« THOSE WACKY KIDS HANGING AROUND THE PENTAGON | Main | LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I GIVE YOU MUIRE DOUGHERTY »
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
The Memories That H.O.T.S. Spurred
Though we now know the 1970s and 1980s to be one of the darkest of modern times in terms of crime, urban blight, and working poverty, those of us who grew up during these times naturally view them as innocent, perhaps bittersweet.
Is this why I found the movie H.O.T.S. (Gerald Seth Sindell, 1979) so fascinating? Even titty movies, as illicit and hard to come by as they seemed to the intrepid teen of 1979, now elicit no more shock or titillation than does a sallow and unsexy Montgomery Ward underwear catalogue from the same period. Back then, sex was less high-stakes. It could give you weeping sores, but it couldn't kill you, and no one expected physical perfection.
H.O.T.S., like so many films positioning themselves as sex comedies appealing to young adults, took place on an all-American college campus. The hard-to-follow, ever-shifting plot involved a group of female students who, upon being rejected by the established sororities, formed their own sorority called H.O.T.S. What H.O.T.S. was an anagram for was changing and unimportant; what was important was the face-value meaning: the "girls" were HOT! If you consider hard-faced 34 year old strippers playing the roles of peachy, romping co-eds hot. But what was truly fascinating to me about H.O.T.S. was that it evoked my youth, often misspent in the parental leisure activity of going to off-color drive-in movies.
Like many a low-income youth, I was raised by a single mother on AFDC. To ease the tedium of spending summer days in the Oakland welfare office, my mother would take us to the drive-in. I was often allowed to invite a friend or two, green-snotted progeny of similar provenance. We had a white van, now understood as the preferred vehicle of the child molester and serial killer, but then merely evoking a "She's gonna love me in my Chevy van" freewheeling laissez-faire. My mother's tactic was to get the kids to hide under mildewed blankets in the back of the van while she drove up and paid the cashier only the entry fees for she and her girlfriend, visibly ensconced in the front seats. By the time my friend and I were released into the broken drive-in playground, oozing tar and dog doody underfoot, the management was none the wiser. My friends eagerly awaited these invitations to the drive-in, as criminal as they were, because my mother had no sense of what films were appropriate for children, or didn't care; hence, we were gifted with viewing the likes of Raw Meat and Mother Jugs and Speed. During these interludes I saw other films set in the H.O.T.S. milieu of an alternative campus sorority; I could swear that I saw one, as I fought the childish urge, late at night, to sleep, in which a sorority "girl" coyly asks the football-playing boyfriend of the rival "good girl" sorority to check her virginity by penetrating her. But, alas, this was not H.O.T.S., and though similar, H.O.T.S. did not solve the mystery of whether this alternative seventies softcore movie actually existed.
Are H.O.T.S. and its kind any worse than American Pie: Band Camp or Grandma's Boy? It can be refreshing to watch women's bodies unobscured by boob implants or hardened into body armor by constant workouts, jiggling in the cellulitic flesh that God gave them. One can almost hear the strident tones of the Andrea Dworkins and Susan Brownmillers of the world denouncing the H.O.T.S. "girls" need to horn up the male student body. But one can only imagine what the seventies separatists would have remarked about the teen sex comedies of the new millennium. Would topless football seem less moral than the bedding of a bald-pussied Playbot as a male status maneuver? Or the barely concealed implication that you are only a valid human being if you are wealthy and/or famous? Undoubtedly not. And though my adult understanding now suggests that seventies drive-in staples may have been untoward viewing for children, maybe I should just feel good that I saw them then, as confusingly creepy and renegade as they were to me then. Now they just seem like a bit of harmless, sleazy fun.
Enjoy a trailer of H.O.T.S. at this link and see what I mean:
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/21235/H-O-T-S-/trailers
![H.O.T.S.[2].jpg](http://www.cintrawilson.com/dregs/H.O.T.S.%5B2%5D.jpg)
Did you enjoy this post? Use the wonders of social bookmarking to share it with friends and the Internet hive-mind!
del.icio.us
Digg it
reddit
Google
StumbleUpon- Hide Comments for The Memories That H.O.T.S. Spurred (5)
COMMENTS
Well done. Lugubrious tears of nostalgia are, even now, lugubriating their way down my cheeks. Well, practically.
Yes, titties (especially) seem like entirely different entities, when one ganders at them through the lens of steamy drive-in theater days. Boobs/Racks/Ta-Tas/Jugs/ Luvin' Pillows have undergone a complete transmogrification.
There was a curious innocence to those celluloid morsels of cheezy sexuality (the films, not the tits)--one that didn't seem so d-i-r-t-y and plasticized. Who can forget the overtly sexual but delightfully dimwitted (and funny!) ministrations that drive-in staples like 'Porky's' performed upon both the pubescent and adult minds?
Yes, the adults had no problem enjoying such fare along with their spawn, perhaps because films like Porky's and H.O.T.S. were not out to try too hard. In their own way, they were as comfortable and as pleasant as freshly mowed summer lawns, back in the day. Weird to say it, but true, I think.
When tits & jiggles became "pornironic" and self-consciously crass (not to mention deformed by implants), the whole aura was lost. When tits became trivial, a little bit of Armageddon arrived.
Our town ("town" being a term used loosely) had a drive-in theater up until 1984. It was an adjunct of the nearby A&W restaurant. You could get your root-beer float and watch bouncing-boobies in absolute, Grade-A American tackiness...feeling like a good, clean person when you were done.
Those days (and films) are gone. Who needs to pay to see tits onscreen anymore, when your 64 year-old Merry Widow nextdoor neighbor--grizzled and livin' la vida loca--has used her dead husband's insurance money to buy (and then flaunt) a bodacious set of double-D hooters? Well, I'm talking about a California happenstance, but still. The mystery that drive-in boob-fests cultivated is now foreign, when granny is lugging her purchased monster-bosom down to the mailbox forty feet away from your own house.
It ain't the same, I tell ya.
And Muire, you speak the Truth. Kudos and welcome.
Posted by: Juan "I'd Know That Penis Anywhere" de la Sahara at April 23, 2008 12:01 PM
Thank you for your sleazy tender memories. Real bodies and what they stimulate may now be part of our collective past. Perhaps as a human race we have to accept that we're all moving toward Cyborgism, with crowns in our mouths and fake breasts on our chests as the first steps.
Posted by: Muire Dougherty at April 24, 2008 1:22 PM
(sigh). Yes, it seems we may have to accept the migration toward Cyborgism. Evidence of this trajectory seems undeniable.
In 300 years, the wealthiest of us will all end up with shriveled ET-bodies... totally encased in some sort of ultra-kevlar(ish) "armor," pushing buttons within our individual body-machines, if not utterly connected to the One Great Hard Drive that programs and predetermines our every action.
Yeah, we'll be action figures. With bodacious, shiny bronze boobies and razor-sharp digi-penises.
The only token of human culture that will survive this long process of evolution?
The stripper pole. Practitioners will be able to spin and/or gyrate at speeds approaching hyperspace.
There'll likely be a Kardashian or two around, I suppose. Cyborg Royalty.
It'll be like the old Charleton Heston (mayherestinpeace) flick, "The Omega Man," crossed with the Travolta crime, "Battlefield Earth," crossed with "Showgirls."
Meh. Who am I kidding. Humanitywon't be around in 3oo years.
Onward, just the same.
Posted by: Juan "Onward, Christian Cyborgs!" de la Sahara at April 25, 2008 10:45 AM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7TPf1qW3LI
dance and screaming Lord Sutch for real chicks in bikinis.
One of The first films I ever saw was "Mother Juggs and Speed" at Rockridge Center. My thighs were born at Fentons, and I ran from scary pimps at MB center when it still had a Woolworth's---we are sisters.
Madonna the nanny exploiting hag bitch & the physical opposite in every way of Raquel Welch) killed off the hourglass figure (she NEVER had one) and ushered in six pack abs and no hips as a career move and now white women who don't look like bricklaying boys are just 'too big.'
BUT HAVE NO FEAR REAL ETERNAL BOOB FEST LIVES ON IN ETERNAL GRADE A AUREOLES DISHED OUT BY BRAVE WOMEN EVERY WHERE ON YOU TUBE.
Posted by: Super Piedmont Cut Up at April 26, 2008 5:14 PM
The hip to waist ratio is what has been destroyed as it all moves towards androgyny.
What virtually all women had until the madonna/Gisele Bundchen 32-30-32 tube torso effect was more or less a delineation between the hips and the waist-even women with naturally boyish bodies.
Yet most of these celebs who are tube shaped are claiming hourglass stats. jesica alba is a reapeat offender,
http://men.style.com/slideshows/mens/standalone/gq/feature/060107/jessica_alba/00021f.jpg
James Cameron had her shoe horn her normal size body into a size zero for dark angel and she has no hip to waist ratio yet lies like this fly around:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/25/nwiggle125.xml
I mean what the fuck? When the scrawniest are pretending to be normally voluptuous where the hell does that leave real women who DO have their form intact.
I'm going directly to Cambridge to protest, I kid you not!
Posted by: Super Amanda at April 26, 2008 5:26 PM
CONTRIBUTE TO THE CULTURAL DOGFIGHT