“MORE ‘FORBIDDEN FRUIT’ EXPLOITATION RELICS”

By Raymond Benson

Here we go again! Another entry in the “Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture” series, this time it’s Volume 7. Presented by Kino Lorber in association with Something Weird Video, we have for your shocking pleasure the double-bill of Test Tube Babies (1948) and Guilty Parents (1934), and what a hoot these pictures are.

There have always been what have been termed in the motion picture industry “exploitation films,” even back in the silent days. The late 1930s and much of the 1940s, however, saw a deluge of cheap, not-even-“B” pictures made, usually independently of Hollywood and marketed in guerilla fashion as “educational” adult fare. You know the type. Reefer Madness. Child Bride. Mom and Dad.

Kino Lorber and Something Weird have been doing a bang-up job on releasing a series of some of the best (i.e., infamous) of these jaw-dropping pieces of celluloid. One wonders how the movies ever got distributed. They’re so bad that they’re hilariously entertaining, and they especially elicit eye-rolling because they often portend to be “instructive” in nature.

Test Tube Babies was produced by the notorious George Weiss, who was responsible for many exploitation pictures of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, including Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda. Featuring a slate of no-name actors in an amateurishly put-together film (it feels like a student project), the movie ironically has a sound message behind all the sensationalism. Artificial insemination was just becoming a “thing” in the late 1940s, and the movie attempts to convince an audience that, if the male partner of a marital union is sterile, then it’s perfectly acceptable for the wife to undergo artificial insemination by a sperm donor. Cathy and George (Dorothy Duke and William Thomason) are an attractive newlywed couple who want to start a family. When, after a year, Cathy is unable to become pregnant, a doctor (played by Weiss film stalwart Timothy Farrell, usually always in the role of a physician) tests George and delivers the bad news. He then proceeds to sell the couple on raising a “test tube baby.” The exploitation aspect of the movie is the lead-up to all this, as the couple experiments with swinger parties among their friends. Thus, much of the movie consists of tawdry softcore skin flashes, frank talk, and even a girl-fight on the floor of a living room. It’s all designed to titillate. Naturally, Test Tube Babies would never have passed the Production Code’s guidelines, and it was thus released independently for adults only.

Guilty Parents is surprisingly the better film, albeit much more primitive in production values. Jean Lacy plays innocent Helen Mason, whose mother (Isabel La Mal) is frighteningly puritanical and protective of her daughter, refusing to teach Helen any of the rudiments of the facts of life. Of course, Helen meets a young man who corrupts her, and the couple commits a robbery. The boyfriend dies from a gunshot wound, so Helen goes on the run, changes her name, and falls deeper into a hole of depravity and prostitution. She eventually kills the pimp who is exploiting her, and she goes to trial. Her defense attorney makes the argument that it’s all her mother’s fault—that she’s the guilty one—for not educating Helen in the ways of the world. Oh, and there’s a surprise ending. Also known as Hitch Hike to Hell, the pre-Code Guilty Parents features a silhouetted nude sequence and a lot of scantily-clad ladies, gangster-type men, and material that would never pass the Hays Office once the Code kicked in later in 1934. Sure, it’s a terrible movie, really, but it’s entertaining in its time capsule, exploitative way, and Jean Lacy is actually quite winning in the lead role.

The high definition restorations look as well as they can, considering the sources—certainly better than the cheap public domain DVDs and VHS copies of these films from yesteryear. Supplements include an audio commentary on Test Tube Babies by Eric Schaefer, author of Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films; a 1951 “marital education” short, Sex and Romance; an alternate title sequence for Guilty Parents (with the Hitch Hike to Hell title); and a collection of other exploitation film trailers.

For cinephiles interested in this wacky genre of so-bad-it’s-good Forbidden Fruit, the double bill of Test Tube Babies and Guilty Parents will, oddly, scandalize you and make you laugh at the same time.

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