Exploitation Nation

Wet Wilderness (1976)
D. Lee Cooper & Robert Thomas
After Hours Cinema
1.85 (Enhanced for 16×9)

Once upon a time there was this weirdo crossbreeding of horror, gore and porno. Not the crass frat boy styled bullshit that you see nowadays where they know that most porn consumers are into gore and titties. But weirdo honest to god attempts to tell fucked up stories that crossed the line into horror territory. How weird it must of been to the all night masturbators to being wacking off in their seats to suddenly be faced with scenes of a woman with a machete in her crotch or a dude hacked to death with a hatchet. But this movie offered both in an attempt, though maybe wrongheaded, to be an actual movie. Porn had tried detective stories with the Johnny Wadd movies, many comedies and some dramas and even The Devil In Miss Jones hit on supernatural themes, so why not try a gore porn (technically this is not the first one to do it either. The first is a real oddity called Hardgore (1975) that is far more gory and fucked up than this one).

The story, what little of it there is, finds a single mom, her son and daughter and their hippie chick friend camping in the woods. When the daughter and hippie chick wander off for some lesbian hyjinx (man the hippie girls hairy armpits are a fright!) a muscle bound, machete weilding maniac in a yellow ski mask appears. He makes them suck on his sex muscle, then makes them make it with each other before checking the hippie for oil in the fudge tunnel. The daughter runs off during this destraction and the maniac stabs the little hippie chick in the hairy pubis with the machete complete with nasty splash of blood on her tummy.

Before long he catches up with the family and is forcing them to play incestuous reindeer games with brother and sister while he violates the Mom who keeps looking offscreen for directions. Numerous times. Somehow in the midst of the (not very) confusion Sis makes a break for it again. She seems to make a habit of leaving people in a lurch. Its her lot in life I suppose. So Mom and Son are forced to make the beast with two backs by the Masked Maniac with the word LOVE stenciled across his forhead in marker.  Sis finds a Black Man tied to a tree in the forest to which he replies “Cut me down! That maniac tied me up here three days ago!” Then his ropes accidentally fall off on their own. Before she can untie them both. Naturally the maniac, with Mom in tow, catches them and makes the black fella and Sis make some friction too. The cutaways to Mom looking shocked and sad are shot at night, even though the rest of the scene is during the daytime. Eventually Mom gets her some sexual chocolate too before it all ends badly for the poor brother who waited three days for this. I won’t spoil the surprise (not really) ending.

This nasty little number has built up a decent cult following thanks to really shitty bootlegs that have traveled the underground circuit for years. When I say shitty, I mean like fifth generation, full of static shitty. But the  movie’s goofball charm still played through, Part of that charm is the weirdo one take appeal of the action. If anyone has seen the skits on Mad TV making fun of the Dolemite movies where it looks like everything is one take, even if actors blow their ques, the camera zooms in wrong, etc. This is exactly like that. The action is clearly staged but it feels like the actors are trying it for the first time and are not quite sure what they are doing. The repetitive nature of the sex scenes grinds the movie after while so the brief running time is a blessing. But the weirdest attribute to the film is the completely stolen soundtrack. Wet Wilderness was scored completely with music from Psycho and Jaws, and some other Hollywood favorites. This was not an unusual practice for pornos as the films usually flew under the radar of the studios and were thought of as kinda disposable. It is certain no one thought that thirty years on these films would be rediscovered on a home viewing format and collected as cult films.

But here comes the pain. After Hours DVD of Wet Wilderness has some serious issues. So much that it has already brewed a small shitstorm in the cult film collecting community about changing films for release on DVD. So lets get the obvious out of the way first. That wacky stolen score that makes WetWilderness so fun? Its gone. But lets be realistic for a second, it was never gonna make it onto a legitimatly released DVD in the first place. Universal would never license their music from two of their most beloved Box Office hits to some skanky and horribly offensive porno roughie because fans demand it stay intact. It is a trade off. Do you want the film on DVD but with new music, or do you not want the movie at all (well the old bootlegs I guess). But with that comes another caveat. The movie is more than just rescored. It is entirely redubbed too. Since they were obviously working from a film print of the film (and a damn nice one too I might add) there is no way to seperate the dialogue tracks from the music track, so it appears to put in new music they had to record new voices too. This will undoubtedly piss off a LOT of purists out there. I can understand why it would. But once again it comes back to the question of wanting it on DVD or not at all. I will say the new music fits the movie really well, actually better than the original stolen music. The original music was goofy, making it funny and reminding you of those other movies. This new music-concrete score is much more menacing and vibrant. The movie is still goofy, but it gives it a bit more edge. Now the new voice dubbing is not as successful. The original had some hillbilly sounding redneck who could have just jumped ship from Deliverance. Now we get a voice that seems deep and somewhat processed and frankly a little too sofisticated for this movie.To everyone’s credit the kept the dialogue word for word intact.

Now for the other issue with this disc, and it is an ongoing issue with many discs from After Hours Cinema’s classic Adult movies line. The aspect ratio. Most of these old porn films were shot on 16mm (this one certainly was) which is an aspect ratio of 1:33 or full frame as regular folks know it. Meaning that it should take up a regular square TV screen. These releases are LTBX but weren’t shot in a ratio that called for that. So that means to achieve the matting (black bars at top and bottom) that image is covered up. Which is something us who have argued FOR ltbxing have argued about for years, but I digress… So what you get is tops of heads are cut off, chins are cut off in close ups etc. In Wet Wilderness that nasty shot of the Hippie Girl with the machete in her groin and blood on her crotch? Most of it is underneith the bottom matting so you can’t see it. I compared it to my old bootleg and there is quite a bit of picture missing. Also the shot were the maniac first appears the girls making out are almost completely below the picture and the top of his head is above the picture. So why do this then if picture is being lost? Because they are reformatting the picture so it will fill the entire screen fo those who have the new fangled Widescreen TV’s which displace the images at approximately 1:78 or 16×9 in the video world. So on a widescreen TV you souldn’t see the black bars, but you are aslo loosing major picture so it will fit on your whole TV. Just like before ltbxing back in the day on square TV’s was cropping off the sides to make the whole picture fit. Its the same thing, just now the top and bottom are being lost, and not the sides. Now this isn’t the case on all movies. Just ones that are 1:33 and cropped/matted to this new ratio.

After Hours has done the right thing on a few of their discs and given the option of a full screen and 16×9 edition of a film in the same package. I’m sure that is expensive and cost prohibitive to do. I’m thankful they did in on Hideout in the Sun and Sexual Freedom In Denmark both outstanding packages. But they need to consider that these films are primarily being bought by cult film collectors (I really cannot see some urban masterbator buying Wet Wilderness to whack off too) and these guys are fanatical about these kinds of details. On various message boards there is already people crying foul of this release because of this issue. After Hours really needs to rethink their stance on matting these films. Original Aspect Ratio is important to the collectors.

Otherwise the picture looks great. The print they used has some speckling and dirt here and there, with the occassional scratch. But compared to what we’ve put up with until now this is a revelation. It isn’t perfect, but in my opinion it looks damn good. And compared to my bootleg theres a couple of shots extra here. Nothing of consequence, just some transitional footage of the forest, river and such, but for completists its there.

Also in the package is another porno sickie called Come Deadly which I have yet to watch, but will soon. Also included is very good liner notes and a fold out poster of the outstanding cover art.

2008-11-06
01:42:12
Andy Copp

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