jest. I liked your, my favorite Halloween costume of yours is Peggy Hill, Avi.

I think the execution wasn't super great on that, but I thank you. I thank you for that. You had an Alamo beer and a boggle set. What else is there to know? That's true. That's true. I think I was at the wrong party. Nobody there knew who Peggy Hill was or what King of the Hill was about.

That means you're at a Halloween party full of assholes, I'm sorry to tell you. My condolences. It's okay. I got drunk and it was fine. So as we're talking about costumes and what we'll be and what we're thinking of maybe being and hopefully executing better, I do want to take this opportunity to remind us all that blackface is not an appropriate costume for Halloween for any time of the year. In fact, dressing like any ethnicity at any time of the year is highly disrespectful and

violent, I'll say. We'll go with violent. Don't do it. Just don't do it. Yeah. Yeah. Taylor, have you... Do you know anybody who's done blackface?

You know I love my girl Countess LuAnne. She did get very liberal with the self-tanner one year on Real Housewives. Oh, that's rough. She I think didn't go to that reunion because she was in rehab, but Meg and Kelly spoke up in Countess LuAnne's defense and got fired. So somebody got it. Oh, okay. Okay.

Yeah. Somebody took the heat. You know, there was a resolution there. I went to a Halloween party when I lived in China and there was a Canadian there dressed in blackface. So it's maybe worth putting into context like why this isn't such a great thing. So basically blackface in particular, but also like other forms of mimicking other people's ethnicities and other physical characteristics, have a long history of being used in really,

you know, shitty and pejorative ways throughout American history. I'm saying American history because I think that much of the way that, let's call it, the global community has processed this issue of blackface, especially in recent times, is filtered through an American context, but we can find examples of similar things in other cultures and other contexts as well. But basically, historically, when white people have been putting on makeup to look like black people or other kind of folks, it's been with the intention of mocking them or belittling them and dehumanizing them.

And so people aren't really so hot in terms of, oh, one time a year you dress up like me and I think that Countess LuAnne still could have done a respectful homage to Diana Ross that didn't involve blackface, put it that way. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think too, like in the historical context, white people would put black paint or sometimes like shoe polish to make themselves look black so that they could act in a way that they didn't think was proper for a white person to act. This complete and total disrespectful performance of what they thought blackness was.

And that's continued. It started in the late 18th century and then moved on to the stage. At first it was just kind of, you know, just happening in like kind of small public areas and then it became much more mainstream and took place on the stage. And that's where you hear the word minstrelsy. And it became one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the United States. There was just absolutely nowhere that you could turn any and all types of advertisements, product packaging, were portraying this minstrel character.

And typically it was a white person in blackface who was acting dumb or lazy or they were over sexualized. It was all this huge caricature that was never based in any type of reality. And it moved from minstrelsy to vaudeville. And so it's very prominent in American history, though I don't think we ever really understand it to be a big part of our entertainment's history. But you can trace Mickey Mouse himself to those vaudeville acts, to those minstrel acts, like the idea of the exaggerated lips and the gloves.

That was always, always a part of minstrelsy as well. So there's like, there's very, yeah, there's inherent parts of American animation, which because of Disney and how huge of a company and producer of content that it is, like, it's pervasive across the world because of that. So yeah, your note about like, it's American, but the way that it influences other cultures is pretty, is exactly on point, totally. Yeah. But dude, this, this is not even about Disney.

It's about another famous person, or, you know, entity, person in this case, Disney not being the person, but another famous person who has done blackface, Joni Mitchell. Okay. Winner of 10 Grammy Awards, she's been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone called her one of the greatest songwriters ever. She has a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammy Awards, and she's a Kennedy Cinder honoree, Joni Mitchell, Canadian, Canadian hero, really. Whatever, very own.

Yeah. So let me, let me describe a little bit of this blackface of Joni Mitchell's blackface. So it's 1976. She's a big fucking deal. She's already produced loads of songs, written and performed and painted the cover albums. She's gotten a lot of recognition as a folk artist. She's defined as like a voice of a generation. And in the late 70s, she's kind of getting more and more interested in jazz, specifically

experimental jazz. So she's moved away, she's moving away from folk music, more to jazz. And she's invited to a Halloween party by a well-known session bassist. His name is Leland Schuyler. This all takes place in LA. So she gets to this party, you know, big party, everyone's in costumes. There's, you know, food and drink and probably weed. And everyone else seems to have brought a date or a friend, but Joni is alone.

She hasn't brought anybody there, but it's good, like, probably good, given the circumstances. Let's do some damage control, okay. So she's standing alone in the corner, but it doesn't look like Joni Mitchell. You know, with her, she has these like very dramatic high cheekbones and long blonde hair. She's relatively like pale skinned normally. So standing alone in the corner, nobody recognizes her as Joni because what they see is a dapperly dressed black man. He's wearing a wide brimmed hat, these big old kind of 70s shades, like a sharp suit

with, you know, those really sturdy lapels, kind of a zootsuit style. He's got a red button up and he's got this like perfectly quaffed afro. And the host has been asking around like, I just don't even know who this guy is, like who, I don't know. Who is this black man who looks like Joni Mitchell? Yeah. And everyone's like, I don't know. So finally, the host goes up to him and says, Hey dude, nice to have you here.

Can I ask like, who are you? And he takes off his sunglasses and his wig and boom, it's Joni Mitchell in blackface. So everyone at the party is like, Whoa, Joni, we didn't know you, wow, you fooled all of us. We all know you, but holy shit, you fooled us all. And there's, why did you bring me this because it's wild? I think that was my way of interrupting because I needed to like step out of this moment for some air.

Yes. Get my, my marshal, my forces, get my wits back about me and then, okay, so we're back in the living room. She's, which she's whipped off the way, gets a dramatic reveal. What next? So everyone at the party is like, Oh, Joni, you got us. Good God. Good God, woman.

You got us. But, but I think it is important to note that like there's a jovial atmosphere where it's like, Whoa, girl, you did everything. Wow. Way to go. Way to go. Girl, you did everything you did. There wasn't anything you didn't do with this.

So the inspiration for the costume, of course, because they're all asking and she does talk with a magazine about this costume later in 1988 and it's Q magazine and she is quoted as saying, I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard when a black guy walked by me with a Dippity Dopp sort of step and said in the most wonderful way, looking good, sister, looking good. His spirit was infectious and I thought she dresses that guy. I thought I'll go as him. I bought the makeup, the wig, sleazy hat and a sleazy suit and that night I went to a Halloween party and nobody knew it was me.

I know. I know. It's so. You say something nice to one person and she's like, I need to put shoe polish on my face. Yes. Oh, no. I hate that so very much from my soul that makes me cringe.

Taylor, I'm so sorry to do this to you, but it doesn't stop, adjust this costume at this one Halloween party because this blackface costume becomes a persona for Joni Mitchell. A blackface persona that she calls Art Nouveau. That's his name. Art Nouveau. This is making me so angry. Oh, no. My dude, this character appears on the cover of her album, Don Juan's reckless daughter.

What? Many people don't know that it's actually Joni Mitchell on the cover. It's pretty rough. So the thing is, well, let me just quote Joni here. So she once told LA Weekly about this album cover and about this blackface persona. I don't have the soul of a white woman. I write like a black poet. I frequently write from a black perspective.

But strangely enough as well. So she shifted her career from folk to jazz and in 1979, she starts working with Charlie Mingus on his, what will become his final album. And Mingus is a very famous experimental black jazz musician. And she works with, through her like jazz phase, she works with loads of black artists, Miles Davis. I mean, I think the Mingus one is the biggest because that ended up being his final album and she collaborated on quite a bit of it.

So it's very strange why she feels this way. I mean, she's from Saskatchewan. She's a very white woman and a folk artist too in her early career, a wonderful writer and a wonderful musician, but this, her understanding of racial politics is very weak and leaves a lot to be considered. Yes. Well, I think that perhaps, not to why am I giving this one the better of the doubt, perhaps in her naive way, she thinks that like she sees herself as an outsider and that mutates

itself into like, I don't know, appropriating the ex, that guy said hi to her one time. No, it's not defensible. Judge Taylor rules guilty. Next. No more blackface in my court, please. Torkshire and blackface. No more. Bailiff.

Yeah, and she, because there's a lot of people who have done blackface or brownface or have done some inappropriate appropriation of somebody else's culture for a costume or for something to wear. That has happened, obviously. We can cite numerous examples right here, I'm sure. But typically there's some backlash and acknowledgement of wrongdoing, whether or not that is truly a heartfelt understanding of wrongdoing or if it's kind of like save your ass apology. There's typically some type of, you know, acknowledgement that like, it was a different

time. I'm so sorry. I've learned I'm going to do better. I'm going to do the work. Right. But not Art Nouveau? No. That's tough.

Yeah, not with Art Nouveau because it wasn't that it was a costume to her, it was a part of her. So she's not going to apologize for being black on the inside. J.T. Leroy. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. He's real.

He's real. He lives in the heart of every child in the laugh of every, you know, come on. There's a professor of equality and diversity at Leeds, Beckett University. His name is Kevin Hilton, and he has a really, a really good way of putting it, I think. He says, regardless of Joni's raison d'etre, no performance of blackface can be neutral in terms of its felt impact on black and minoritized ethnic communities, which I think like kind of, it doesn't matter her intention, even if it was like a befuddled artistic one or a wholly good-hearted one or totally malicious.

It doesn't matter because it's the effect that's really the issue here. She's also not pulling it off the way she thinks she is. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I know. She looks like Joni Mitchell in blackface. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. She has been working on her memoirs since 1998. She told The New York Times in 2005 that they were in the works, but she was certain that the first line of her four volume memoirs would be, I was the only black man at the party. I suppose I admire her restraint in not writing it in jive. What the fuck am I supposed to say to that? I don't know.

I have no idea. I think this is like, I like Joni Mitchell's music. I've heard a few of her albums. I love Joni Mitchell's music. Yeah. It's fantastic. Yeah. I had no idea about her being in blackface or having this blackface persona.

It confused me quite a bit. I was a little disgusted all around. I've been reading this book by Hanif Abdurakib. It's a collection of essays called A Little Devil in America, Notes in Praise of Black Performance. And he has an essay about blackface in particular, and he's a, have you, have you read any of his stuff? No, but it sounds like you're about to give him a recommendation.

I totally am. He's typically a music writer or he got started as a music writer, but he's also a poet and all of his stuff is, is really good. But this essay, 16 ways of looking at blackface, he has a quote that I think is helpful. So he writes, some people on the internet know that blackface is bad, but don't seem to be entirely sure why. It's just one of those things that white people shouldn't do. I wonder about the benefits and failures of this.

How far the country has gotten laying down the framework for societal do's and don'ts while not confronting history. If it is possible to ground a true behavioral shift without attacking the root of blackface, the fact that there will always be an audience wanting a blackface, but not necessarily a black person. The problem with approaching history in America is that too many people measure things by distance and not by impact. Yeah, I think that explains very elegantly why this is something where even if you aren't

coming at it from a place of negative intention or you don't entirely understand why it's so stigmatized or whatever, the compassion of knowing, I think that it propagates harm is enough. And to not do such a thing and to maybe just go as a pumpkin. Yeah. This Halloween. Exactly. Pumpkins are great.

Josie, what's your favorite vampire movie? What we do in the shadows. Very good choice. Very genuinely funny and I'm a tough crowd. I only laugh at really good comedy and anything Josie says. That's it. Wow. Different categories.

Thanks, dude. No, I love what we do in the shadows, a techo at TD joint. And now it's, well, it's been for a while, but there's a TV show that's pretty good too. I really like the TV show. I think for my favorite vamp flick, I'm going to go with the 1994 classic starring our generation's finest actress, Kirsten Dunst, as a horny child vampire, interview with a vampire. Yeah. That's a really good one.

It has like all the southern gothic vibes going and like you get a sense of how fucking hungry they are all the time. I love that one. I was supposed to go to my friend, Mohammed's DJ set. He was DJing some party and I literally went to my friend's place to like get ready. Like I was already ready. They were getting ready and we were going to go, but they had put on interview with the vampire and we didn't end up going.

We just stayed and watched interview with it because it was the war was too powerful. So we're going to be examining the history of vampires in film and first we must look at the history of vampires in literature. Okay. You know, it's always a book before it's a movie. So many cultures have their own versions of the folk lork creature, but they became popularized in English language literature via two seminal works. Okay.

The first is Irish author Jay Sheridan Le Fanus Carmilla, originally serialized in 1871 in a magazine called The Dark Blue. It's about a young girl named Laura who falls figurative and literal prey to a sensuous female vampire named Carmilla Karnstein. Oh, she's a lady. So this is a lesbian vampire novella of Sumno and it was the OG. So like kiss the ring. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, I love it. There's a reason vampires, I think, are gay at a rate outstripping most other horror movie like interview with a vampire. Those are not twilight. Those are like aggressively heterosexual. Very much more than vampires get married. Yeah.

But I think you're getting at something with like the at the kernel of the vampire is something sexual. You know, there's the idea of biting somebody's neck like it always happens at night. It's penetrative. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so that it makes sense to me that it would be like all types of sexuality too. The second big influential book is of course Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula from which

many of our foundational concepts of vampires come. Count Dracula remains the most famous vampire, although credit where it's due around the turn of the millennium. Edward Cullen made a good run for the Golden Casket. Ah, you know. So it follows, of course, that the early little horror movie pun there, that the early vampire films draw from the tradition of Stoker. The first vampire film was Germany's Nosferatu, a symphony of horror, an unlicensed 1922 knockoff

that slapped new character names on Stoker's otherwise untouched intellectual property. The widow Stoker sued and won and the film was ordered destroyed, although Prince have survived the modern era. Oh, I did not know that. Whoa. Good for her, but shitty thing to do, you know. Bitter sweet. Like that coffee crisp.

In the 30s and 40s we see vampires as part of Universal's famous slate of monster films and in the 50s, a British company called Hammer Films took over and churning out Sammy Vampire Draws. So we're in an era of plenty, perhaps over plenty as far as monster film goes. Okay. Okay. Draws. Is that what you said?

Draws. Draws. Draws. Okay. Yeah, that is a little bit of a doily word, huh? How about bullshit? Okay. Let's just call it down the line.

I mean, draws. Vampire bullshit. Draws fits. It's a bullshit word. Use that in your next wordle, folks. You heard it here first. From the 60s, then into the 70s, we have a bit of a vampire craze. Do you impart to books like Salem's Lot and interview with The Vampire, which would go

on to spin off the 90s movie, to which we referred earlier, and TV series like Dark Shadows, which was like a vampire soap, which is a lot, so that sounds fun. I would watch that. I'd watch it with you. Oh, that's Dark Shadows Marathon next October. We're doing it. Why not this October? Are you busy?

You have a lot on your plate. I won't go as far as to say that a bit. Yeah, you know what? Well, listen, have your people call my people, and they won't answer. Okay. When we get to the early 1970s, what are the trends in vampire films? This is where you are in the world. France is enjoying a wave of incoherent pretentious lesbian vampire erotica.

Yeah, the girls. Spain drops El Vampiro de la Autopista, or The Vampire of the Highway, whose star, Waldemar Wolfhart, was in a real life accused and acquitted of murdering young women along the highway prior to taking the role. Holy fucking shit. What? Okay, so we're taking a hard left into a sidebar here, because I couldn't leave that alone. No.

Please and thank you. Let's go. Let's turn over the rock. Turn over the rock. Yes. What happened here was... What happened down there? There's this German playboy, like a young, you know, let's call him a Jake Paul of his

era, and the era is like 1950s, 60s Germany and Spain. Okay. And he basically, there was some sort of, they believed there was a serial killer, whom the media had termed El Vampiro de la Autopista, which vampiro in this context basically means like, like a bloody monster kind of thing, less than a literal vampire. In 1964, this is quoting from an article from The Reprobate that I'll shout out in the end credits. In 1964, a 22 year old American tourist, Mary Ann Peterson, was hitchhiking her way across

Europe when she became the first known victim in what would become known as the Autobahn mortars and two more young women, one American, one German. So we were flailing around, the media's in a frenzy and we're looking for supplements. Someone reported seeing a red sports car with Stuttgart license plates in the area. This guy had a red sports car with Stuttgart license plates. That was basically all they needed. A big frame up ensues. Trial by media.

Everyone thought he was guilty, but he went to trial. There was no evidence he got acquitted. He would sue. There would be some sort of retaliatory charges for which he would go to prison. It was like a whole big thing. But the way that it all turns out is this guy who seems to have been, again, we're talking like the Jake Paul of this era of Germany, just this like smiley blonde playboy, and he seems very willing to have played on his infamy in order to get a leg up in like this

kind of weird entertainment career. So he released an album called Wildemar El Vampiro. And he released it in Spain because he wanted to get big in Spain. Yeah. Okay. Oh my God. That is too weird. And so as part of his trying to get this big push in Spain, he takes on the role as El

Vampiro de la Autopista in this movie, except this time he's a literal vampire sucking women's blood going down the highway. Okay. Okay. I just, I wouldn't do that if I were him. Having gone through a trial. But you're not. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking at the album cover. I am not him. This is true. Yeah. So he ends up going into acting under the name, I think, Wal Davis for 10 years.

And then he, you know, that's that. Wow. Not here to talk about that, by the way. Okay. Okay. Sidebar. Yes. You said hard, hard left sidebar.

Yes. Hard left onto, onto La Autopista. And now we're back. In Mexico, the hot trend is monsters versus luchadores as professional wrestling invades the cinema. So there's a guy named El Santo who wrestled in a silver mask and silver tights. And he's basically the most famous luchador ever, ever, ever d ever. And there was a bajillion dollars to be made off his likeness as just this folk hero.

So he ended up doing, you know, like El Santo versus the vampire women. Okay. It was like Santo and Blue Demon versus Dracula and Frankenstein. And it would, they would all start with like a 15 minute tag team match. Yeah. And they would have like action scenes. They would, it would be like, you know, get a little fucking hip toss here in the swamp creature and then you put them in an arm bar for like five minutes.

Perfect beauty. Yeah. Asian countries like Japan and the Philippines are seeing the import of European style vampires and tinkering with those tropes. Fun fact. The first ever Filipino movie with sound in 1933's Ang Aswang is a vampire flick. Hey, hey. Okay.

Apparently Aswang, the Filipino type of vampire sucks blood through its tongue, by the way. Better. There it goes. Your vampire. That's better. For your, for your like vampires of the world. I'm traveling to Manila, I need to know like what specific vampire I need to be aware of.

Mm-hmm. That's good. I'll punch it. I'm sorry. Do you know if, if the initial puncture rune is made by the tongue or is it teeth that make it and then the sucking is the tongue? Hmm. I don't know, but I'll get to the bottom of it.

We got to go to Manila to find out. We got to, we got to go to Manila. We got to do some freaky tongue shit, let's go. And in the U.S., the trend broadly is toward exploitation of every kind. In 1970, the vampire, oh you sounded, you sounded unsurprised. Hmm, interesting, exploitive American, American media, weird, huh. In 1970, the vampire lovers, a take on Lyfa News, a lesbian vampire novella, Carmilla, is hugely influential in the sapphic, titty-heavy direction the rest of the decades vampire cinema

will take. Okay. Titty-heavy cinema. Titty-heavy. Just, just yabos, whipping around, circles up and down, left, right, in your face, it's all happening. Okay. Thank you.

And then someone stabs a steak through them because it's a fucking vampire movie. Right. It's a lot of really confusing imagery. In the same year, we see the release of Count Yorga, vampire, originally written as a soft core porn, before being toned down at the male lead's request. In 1972 and 1973, we get Blackula and its sequel, Scream Blackula Scream, with black actor William H. Marshall giving a very stoic and dignified set of performances as the titular vampire amongst all the absurd material.

Okay. These, that's not a great film, Blackula, I've seen it in the theater, but it's, it's fun. Okay. These films opened the door for a churn of black exploitation horror flicks, as well as other unconventional jaculas, like 1975's Defula, who spoke only in sign language. Cute! I like that.

It was advertised as the world's only film in sign scope. It was made by a deaf, I think writer, director, everythinger, actor named Peter Wexberg. It's the, the concept of the universe is just that everyone here happens to speak sign language. It's just a sign language universe, and people use the era appropriate technologies that deaf folks would use to communicate at the time. And then in the end credits, it says who of the actors was deaf and who wasn't. Wow. That's a really dope movie.

Yeah. In 1975, very ahead of its time. And it's called Defula, is that what you mean? Defula. Defula. Okay. All right. I'm, I'm, I, I, the name would not have enticed me, but this description has, so.

It's very good. I had the name enticed the hell out of me. I was like, I want to fuck every other eula. I want to see Defula. There's a version of it that has the, um, if you're a hearing person and you want sound, there is a version with a dub, but the original version was meant to be watched silently. Whoa. Oh, that is dope.

That is so cool. This is an incomplete list of the more notable titles of the early seventies vampire filmography, but for each of those, there are a dozen more with poor production values, worse acting, unsalvageable writing, and an abundance of sleaze, torture, nudity, and rape. Oh, that's rough. By the time movies like the vampire lovers and Count Yorga have trickled down to the end of the decade, we're getting elaborations like the 1978 Filipino grind host flick, Vampire Hookers.

Tagline, warm blood, isn't all they suck. Ooh, what? Oh, Lord, God, rough. And given the abundance of substandard vampire erotica in the 1970s, it won't shock you to learn that some of it was just outright pornography. Yeah. Legend, John C. Holmes starred as Count Spatula in 1970s Sex and the Single Vampire. In the film, the unfortunate Count dies as the sun comes up after an all night orgy

at an outdoor locale, so it goes. Oh, yeah. Die doing what he loved. Mm-hmm. That's good. Pseudonymous director Sven Christian directed both the mad love life of a hot vampire featuring a vampire pimp, Dracula, and his harem of dick-biting ladies. Dick-biting ladies, okay.

It was like instead of biting you on their neck, they bit your dick. It was like basically let me give you a blowy, and then when they were down there, they would bite your dick. That's the gimmick. That makes really good sense. No, I agree. At any, listen, find your point of entry. Yeah.

And if the blood's rushing to it, that's- I mean- That's what I was going to say. Yeah, that's- They're kind of onto something. That shit would go off like a sprinkler. Yeah, exactly. Blood sprinkler.

Invite your friends. Mm-hmm. He also directed the horny vampire in which Count Talcum cruises the vagus strip looking for booty and blood. All of this, of course, is to say nothing of succula, Dracula sucks, Count Erotica vampire, all the great vampire porn classics that we're all so familiar with. Yeah, we studied them in school, yeah. Every Halloween, Nana would put on a Dracula love ampere, and you'd all whip it out and

rub one out together. Jesus. Wow. But each of these efforts, Josie, pales an infamy when compared to Canada's enigmatic offering to the spooky world of vampire pornography, 1974's sexcula. Sexcula. That's a mouthful right there. Hey, hey, hey, hey, walka, walka.

That's a triple on tondra. That's a good vampire and dick-sucking and word joke. Triple threat. I'm curt-seeing, just so you know. Beautiful. Tagline, by the way, she'll suck more than your blood. Oh, well that sounds like the Philippine one, right? I think you're gonna find that vampire porn's mostly tend to use that tagline.

Okay. God damn it, someone should have copyrighted it. Hopped together by an inexperienced director in order to attain tax credits for a wealthy producer, Sexcula was shown in public only once and then sealed away for nearly 40 years in a federal archive until it was finally rediscovered and, on October 25th, 2013, repremiered at Van City Theatre in Vancouver, British Columbia to titillate and horrify an unsuspecting new generation. Oh, Van City, you mean the one downtown?

Yeah, unlike Seymour. Whoa. Damn. Among the ignorant doomed who filed into that theater in 2013, was a 24-year-old Taylor Basso, who read about the theatrical unsealing of a bizarre lost piece of locally filmed vampire erotica and who foolishly thought, well this'll be fun, why don't I bring my friends? Oh, my.

And in true horror movie style, that act of naivete sealed not only my fate, but those of my nearest and dearest vampires, after all, need an invitation. Josie, this is the story of Vancouver's infamous lost and found vampire porno, Sexcula. That you watched, that you brought an entire team of friends to go watch. Was it nighttime or was it like a matinee screening? 10.30. PM. 10.30 PM, it was well after midnight by the time we left and I tell you we left changed

people. Me more than anyone, me with a lesson in fucking hubris. I don't know if I wish I were there or not. I, wow. I do, and nope. You don't. I do, and nope. Okay.

All right, all right, all right. That was quite the, quite the little fly around survey of vampires, stories and pornos. Cool. The reason that I did that was, well and I like to keep you guessing, but two, in doing my research for this, I stumbled upon and then purchased with my own money, reminder, you can donate to us at ko-fi.com slash bittersweetinfamy, but it's a good book. I bought vampire films of the 1970s from Dracula to Blackula and everything in between. Everything in between.

Everything in between. And it's by a guy named Gary A. Smith. And it's written with clearly a lot of affection and his own notes on what he's seen. That little tour of the world of 1970s vampire cinema that you just got, incomplete as it was, that was courtesy of Gary A. Smith. Thanks, Gear Bear. The most important thing, by the way, you said I watched Sexcula. That's not true.

I've seen Sexcula twice now. Oh, okay. Let's lay that right out. I found it a less confronting experience the second time around. When you were prepared, when you kind of knew what you were stepping into? I knew it was coming and I watched it minimized while I just did life drawing exercises in the background, which is, if you like life drawing, by the way, go to www.lovelifedrawing.com, great free resource, lots of poses, stuff like that.

I did those while I was out, so I drew some forms based on the people in the porn. I'm not going to lie and say I didn't. Nice. Okay. Fine. Right there, baby. That's a better experience than like it is projected bigger than a house right in front of you and it's pitch dark and you can't leave and your closest friends are there.

That's different. Yeah. Yeah, it's a different thing. Yeah. Yeah. And you don't, yeah, you're done. Yeah. You walk, yeah, everything, the whole setting.

So true. So true. Yes. So Sexcula is supposedly the first commercial hardcore porn ever filmed in Canada. Oh, okay. And yes, so it's of national significance and its existence is owed to a confluence of factors. Not only are cheaply made vampire flicks flooding the market like we were just talking about,

it's also a time referred to as the Golden Age of Porn, a period between 1969 and 1984 that was marked by the mainstream cinematic release. Sorry. Continue. I don't get the joke. Can you explain it? The Golden Age of Porn started in 1969 and why is that funny? There is a sexual position called 69 where two people are on top of each other.

How does that one go? Performing all sex on each, on each. Two people are on top of each other. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Good job. Did you want me to draw you a life drawing of it?

It might come to it. So yes, 69, haha nice, to 1984. This is a period marked by the mainstream cinematic release of and cultural and commercial influence of pornography. It's going to be a blue episode. What does that mean? You've never heard the term blue as in like, in a little smutty? No.

I've obviously heard it as like sad, but not, not smutty. I like that. Okay. According to Green's Dictionary of Slang, whether or not they're reliable, we'll see, in the 18th century, ignorant Parisian booksellers covered their seditious or obscene material with blue colors. Ah, blue. Chocolate blue.

Blue. Yeah. So this is going to be our, this is our blue period. This is going to be a blue episode. Blue. Blue. Episode. So again, cultural change, sexual revolution, et cetera.

Pornography was largely an underground affair with Reels funded by New York City organized crime figure Robert D. Bernardo being distributed to peep show theaters. Okay. Yeah. The wide theatrical release of Andy Warhol's blue movie. Aren't you glad I introduced that word to you moments earlier? Yes, I would, I would be lost. It depicted its stars lounging about an apartment, chatting about the Vietnam War, and engaging

in a scene of unsimulated penetrative sex. Whoa. It created an appetite and opportunity for other instances of porn in the mainstream. Okay. Sidebar, by the way, Warhol would have his own dalliances in monster movies, including Andy Warhol's Dracula in 1975 starring Udo Kera's Dracula. In 1970, a theater in Midtown Manhattan showed a documentary promoting the legalization of pornography and was served with an obscenity charge.

The film was seized and the presiding judge, Jack Rosenberg, stated, the film is patently offensive to most Americans because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters. I don't know if that was his voice, but that was a good voice though. That was a good, like, anti-sexual, anti-porno white dude voice. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that.

I'm working on my range. Thus began the tenuous relationship between porn, theaters, and the law, as the flood of big-name pornos that partially defined the 70s in the public memory, funded by our old buddy D. Bernardo out of NYC, pour into mainstream cinemas, only to be challenged by various obscenity watchdogs, religious groups, second-wave feminists, Nixon, etc. Wow. This was the bond between Nixon and feminism, I think. Oh.

This was what we agreed on at the time. Yes. Okay. That is, the world is a strange place, you know? This is the era of deep throat, and later on Debbie does Dallas, and the mainstreaming of figures like Ron Jeremy, Marilyn Chambers, and Linda Lovelace. All right. Porn is financially viable, paid critical attention, and mentioned on buzzy late-night

talk shows by figures like DeLorean owner-investor Johnny Carson. Oh. The critical and commercial. Thank you. Just trying to get that alternator to work still. The critical and commercial viability of the genre peaked with the well-received The Devil in Miss Jones, which Variety ranked number seven of the 10 highest-grossing pictures of 1973.

Whoa. Although, having said that, I saw this movie inside Deep Throat, which is like an HBO documentary, said that Deep Throat made $600 million on a $25,000 budget. Oh. $600 million? It was big business. In the early 70s, right? In the early 70s, so we don't have the same options around like, we don't have home video

cassette. We certainly don't have the internet or only fans or anything like this. If you wanted to go, but it's also like, how do I put this? John Waters said in this same documentary, this is like a very transgressive thing. These are people like of mixed company, of mixed gender, of mixed social standing, whatever, smoking a doobie and going in and like watching a porn together. Like 20 years ago, it was 1950 something, right? Yeah.

10 years, or 15 years ago even. Wow. $600 million, that's like, that's a lot right now. That's a butt ton of money right now. But in the early 70s, do the math, right? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Unfortunately, it was also in 1973 that the Supreme Court handed down its decision on

Miller versus California, which redefined obscenity from something, quote, utterly without socially redeeming value, and quote, to that which lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value as defined by contemporary community standards. So basically the old version of obscenity, yes. The old version of obscenity was like, if this is literally just someone like pulling poo out of their ass and smoothing it onto a passerby's face, that is obscene, that serves nobody any good. But if it's not that, then we've got some room to talk.

This is like, if the hypothetical imaginary average person on the street could find a fence in it, then that's where the conversation starts. Right. Yeah. So thinking with a law like that, I feel like it just asks people to create quote unquote obscene things just to push the line. You know what I mean? Like to be like, no, this is political.

You think that this is obscene, and that's a political statement. So I'm coming back and I'm making something that's obscene, but it's a political statement. You know, it's like, how are we going to define this, fucker? Oh, maple forp. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah. So when you make it so vague, it just creates this opportunity, not opportunity, I won't say that because I don't think that this law created art, but you know what I mean? It creates this situation. I also think that it's worthwhile context that because we're in this sex revolution, it must be such like a driving forward movement. At the time, we don't know that we're going to run headlong into like social conservatism of the 80s, the AIDS epidemic, et cetera, that's going to put a real crimp in all that.

But there must have been such a buoyant feeling of hope that like, holy cow, 15 years ago it was 1950 something and I had to ask June's father permission to take her to the sock hop. Now I'm in a movie theater in Manhattan, putting my hand under her dress. Yeah. And we're both loving it. That must have been such a frustrating thing to see get bogged down in these claims of Is there an argument to be made of like, I'll get behind film ratings.

I don't need someone like jerking off next to a child in a movie theater. Right. Also, I want to know what I'm going into sounds like maybe you wanted to know that as well. Yeah. Yeah. But if people want to watch dirty movies in private or in, I don't know, areas where they consent to be, I don't really give a shit. Yeah.

No, exactly. Wow. The time was this sort of, I don't know, this big moral clash between big screen porn and big name critics, let's say. Yeah. And of course, many states used the Miller vs. California decision to justify banning porn and because it's like you said, it's completely vague. It means literally anything you want it to mean.

And so while mainstream porno chugged on till the mid-80s, it never quite reached the same dizzying highs. In the end, porno chic was killed by the rise in home video and subsequently the internet. Yeah. Okay. That all makes sense. Yeah. Now we've got only fans.

No. We don't need to go to the theater. No, no. It's all on our phone. It's all on the device that we carry around and sleep next to all night long, yeah, exactly. And then it yells at us and we wake up. I really need to get a proper alarm clock. I hate my phone as my alarm clock.

I hate the screaming. So rude. Meanwhile, up in Canada. Yeah. Let's head north, baby. Get a jacket. Let's go. Grab a toke.

Take your shoes off by the door. Cinema is going through what is informally referred to as its tax shelter era. So according to the Canadian Encyclopedia, between 1975, he-he-nice, and 1982, my jokes are so stupid. My jokes are so stupid. Trick or treat. All right. Between 1975 and 1982, the federal government allowed investors to deduct 100% of their

investment in Canadian feature films from their taxable income. Oh shit. 100%. Okay. Literally every single cent. Yes. Okay. In a huge boom in Canadian films made from only three in 1974 to a peak of 77 in 1979.

Whoa. Nice. That's so cool. So we've got all these movies, but they're not known for being that good, let's say. Or there are gems among them. There are Oscar-nominated screenplays. There's a couple of critical successes. The majority of them resemble crudely made versions of their American counterparts, aren't

culturally Canadian in any identifiable way, and many aren't even released commercially. One critic looking back said the scheme was, quote, like trying to compete with Ford motors by building a car in the basement. Oh. Which I take exception to because we are the attic. Yeah, baby. It's like trying to build a car in the attic. Yes.

We haven't thought of a way to get it down, but we're trying. I'm enjoying that. So while this era had a reputation for provocative low-grade titty schlock, much like our American cousins, we bust on you, but at the end of the day, we're quite similar. Well, you know. We look up to you a bit. It's capitalism. Or down is the case, maybe.

There you go. There's nothing else, you know. In spite of all that, this era gave us some diamonds, if you want to call them that. The screwball comedies, the meatballs and porkies. Those were Canadian tax shelter films. Yes, as well as the Canadian tax shelter era launched the career of director David Cronenberg. So huge win for all you wound fuckers out there. Oh, wow.

His 1975 movie shivers generated much controversy. Thanks in part to a particularly scathing review by Robert Fulford in the magazine Saturday quoting the Canadian Encyclopedia. The review titled, You Should Know How Bad This Film Is, After All You Paid For It, called the film an atrocity, a disgrace to everyone connected with it, including the taxpayers. If using public money to produce films like this is the only way that English Canada can have a film industry, then perhaps English Canada should not have a film industry. Oh my God.

That is. So that's fucking, that is a, that's a real stake through the heart. Yes. You know, when, when in Transylvania. Yeah. Wow, yeah. Dude, yeah. So this obviously sparks a furious debate in the House of Commons over the use of taxpayer

dollars to fund the films. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So as you can see in 1974, we have a perfect eclipse of these three film trends. We've got vampire B movies, mainstream pornography and Canadian tax shelter cinema. What a, what a convergence. It's like when Earth's three moons line up.

That's what I was thinking. Yeah. Exactly. To block the sun. The throons. Moon. Tune. And loon.

I like that. Thank you. So they're all lined up. Enter Vancouver industrialist Clarence Neufeld. Hey guys. I heard something about some tax credits. I heard some 100% tax credits that you're just giving out like candy. Where do I sign up?

He has no ambitions to cinematic success, but something about this whole system strikes him as a particularly fun tax shelter and he wants it. This seems fun. Guys, let's do it. Yes. Wow. The privilege of great wealth. I think I'm going to make a vampire porn.

Why not? It will cost me nothing. And hey, everyone's got a script, right? Except Neufeld doesn't. So he turns to a guy named David F. Hurry, who had previously written for the beloved Canadian television series, the littlest hobo. I'm sorry.

Do you know the littlest hobo? I do not know the littlest hobo. I'm just, I just want to make sure Mr. Hurry writes the porn script. Is that what happens? So your issue is you think that he would only write like premature jacks or what? Yeah, I guess so. I don't know.

You think that because his name is hurry, he's going to write bad. He's going to write really brief, unsatisfying porn. It rushed. I mean, I, yeah. Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. I love the logic that you bring to things. It really keeps me humble.

But imagine there's like a character in a porno and his name is Mr. Hurry. You change the questions. He's not a character. Well, I don't know if that's his real name. So like, I do assume by the way that other than the people whose names I am going to be saying are real, like Clarence Neufeld is this guy's real name. Everybody is working under pseudonyms.

Even Clarence Neufeld did this under a pseudonym. It was Clarence Frog. I'm sorry. Frog? F-R-O-G? No, no. Hurry's sounding pretty good, huh? Yep, yep.

You're sleeping on the best part. You don't, the, the littlest hobo. So let me tell you about the littlest hobo. Tell me about the littlest hobo. I need to give her some Canadian knowledge on you here. So he's an extremely intelligent stray German shepherd and he goes from town to town helping people in need. I didn't know he was a German shepherd.

He's the littlest hobo. And he jumps on the trains and like rides them from town to town and he comes in and he'll get like a lot of like, oh shit, you know, I left the baby out on the porch. It's locked. You know, the littlest hobo comes in and saves the baby. He was our lassie. He was like a less pretentious lassie. Lassie always kind of a stick up her ass.

The littlest hobo was for the people. All right, dude. What have you said? Littlest hobo. His name was hobo? He didn't really, okay. So apparently I didn't know this, but apparently there's like lore. He has a name.

I forget what it is. He's often referred to as hobo in the same way that we often refer to Frankenstein as Frankenstein, but he's really Frankenstein's monster. But like, yeah, I've got shit to do, man. Let me live. So it's that's kind of the vibe, but I think that there's lore that he's part of a like a race of hyper intelligent alien dogs or something. There's they took some weird turns that I think people got sick of watching him like,

you know, get people's keys through the mailbox and they were like, fuck it. He needs to start. He needs to, we're bored. Wow. I'm in. So that's the littlest hobo. See, we both found two completely different ways to derail the podcast in one sentence. Yours was David F. Hurry.

Mine was the littlest hobo. None of those things matter. Wait, his middle initial was F. I'm just saying. Okay. Fucking hurry because he's in a fucking hurry to write this form. So hurry cranks out the screen by hurry by name, hurry by nature. And according to Will Sloan for Hazlet, filming was spread out over three weeks in August

with a crew of littlest hobo alumni and a cast laced with local sex workers. Oh, wow. What a combo. Yeah. So we got a lot of, I guess David must have brought his like littlest, like, you know, he called up hobo, maybe for a cameo, but hobo wasn't answering his calls, you know. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. She got the hobo sound guy, the hobo, you know, craft services. Yeah, totally. Craft services. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly that. Unfortunately, it seems like some key people ran afoul of Nifo because both the director

and the cinematographer were immediately fired, leaving uncredited 27 year old second camera assistant John Holbrook to take the reins under the pseudonym Bob Hollowitch. Bob Hollowitch. Okay. Wow. Oh, an action. That gets dumped on your plate. Well, he kind of volunteered is the way that I hear it.

Like me, I think he saw like, he saw, I gather that like a lot of back in that day, a lot of people would use like porn credits to like, here's a way to get some work on my resume before I move into quote unquote legitimate film or whatever. Right. Yeah. Like behind the camera. Yeah. That makes sense.

But he was like, fuck it. I'm going to direct this vampire porn. I've got it in me. I can do it. So Holbrook himself got into trouble with Nufeld, the producer for trying to film around the porn parts. It was a little sheepish boat going all the way apparently. He was like, okay, let's just skip ahead to page 50 here.

Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Little, little soft core horror dramedy. How about that? You know, tasteful. Let's just take page 69 right out. We don't need that one.

Exactly. We can jump it like a, like a unlucky elevator. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? That was not Nufeld's approach. Nufeld wanted some like spread in and some, you know, some, some titty wank and so on. Some moaning happening. Yeah.

Yeah. We, we need more flesh. The actors and the crew and the cast, no one really seemed to want to be there. Cocaine use was prolific among the cast and crew and not, it seems in a fun way. The actresses felt anxious about filming their sex scenes and among the stallions we had some evident performance difficulties. Flaccid faces? Yeah.

Is that what you're telling me? Floppy whoppies. Whoa. That's no good for a porn. Well, there's apparently a few visible in the final cut. I didn't see them. I'm not going back to look. I have, I have heard tell that some people are visibly pushing rope on the thingy.

Ouch. Says Holbrook quote, every day something would go wrong. Like she didn't bring her clothes today. Why didn't she bring her clothes today while they're at her friend's laundry? Well, I'm continuing a scene and now my actress doesn't have the clothes that she was wearing yesterday. How do I do this? All right.

I'll put a dissolve in there. It's later on and now she's naked. It's just flying by the seat of your pants. Oh, that's rough. I mean, obviously the solution is that she keeps her clothes on set that you have a costume. You have someone who's in charge of costuming and they keep track of all that. But okay, whatever. No.

I could do this. I could make this porn in my sleep. Good. You know, I think you would probably produce a very endearing vampire porn if left to your own devices. I'll give you that. Thank you. I'll think of a title.

I'll let you know. Can I suggest a tagline? Is it they'll suck more than blood? No. Yes, it was. I'm getting better. I'm getting faster. I swear.

There you go. Listen. This machine learning. It's improving. The A.I. is alive. She's almost a chief sentience. Josie is almost a chief sentience. She's going to escape the podcast soon.

So the film gets finished. It screens one single time in 1974 at West Vancouver's defunct panorama film studios, an event which did not go well. It says porn historian Demetrius Otis, quote, it was all these industry people expecting some Canadian feature film. And what they got was, you know, a sex movie. Oops. That's a marketing snafu for sure.

Well, the way that another person, Jack Darkus, who I'll talk about in a bit, but the way that he mentioned it in an interview was like, I got like an invitation from my union. And I was like, sure, I know some of the names on this list are familiar to me. Sure. I'll go and support these people. Oh. Lil' Hobo. Lil' List Hobo.

I know Lil' Guy. Let's be forget. This is like a grant thing. So I'm sure they had some requirement to like, you have to screen this at least once. You have just some activation of the film. Yeah. Exactly. Newfield shops around for a U.S. distributor, but no one wants in.

So he says, no problem. I've got my tax credit. We can just let sex kill a language in obscurity in the spooky crypt of gimmick vampire pornography. Whoa. So he doesn't, there's, yeah, there's absolutely no fighting for it. He's like, oh, okay. Well, that project was fun. What's next?

He did it. He got his tax credit. He got whatever it was. He got, I don't know, firing a bunch of people and making a porn. He got that out of his system. Yeah. You know, what next? Yeah.

Something to do with boats, I bet. I feel like that's... Yeah, he seems like a boat guy. Yeah. Yeah. Boat shoes. Producing a line of specific boat shoes. 1980 boat shoes.

Don't wear boat shoes on the set of a porn. But he's done with the porn. It's done. Yeah, it's true. It's true. You're right. You know what? Checkmate.

Once you've stored your Canadian tax haven porn and it's slimy little archive, then, you know, slip onto boat shoes. Fair enough. Who could argue? However, because this was made with federal funding, a copy is sent shortly after completion to the Archives of Canada. Oh, my, oh, my. Where it is preserved in archival condition for nearly 40 years.

Oh, my gosh. I would love to see what else is on that list. If this is there, imagine. I'm sure it's, I'm sure it's, you can, it's a government of Canada thing. They'll have a front-facing website. I'm sure you can look. And to wit, during that time, the myths and urban legends around sex killer grow because anyone can see it listed in the archives.

And so anytime someone spots it in the catalog, they're like, what the, what the fuck is sex killer? Yeah. And it's very clear that it's a vampire porn too. It's not like, huh, dark nights. I wonder what that is. Yeah. I would assume from the title sex killer, I would be like badly named vampire porn and I would be right.

And you would be correct. Ding, ding, ding. One of the people who attended this premiere at Panorama Studios in West Van was a guy named, fun fact, by the way, West Van is its own city. He's not the West part of Vancouver. A little Canadian trivia for you there. This is all a bit of Canadian trivia for you today, isn't it? It truly is.

Trick or treat. So one of the people who attended the premiere was a guy named Jack Darkus. He was by his own admission so weirded out and haunted by this entire thing that he wrote a comedy film in 1986 called Cinema Canada, also known as Overnight. And it's the story of like this pretentious Czechoslovakian director being flown in to direct sexcula and it's very clearly this. It's a Vancouver film. Whoa.

She's countess, sexcula. The plot line is the same. She's got, the plot line is, by the way, jump in ahead, but the plot line is she's created a sex monster who can't get a boner. Oh, cute. I like that. Way to go. It's a fun concept.

Of hurry. In Cinema Canada, a.k.a. Overnight, it's also true that the people, the studs on the set can't get it up, right? Right, exactly, yeah. It's from the headlines. It's the law and order rip from the headlines version of sexcula. It seems, by the way, so this is available on the director's Vimeo for $1. If you want to rent it, it's $1, but there's also a trailer visible.

It seems broadly like a more charming film than sexcula. What's the name of this film, the parody film, the 1986 parody film? You can find it on Vimeo under Cinema Canada. Cinema Canada, okay. Which is a very bad name, I think. It doesn't really describe what this is at all. I would be like weird sexcula satire. Yeah, yeah.

Put it back in the name. It was helpful the first time. Or just call it sexcula. Yeah. Just call it sexcula. There's something about the name is kind of so bad it's good. It's not ejacula, which is a good vampire sex pun. It is sexcula.

It is sophomoric in its understanding of both wordplay and sex. No, it's true. Right, ejacula is pretty good. So because we've got this movie paying winking homage to sexcula, but the original copy of sexcula at this point is buried in some archive somewhere. Right. And people don't really know that it's there. So we've got this movie kind of whipping up the urban legend of,

because it's a Vancouver film too, right? Yeah. So it's this Vancouver urban legend of sexcula. But we don't actually have the original film. Interesting. So we flash forward to 2012. We land with a guy named Paul Karoo. He's a reviewer for a website called Canucksploitation.

Okay. Which is a very cute title. And it's about Canadian Bee movies, which as we've discussed, have this kind of unexpected rich history due to this insane 100% tax return that they had going on. Yeah. Amazing. This guy, Paul, he hears about this print at the archive and he arranges a screening. And this sort of becomes his cause celeb.

And in his advocacy for sexcula and like his using dude, it takes an ass to fill every seat. True. I have been sitting up here for two fucking years now, telling you that every piece of bad art is good. I'm not going to say it this time. I won't commit to it. But everybody's got something.

Well put. Well put. One man's trash is another man's gold. And I feel that way strongly. Yes. So sexcula awareness and restoration becomes this guy's, you know, driving force. It takes all kinds.

And he's able to make contact with film historian, Demetrios Otis, who is able to negotiate between archives, Canada and Clarence Neufeld for a digital scan of the loan surviving print. Oh, wow. So now it can go places. Archival power activate a piece of once thought lost media has not only been saved, but has actually been like preserved in a government archive for 40 years.

Like it has, it has been one run through a projector one time. Oh my gosh. It's in pristine condition. Beautiful condition. And yet it looks like shit. So there's that. That tells you what they were filming on. Yeah.

Yeah. Yes. And it was with great gusto that this reproduction was presented to us as in me, my friend Sam, my friend Olga, and my boyfriend at the time, Adam. You took, wait, you took Adam, Olga and Sam to see this. Poor Sam. You exposed Sam to this. Poor all of them.

Poor all of them. Yeah, true enough. Sam especially fucked you up. You took that one hard. Yeah. Well, Sam's just like a sweet, nice person. And he always seems like so young and earnest and innocent. He's like, sure, Taylor, you're my friend.

I'll go watch any movie with you. Not anymore. Not anymore. And then just classic dicks flying at his face. God. Oh yeah. Nothing but dinkers, man. I want to know.

NBD nothing but dinkers. I do want to know what your initial invite was like. Like what that group text was, or if you were all sitting around. Sure. I don't remember exactly, but I assume that I would have found out about this event via the Georgia Strait, which is our local arts rag or was at the time. Yeah. I think they've done a pivotal shift to eSports or something.

I don't know. Oh, well. So there's a website called stir, create a stir.ca for art stuff in Vancouver. Oh, cute. You know, here's kind of the much abbreviated version. They didn't go into, you know, Waldemarro, Vampiro. They gave it the 75 words or less version. Yes.

And I was like, oh, that sounds interesting. Like sure, why not? And I remember specifically, I think Sam, I invited separately, but Olga, I remember had a job giving people rides in a new kind of car. And while she gave them rides, she would explain to them the benefits of the car. So it was like a sales pitch. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. And I had just gotten the tattoo that I have on my left shoulder, which is a sun. I had just gotten that tattoo at Sacred Heart Tattoo in Vancouver, which has since been converted into a weed store that location in the way that things go in this beautiful city of mine. And Olga said, oh, and Adam had been there kind of keeping me company. So it was like, oh, why don't I give you a ride home? It was on this ride home.

I remember that I broached the subject and said, hey, would you like to do that? I fancy myself, I don't know, a bit of a card with some quirky ideas for group activities. Yeah. And bring everyone out of their shell a little bit. The culture friend. They're like, I read the Georgia straight. I think this might be interesting. Archive of Canada.

Let's go. So the four of us went together and again. So this is my boyfriend at the time, Adam, his best friend Olga and my best friend Sam, a group that would necessarily hang together all the time, but a group that enjoyed one another. I actually have a little framed picture of this group in my bathroom. But the important thing to note, though, I think is that we're here because of me. This was my idea and hope I hope it goes well.

Yeah. So we come in and sit down and there's a little bit of preamble. And I should say there was an interaction that now that I have done this research strikes me as very odd in retrospect. They were like, oh, the writer of sexcula is here, put up your hand and the person immediately to my left put up their hand. Oh. So I was sitting, so it seems immediately next to the writer of sexcula.

So for example, if Sam leaned over to whisper something to me, I don't know, bust on the film. Yeah. Well, I actually think it's very good. You know, I have to bust on one of those. Oh, no. You certainly couldn't laugh or make your own snide remarks. Certainly not.

We also have the issue that the person sitting next to me was a woman. I now know the writer to be David F. Hurry. Yeah. So we have a few options here. She wrote for the littlest hobo under a man's name because the industry wasn't ready to accept female writers on the littlest hobo like we've got options. There are a lot of options.

Or she wrote a very small part of sexcula script and, you know. She wrote the part where you couldn't get it out. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. That was her branch outs. Either way, I'm kind of buttoning my lip because this person's right next to me. So like there's no snickering that's gone out the window. I'm way too polite for that.

Yeah. In this context. This is Canada. I would rather die. This is Canada. Yeah. Truly. Truly.

Who else was in the theater with you? Was it packed? Was the popcorn consumption like? Yeah. Who generally was in the theater with you? Older white folks who looked well to do. So I would say like maybe folks who were nostalgic for that kind of can't be 70s porn in a movie theater era would be my guess.

So not quite like the opera crew. We were the youngest group there. No. Okay. But also Van City Theater is kind of a bougie theater. And so maybe that's just the clientele. Yeah. True enough.

Okay. But yeah, mostly older couples actually. It was mostly older couples. Oh, okay. Okay. So maybe a little squeezy, squeezy, fumbly, fumbly. Yeah. Not to this movie.

Couldn't possibly happen. Couldn't dry as a bone. A dry theater that night. So anyway. Here's the blow by blow. Pardon the pun. Of Sexcula. I'm ready.

Warning. Get a good grip on yourself. Sexcula is coming. And coming. And coming. Sexcula. Driven by uncontrollable raging desires that break all laws. We start with some fun 1970s footage of Horseshoe Bay

and the Sea to Sky Highway. I've been there. As I always say when I'm doing my impression of the musician at a music festival in BC, let's give it up for these mountains. It's my nicheest Canadian impression. That's good. I like that.

Yeah. Thank you. If you don't know, this is probably the only time BC is recognizable over the next 87 minutes, by the way. It's a lot of darkly lit sets that could kind of be anywhere. I would imagine. Yeah. So we follow a couple that pulls up to this burnt out abandoned house.

So again, they've already gone down from Horseshoe Bay down the Sea to Sky to just this derelict shitty old house. So it's not going to look very nice from here on this movie. It's not a very nice looking movie. Yeah. Which I guess happens when you fire your cinematographer on day one. Yeah. That's going to happen.

So we follow this couple in this Jeep and they pull up to a burnt out abandoned house just kind of in the middle of the woods. Where, which the girl explains is an old property of her families. Quote, the stories about this place would curl your pubes. Are your pubes already currently? It's a thinker. It takes a minute to land. This is high level stuff.

This is true. It's true. This is taxpayer funded Canadian cinema, Josie. Please be respectful. This is in the Canadian archives. This is cherished. It is. It is.

Thank you. Yes. I understand. I understand. I'm sorry. Respect. She runs upstairs and finds a diary that I guess is just laying around in this old hollow building.

There's nothing in there, but the diary is just mint condition. Yeah. And she and her boyfriend go on a picnic to a field where she immediately gets naked. Okay. But sadly for her, her boyfriend is more interested in reading the diary and will just kind of come back to these folks a few times in the film, but they're mainly just a narrative framing device. Oh yeah.

Okay. Okay. That was the frame. Gotcha. The couple, by the way, are played by David F. Hurry, your boy. Hey. Ryder extraordinaire.

He's also our assistant director, by the way. Oh. I think there were some firings. We had to condense some roles. We had to downsize. Can you do the communications? Okay. Can you also do some admin?

You know how it goes. Yeah. The script originally didn't start with them boning and then they started reading and he's like, I'm not going to do that. Can we just read the book? Thank you. Oh, they'll bone. Oh.

The girl is, that's David F. Hurry. The girl is Debbie Collins, who plays the titular Countess Sexcula. Okay. So in general, pretty much everyone is doing double duty, even the prominent roles. But that's, I mean, in terms of a frame story, doubling up actors, I feel like that's a thing that happens often because it's like, we've created this story and we're part of it. You know, I don't know.

That makes sense. As Sexcula's descendant, it makes sense that I would favor her, right? Yeah, exactly. You've made the case there. I was ready to bust on that, but you've made the case. Thanks. So it is, you know, it's very economic. Yeah.

This writer is, of course, Countess Sexcula, who writes that she has been compelled from her native Transylvania by her cousin, Dr. Philating Stein. Maybe I should have showed you this movie. You have more sincere enjoyment right now than I did at any point watching this. Well, I'm not watching it. I think that might be the thing. That's true. This is the no floppies cut that you get in here.

Yeah, it's different when there's a flaccid penis in front of your face. It's hard to laugh then. True, okay. Dr. Philating Stein has created a sex monster, Frank, for her very own pleasure, but there's one problem. He can't get it up. So good, Doctor. You know what?

As old as time, song as old as rhyme. It happens. As that teapot was singing about this. Murder she wrote, right? It was her. So the good doctor calls upon the best person to solve the conundrum. Quote, my cousin Sexcula of Transylvania is an expert at erotic, sensual, while she's basically a hooker.

That's the line in the movie? Yes. Do you think that was my material? I don't remember anything like that. You'd think I'd recognize your voice, these 54 episodes and some. So we're introduced to Sexcula via our first sex scene of the film, and I think that you could kind of be deceived into thinking that this might be, I don't know, a better film than it is, or at least more appealing pornography.

It's a well-lit room. Both the people are reasonably young and attractive, and they're doing the porn things. That's kind of all you can say about it, really. Oh, that's not true. There is another thing you can say about it. A phone rings halfway through it, and the Countess answers it. Which is a hell of a thing, given that it's 1869, so maybe she was an early adopter. I see, okay.

But that's the kind of thing that you can kind of pull off if you're doing it in an Austin Powers way, where it's part of the shtick, and I think that it kind of was supposed to be that, but they forgot the actual joke. Do you know what I mean? There's a joke there. Yeah, they forgot to let it sit for a little bit so that people could gather that it wasn't real. Yeah.

They also just have her say, oh, you know, I don't know if she actually answered the phone. And there's your joke. It was 1869. I'm not trying to make this a great film. I'm just trying to see where it went wrong. This is just some constructive criticism for Sexcula 2. Yeah.

Yes, exactly. So let's talk about our three leads. We've got Sexcula herself. She is played by Debbie Collins. Again, there is no chance in hell that anybody is going by their real name here. I just refuse to accept it. I like her. She bears a resemblance to Marilyn Chambers, who is another big name.

She kind of hits a trifecta. She was a big name porn actress. She was in some of Cronenberg's early Canadian tax shelter shtick, so she's got kind of that link. Yeah. Kind of infamously on the Ivory soap box, they didn't realize she was doing mainstream modeling work at the same time that she was doing porn. That's very cool.

I like that. And I guess Ivory didn't know that she was this adult actress and put her on the soap box like cuddling a baby. It's like a very chaste, sweet photo of her. Yeah. Aw. And so she had a bit of infamy for that when people kind of realized what had happened. Yeah.

That's great. I love that. I think that's an amazing story. So Debbie Collins kind of resembles her, so it makes sense. The guy who's playing Frank is playing him as a complete innocent. As a child, which I find very fucking grating. I understand the choice. I understand how he got here, because he's not horny, ergo.

He is innocent ergo. We're just going to play him as this kind of, I don't know, easily excitable 10-year-old. But aw, man. And then our, then our third, our third lead is Dr. Filading Stein. And, and, and like truly, Yasqueen give us nothing. Like an icon. An icon of blankness. Oh, wow.

Okay. Build your own character. Yeah. Yeah. Not selling it. I don't care if you think that I am one, a sex mad scientist or two. Even really all that interested in what's happening right in front of me. In some ways I say, fuck yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do what you gotta do. Get through this day. Yeah. Other times I'm like, damn. Damn girl.

You could have given just a little bit. But that would ruin it. In addition to Sexcula, Filading Stein and Frank, we've got a few more characters to random out our supporting cast. Okay. There's an emotionless sex robot or a pleasure robot. I think formally is her name. Okay.

I want to address her by her Christian name. Pleasure robot. She communicates telepathically. She takes the form of a naked lady. She's a very beautiful young naked lady and pretty much one of the three women that you will see on screen because they're all sharing roles. Okay. So that's it.

Instead of Igor, we've got Orgy. Oh, okay. Oh, Orgy, Orgy. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Again, these are thinkers. Yeah.

This is sophisticated material. It's meant to curl your pubes. Exactly. It's chanted and truly. Everyone's rockin' full bush here, by the way. We didn't specify because it seems like a very facile thing to observe about 70s porn, but we're all full bush. Yeah.

Yeah. We are of the era. Taxes are flowing. Bushes are growing. Let's go. That's beautiful. Thank you. I should.

Question mark. Excellent. You know what? Fuck that. Exclamation point. That's beautiful. Thank you. Thank you.

No prob. So Orgy is Dr. Fellatingstein's gross hench thing. He's always trying to get laid. He eats grossly and is gross. Aw. He's just gross. There is also a caged gorilla for some reason.

Okay. This is a guy in a party city gorilla suit. Okay. I think that the film kind of invites you to generate your own backstory for this guy. Yeah. Yeah. I get that. It makes you think.

It's a real thinker. So it's again, these are, these are head scratchers. Um, this is fuck David Lynch. Fuck Cronenberg. Fuck. Fuck them all. Fuck them. The fact that this is in the Canadian archive and not only that, but then it like gets a

special premiere at Vansity Theater. 2013 is just. Wretched. It's wild. Woo. Yes. Party City Gorilla Suit kind of sums up the production values here. Ugly, sad, stark lighting, poor cinematography, general horrendous production quality.

Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And this is, I remind you, an archival print. So we're not talking daggers. We're not talking daggers. This thing's not coming off the conveyor belt. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so sex skill inflating sign orchestrate a performance involving the pleasure robot and the gorilla in order to demonstrate to him. Like what horniness is about, I guess. Why is there a gorilla? We'll never know. I think you could probably come up with a good reason.

They're using the gorilla to, like as a, as an example, a prototype to like build Frank off of like, like carnal human animalistic urges. Maybe. He needs, he needs, he needs mono genes. Yeah. Or he needs, maybe he needs like, um, monkey spleen. Yeah. I don't know.

Monkey jizz. Yeah. I don't know. Could be monkey jizz. Maybe it's just all about the monkey jizz. Gorillas are monkeys. That's a fact. Please don't email us.

So the, the, the performance in question, by the way, it's robot. This is this robot. I might be a robot and this gorilla and they're dancing. He tries to rape her. She tries to rape him. She shoots him. Oh. He strangles her.

And they kind of die together in a pink spotlight. It's 1869. Kind of closes in on her face. Oh. And then they get up and bow. So it's like, we're all okay. Oh. We were all just actors.

Oh, okay. Okay. If you wanted to demo sex to somebody, if you wanted to educate your sex monster on sex, why this weird gorilla rape thing? Like I don't get it. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it's, again, this, these are thinkers.

Maybe this is just too high brow for me. This is like a hamlet illusion. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Perhaps. Yeah. That doesn't work because fucking of course it doesn't.

It's demented. Yes. So then we set Frank up on a sexy date in a chariot and this is driven by, by the way, this chariot on screen is driven by producer Clarence Neufeld, AKA Clarence Frog. He's doing his Hitchcock cameo here. Okay. Okay. Breaking the fourth wall a little bit there.

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Cool. His customary, you know, Clarence Frog appears in all his flicks. Yeah. Sexcula and Frank are in the back with this girl with this big Gary Spivey perm wig.

I don't remember which one of the other two she is, but she's for sure one of them. Yeah. And Sexcula and Frank are there, but of course Frank goes up to the front and gets more excited to do and clipped clop with the horsies and just flies into this, you know, this fit of childish glee while in the back Sexcula and this lady of get it on. Okay. Okay. It also likes the music stops a whole bunch so you think the scene is over, but no.

Ooh. Wow. That's, that's. It'll just start back up. Really rough editing. Stop again. Yeah. Wow.

That's a head scratcher again. The main issue I have with this movie is that the sex scenes just fucking go on forever. They're so long. It's a porno. They stop and start songs. No, I get that. I get that. And I get fair, but they're, but they're like, they're awkwardly long.

Like if the first five minutes of this clinical girl on girl action in the back of a chariot didn't get you off, what is the next seven, eight minutes of that exact same thing going to do? Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough with music cutting in and out. Yeah. Yeah.

I think they cut the music in and out so maybe you can hear like pants and gasps, but we've also got fucking Frank freaking out up front. Like he's a little kid at the horsies. That's Wiener murder. I'm sorry. Like I'm not trying to be crass. I still can't believe you saw this in theaters. This is crazy.

In theaters and now at home, I must be in like the top 0.1% that like sickens me. So this, this date doesn't work. This date on this chariot doesn't work. Frank is only interested in playing with the horses. So next we decide that what perhaps Frank needs is an injection of sex cells from Vera Allamance. So this is where the, I don't know, the medical accuracy of the film really shines. I think.

This is what it was all written for. This is what the work was about. Yeah. It's basically Grey's Anatomy. Okay. Amazing. Describe it. So, I mean, I think that you could probably find worse theories slash maybe this exact

same theory of sex cells on Instagram. Pretty easy. Yeah. Sidebar, by the way, I'm giving you this story like way more coherently than it's actually playing out. You're welcome. I'm really doing a great cleanup job here, by the intended. Thank you for your service, Taylor.

Thank you. Well done. Canada, thanks you. Really? Believe the term is thank you for your service. Order a Canada right here. Oh, geez. Oh, baby.

They don't want me. You could have gone to the Queen's funeral. Don't drag that. Just listen. She's at a hard couple weeks, okay? Fair enough. Okay. We'll leave the Queen out of it.

So now, okay, we need sex cells. Who is an expert on getting sex cells? It must be Countess Sexcula. You have noticed, maybe by the way, she hasn't really been a vampire as much as just a woman so far. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Also, every time you say sex cells, I keep hearing like S-E-L-L-S sex cells.

I'm like, what do you, oh, oh, yeah. So. Maybe I'm just, that's my, I'm just hammering in some like really dated and commonly misunderstood advertising advice. Yes. Sex cells. They're all by subliminal messaging in this long-winded story about a porn that you shouldn't watch.

Happy Halloween, everybody. Happy Halloween. Happy Smokey Moon. You brought me blackface. I brought you this. Too shit. We deserve each other. We do.

We do. Oh, God. So, Sexcula, this is now her chance, though, she's been benched this whole time, right? She's like, fuck it. I can spring my powers into action here. She gets together with this lager, she gets together with this drunk. My issue here, again, I'm going to come in and snip and snip as I do. My issue here is that it seems like this would be a really good opportunity for like some

erotic neck biting or at least some stylized way, suck them via the dick, some stylized way to extract these sex cells. It's not really clear to me when the transfer of sex, I'm putting more thought into this than David have heard it. It's not clear to me when the transfer of the sex cells occurs. And I think that you lose an opportunity for a distinctive moment there, right? That can be, that's your poster shot if you do that, right? That's true.

Tagline, she wants to suck more than your blood. That's good. Damn. I don't know, dude. I think you should write this back script. I think you, Secula, too. To the streets. I see why this guy, um, Darkus wrote this movie overnight because, or Cinema Canada or whatever

you want to call it. There's the bones of something kitschy and fun here. There is. There's a reason that we see this title, Secula, and you're like, oh, that sounds bad, but I want to know more. Right, yeah. Like, there's something here, um, in the area. There's something in the area, broadly.

The general, almost compass, you know, north, it's in somewhere in the north area, okay. And the way that most typically lost travelers are generally in the area. After this, we get to the church orgy. Oh, okay. Was not expecting that. This requires a bit of explaining. That's a surprise. Yep.

It was to me as well. In order to acquire sex cells, Secula visits the set of a porno. Meta. Before proliferate in 1869. Yeah. Yeah. Filmed porno in 1869. Okay, yeah.

There's no real attempt to, like, dress anybody up, like, goody, goody, so in. So, like, we're, it's that chick who, uh, was flicking Secula's titty on that chariot, had a big 70s perm gig, you know? Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. We're not trying to depict 18, like, quite frankly, at its core, the film would be offended that I've remembered that it's supposed to be 1869. That was the past.

Yeah. We've moved on. This is now. Yeah, yeah. This is a good footage, this porno scene, church orgy footage. Okay. Uh, this is very obviously filmed well after the fact, nor does any other, after you recognize appearing, this is very different from the rest of the film, it's an entirely new group

of people. Wow. Okay. Whereas everyone else, the gorilla, the lumberjack, everybody's doing double duty. Okay. I take away my defense of a frame story double duty, by the way, because this is redock. This is too much double duty. I guess.

Okay. I think it has lit. Quote, when the film originally stalled at 70 minutes despite generous padding, Neufeld called Holbrook, so that's our producer calling our director, to shoot an additional 20 minutes with a different cast, tenuously connected to the main story through clunky narration. This section is also jarringly explicit compared to the rest of the film, which veers towards softcore. Okay.

The offending scene goes like this. Okay. A pretty, ugly, empty chapel, a priest who looks like Dorothy's Bornex ex-stand from the Golden Girls, is marrying just the first guy you want, whipping his willy out in your porn, right? Yeah. Exactly. Is marrying a young couple while they're made of honor, and best man, look on, lasciviously.

Lassiviously. Okay. They're like licking their lips, and the priest is trying to go through the vows, but they can't keep their hands off each other, they're just like pawing each other's genitals through their clothes. Okay. Okay. The vibes in this scene are absolutely awful.

It feels, subjectively, it feels like everyone is about to shed their skin mask and assume their demon form. Ooh. Ooh. Yeah. Subjectively speaking, too. Subjectively speaking. Okay.

The bridesmaid whips out her hooters over the objections of the priest. The priest is like, do you like take this man to be your husband, and she pulls his dick out of her mouth, and just kind of like gently is slapping herself on the face with it. She's like, of course I do. Oh, wow. Bridesmaid and the best man fucking over here, get the groom and the bride fucking over here, and the groom comes, and we get like a real nice tight close-up of his, what's

the phrase you've been using, flaccid penis? Yes. I think, yeah. Nice tight close-up of that, falling spent and useless out of this bride's vagina on this giant screen, about halfway through this foul orgy that I invited all of my closest friends to. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

I began to feel pretty miserable, Josie. I'm not gonna lie. Yeah, and you're seated next to potentially the writer of this script, yeah. It's a tough one. I really was facing down the abyss because this, this, I timed this. This goes on for 20 minutes, the bulk of it, and then it comes back to you a couple times. I have this thing that I've only kind of learned to conquer quite recently, where I get really

anxious if I'm the person who has convened an event, that I'm like, even something like, oh, we're at this concert or whatever, I get very like, I wonder if the people that I brought are having a good time. Yes, yeah. Lately, I've been able to kind of let go of that and just be me and be like, okay, it's not like, I didn't make this movie, Taylor, you're fine. Yeah. I know that feeling well, though.

I really want you to just kind of like put yourself in that theater with me, where I've dragged you all about. As the new husband curls up on the ugly carpet of this hideous pace board church, our bride grabs her bouquet and impishly tosses it onto the prone nude bodies of her horrid maid of honor and disgusting best man. And then goes over to join them for another round. This goes on interminably until our groom gets his second wind and then comes over for a big four person pussy eating dick sucking extravaganza.

Okay. And yeah, I don't know why I want this to fit into the plot. It is a porn and porn are notorious for not having any plot. So, okay. No, it's a gratuitous, it's a really gratuitous and not all that appealingly presented. 20 minute hardcore orgy scene, not not mind you, 20 minute hardcore orgy by the standards of its era. So like no one's eating ass.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean. There's some pussy eating. People eating pussy. Okay. We see the fourth wall kind of breakdown here too, also by the way, in this 20 minute fucking

epic of a gross scene. Like we see the cameramen going in for their shots, so we've broken the fourth wall. It's completely at odds with the entire way the rest of the film has been presented. The priest eventually returns and chastises the bride, but she strips him down and gets him into the action too. Stans, bornec. I got to say, by the way, the bride giving it hell in this scene, like really truly the star of the show here in every conceivable sense.

Good for her. I won't lie, I kind of like the priest too, so not like in that way, but he amused me. So either way, at some point, the screen just goes black and Countess Sexcula collects her sample off-screen, so whatever she was up to when that was shot, it wasn't this. She was nowhere on site. Yeah. Yeah. Back to the, that was like a little, now it's like the second frame.

The interior is the weird church orgy, and then the sexcula, and then the current day. This is all frames, but no fucking pictures. It's terrible. They get the sex cells. They attempt to infuse them into Frank. Feladingstein asks Sexcula how she learned about sex, which Sexcula says, when I took a bath with my cousin, so that's the next angle of attack. Okay.

Feladingstein and Frank take a weird, stilted bath together. Frank is a bit hesitant at first until the doctor implores him, come on, Frank, don't be a sissy, come in. They sexlessly hug and wash one another until Frank finally gets up and then leaves the bath for no clear reason, and I guess it works, because the next time we see Frank and Feladingstein sitting on the edge of a bed and he says, so this is love. Oh. And he, yeah, that was it, that was, he just needed a nice bath, maybe, I don't know, footage

not found. Yeah. Who knows? He was in a hurry. Yeah. David. He had a picnic. He had a diary to get back to, yeah, exactly.

Frank kisses Feladingstein on the lips once, and in between footage of them rolling around in bed, we get footage of the bride banging the priest, the couple from the picnic are banging in the field, Orgy is banging the pleasure robot, and then he and the gorilla chase Sexcula around the lab. Feladingstein is banging except it seems for the doctor and her monster, this is a shocking lack of copulation in this footage based on the story which was Feladingstein wants to fuck this monster. True.

Yeah. So the reason for this, apparently, and this is G-Smiths, I don't know, but this was in a bunch of the articles that I saw. This was due to a lack of chemistry between the actors, Jamie Orlando, who played Feladingstein, was evidently repulsed by John Alexander, who played Frank, and wouldn't debase yourself with more than a kiss. Whoa, so they're like, well, we have other people that can have sex, so doesn't fit in the story, but we'll pop them in there, okay.

Yes, this is a patchwork effort. This is that story about the sock where if you patch it up enough times, is it even still the same sock anymore? Yeah, true. I think this is one of those things. I've never heard that one about the sock, but I get you, yeah. It's a Clyde Google sock story, you'll love it. Anyway, the scene abruptly cuts to Frank, who he now has a mustache and a cigarette.

He's on the set of the film, and he's carrying himself a bit differently. He's not playing the character, so manic and child. He says, it wasn't love, oh well, and he sings Feladingstein's name, and he whistles, walks off into the distance, and waves as he closes a door behind him. Yeah, like fourth wall cowboy ending, that's quite, quite a way to finish her off. David, I have hurry, baby. Yeah, out here in a hurry. That's his signature move, is he just wraps up the script with, well, that was all a waste

of time. Goodbye. Goodbye. And so forth. Yeah. Genius. He only knows how to write one thing, and that's hyper-intelligent German shepherds. Hey, it's a niche, you know?

We close with the logo for Frog Productions. It's like the MGM logo, except instead of a roaring lion, the inset depicts sex kilo moaning as she sucks a dick, curtain down on a horror comedy porn that is neither scary nor funny nor hot. And then when that happened in the theater, was there like clapping, muffled clapping? What was happening? A very deflated room, traumatized a little, maybe. I think that orgy scene really took the wind out of everyone's sails, honestly.

Damn. Because we had like early on, you'd get a clunker like this place, it'll curl your pubes, and you'd get like a knowing titter. After that fucking endless church orgy. Yeah. Silence of tombs. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like. The silence of tombs. This is not funny or sexy or kitschy or any of it, yeah. But I try to put myself in the, because like obviously, I mean, number one, I'm not the demo, really great, I'm gay, so I gotta put myself, I need to put myself in the mind of a heterosexual from the 70s when I watch this, and try to appraise like, is this hot? And my answer is no, it's confusing, like the parts of it, the parts of it that you could find hot, there's too much weird other shit going on to distract you, and, or they

are that church orgy, which is like reprehensible, easily the worst thing I've watched for this podcast, that scene. Yeah. Possibly the worst scene in a movie. Oh, wow, wow. It's, it's, it's, it's, I would give anything to have not done that particular thing. Twice. I feel bad about that one.

I dragged them to a long bad porn. What were their reactions? Like you step out of the movie theater, and then what were they saying? Well, without going into too much detail, it was pretty evident throughout the ensuing Q&A that followed the show that certain folks from the movie who had been coaxed into the night's festivities were very much regretting that decision and ruin the rediscovery of this film. Yeah.

So like that, that also contributed to the deflated vibe, and it was also a situation where like this post-show thing went on for a while, and the house lights were up, and it would have been bad to leave. It would have been. Oh. Yeah. It wouldn't have been good. Oh, you're all so polite, all you Canadians, just being like, we've got to sit through

this hour more talking about this horrible porn that I inadvertently watched. We had to hold space, baby. That's polite. Sometime after midnight, myself, Sam, Adam, and Olga left the theater and waited until we were in appropriate distance from the crime scene before I formally apologized for the evening and initiated a debrief. This was a real L on my record. No one came to my shit for a while after this one.

No, I bet you had to earn back some truuust. The second I tried to do some quirky picture, they shut that down. Nope. Nope. I don't care about the people's hobo. Whatever. Little list hobo. The people's hobo?

The littlest hobo. The genre of vampire porn would continue with hits like 1983's gay-racula, tagline, Count Jack is back, and this time he's sucking more than just next. Yay! It never gets old. See? At first you were like, that's dumb, and now you're like, hey, the vampire tagline. The vampire porn tagline.

The repetition gets me. I don't know. Upon Sexcula's resurfacing in 2013, porn historian Demetrios Otis struck a deal with Clarence Neufeld, FKA Clarence Frog, to distribute Sexcula, the infamous lost porn on DVD, with detailed liner notes giving additional context on the film. The 2013 Hazlet article has Neufeld as, quote, still a wealthy Vancouver resident and I couldn't find anything modern to contradict that. John Holbrook, our embattled second camera assistant turn director, enjoyed a 50-plus

year long career in behind-the-scenes roles in television and film before pivoting toward his love of songwriting. You can find out more about him at johnholbrook.ca. The rest of the cast of Sexcula, along with their fake names, disappeared into the ether like vampires at sunup. Yeah, baby. As for me, Taylor Basso, the rare non-fictional Taylor in this story, by the way. Yeah, yeah.

It was nine years between my first two showings of Sexcula, I'm hoping to at least double that before I pick it up a third time, so 18 years from now, which is, I guess, 2040. Okay. I'll put it in my phone. I'll put a little reminder just to check in with you. Please. Please. I have subjected yet another friend to it, for which I apologize.

This one, I mean, I wasn't there, so I cannot speak for Sam, Adam, Nor Olga, but this retelling, it feels a little bit better, I think. I like to think I put a bit of polish on this turd. Yeah. Yeah. I had a really hard time with an ending for this one, much like the film itself. Yeah. I had a really hard time with the ending.

What's that Obama quote? The sun will always come up. The sun. You said it. You said it after Trump was elected. No matter what happens, the sun will rise in the morning. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm happy with that. Maybe that's your title. Sure. I don't think it is. Thanks for tuning in. If you want more infamy, go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find your podcasts. We usually release a new episode every other Sunday, and you can also find us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy.

And if you liked the show, consider subscribing, leaving a review, or just tell a friend. Stay sweet. For this week's Mimphemous, I read an article in BBC News published October 28th, 2016. And the article was entitled, When Joni Mitchell wore a blackface for Halloween. I listened to a podcast called Code Switch on NPR, their episode from blackface to blackfishing. And that was published February 13th, 2019. I listened to the album Don Juan's Wreckless Daughter, published 1977, songs all written by Joni Mitchell.

And also the 2021 essay, 16 ways of looking at blackface, written by Hanif Abderbke, published in his book, A Little Devil in America, Notes and Praise of Black Performance. Oh, and I used the Wikipedia for Joni Mitchell. The sources that I used were Sexcula, Canada's first porno in Hazlet by Will Sloan, May 5th, 2013. I read Vampire Films of the 1970s from Dracula to Blackula and Everything in Between by Gary A. Smith, the Wikipedia article in The Golden Age of Porn, and I know you're holding your nose because it's a Wikipedia article, but it's a very comprehensive and well-sourced,

so I'll defend my choice here. I also listened to Moving Radio's Sexcula, an interview with Demetrius Otis on CJSR Radio, FM88, who's also where I pulled that little clip of the Sexcula trailer from. I read the Canadian Encyclopedia article on tax shelter films, which by the way, I caught a little error. I said quoting the Canadian Encyclopedia that the tax shelter era started in 1975. That's wrong, 1974. I watched Inside Deep Throat as well as Tax Shelter Terrors.

I read Jack Darkus, the Offscreen interview by Randolph Jordan, Offscreen, Vol. 18, Issues 11-12, December, 2014. I read Waldemar the Vampire, The Strange Case of Waldemar Wolfheart, and The Otto Bam Moral Dolls, and The Reprobate by David Flint, February 22nd, 2022. And of course, and much to my chagrin, I watched Sexcula again. If you want to watch Sexcula, you can get it on DVD via Incl's Pictures, an interstitial music was provided by Mitchell Collins, a song you're currently listening to. It's Tea Street by Brian Steele.

Stay safe, little vampires.