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Director: Ted Bonnitt
Producer: Ted Bonnitt, Eddie Muller, & Keith Robinson
Screenwriter: Steve Martin
Stars: David F. Friedman, Dan Sonney, Frank Henenlotter, Mike Vraney, Carol Friedman, Margaret Sonney.
MPAA Rating: NR
Year of Release: 2001
Running Time : 80 minutes |
A film review by
Sara Scherion
Mau Mau Sex Sex
is an affectionate profile piece on two great independent filmmakers
and renowned purveyors of smut. David Friedman and Dan Sonney were
originals. While Hollywood was embroiled in the studio system, they
were drawing crowds to films that explicitly showed everything
Hollywood films couldn't. Famous for producing such great sexploitation
fare as The Defilers and A Smell of Honey and a Swig of Brine,
Sonney and Friedman were majors in the seedy off-Hollywood Industry. In
the days when sex on film was illegal they made the most wholesome
trash available and in the process also created marketing mechanisms
and exhibition opportunities to support them. But their days of naïve
(though not uncomplicated) ballyhoo came to end when the ban on sex in
film was lifted, and they were "run out" of the business by hardcore:
something with which they didn't care to compete. Director Ted Bonnitt
finds the filmmakers in their ripe old age. These men who in many ways
were the "American Dream" are depicted in their sunset years: they're
retired and crotchety, but quick as the whips each and every one of
their films included.
Though Mau Mau Sex Sex
begins with an introduction addressing the work of the men, the film
emphasizes the balance between these men as businessmen and family men.
Though the film doesn't judge or even mention any classic censorship
battles, there are the suggestions of judgment made by the wives and
daughters of the producers, and that inclusion reminds us that these
purveyors of trash were hardly unaware of the mores of the world around
them. They simply did as businessmen do: they capitalized.
As many film documentaries do, Mau Mau Sex Sex features an historian, but not just any historian, Frank Henenlotter. The man responsible for such fan/gore as Frankenhooker and Basket Case,
Henenlotter has spent his last few, reclusive years, adoringly
cataloguing exploitation films. And while his knowledge of the area is
vast, one can't help noticing layers of oddity as this
exploitation/fangore filmmaker respectfully outlines the most absurd of
exploitation films. Hardly a neutral voice, Henenlotter's glee is
apparent as he even confounds himself with the plot lines of these
films: films that used plot as a ruse to show topless women. In support
of this point, Mau Mau Sex Sex is successfully littered with
clips of Sonney/Friedman Productions each magnificent moment echoing
the cliché "you have to see it..."
Finally,
the importance of the archivist is asserted at the end of the film,
when David and Dan are driven (by the Producer Eddie Muller) to their
old offices on Cordova in Los Angeles. Mike Vraney,
archivist/distributor walks with Dan and Dave through this archive,
where he points out that "these men are still in the game".
Interestingly enough, Mau Mau Sex Sex came out in the process
of an exploitation film zeitgeist. Films that hadn't been discussed in
the shadows following their exhibition were being dug up and studied
scholastically. All these timely elements come into cosmic alignment,
at the end of the film you when Dan and Dave, crotchety as they are,
walk off into the sunset and it's clear this film offers them a kind of
loving immortality. Mau Mau Sex Sex is admiring Dan and Dave and doing its part to make sure that if their smut is forgotten, at least the men behind it won't be.
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