Vintage Hixploitation-Lite…but that’s more than okay, considering your big-screen summer movie options.
By Paul Mavis
So let me get this straight: you and I are supposed to get excited this summer moviegoing season with the prospect of already senseless secret agent Tom Cruise getting tossed around senseless for the 7th time, or plastic Margot Robbie acting like a dim-witted tramp as per usual, or re-experiencing the A-bomb being invented (what? No “Howling Mad” Murdoch?), or listening to decrepit Indiana Jones break his impossibly brittle bones for please God the last time? Those are the “saviors” of the 2023 movie season? Jesus palomino I’m glad I grew up with cheap little summer ozoners like Sixpack Annie.
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Does M-G-M still have the M-G-M Limited Edition Collection, their own manufactured-on-demand line of discs? A few years ago, they released Sixpack Annie, the 1975 American International Pictures southern-fried drive-in programmer starring stacked Lindsay Bloom, along with a host of embarrassed costars including Ray Danton, Sid Melton, Joe Higgins, Doodles Weaver, Louisa Moritz, Richard Kennedy, and Stubby Kaye. Now anyone taking a good look at that sweet one-sheet poster could be forgiven for expecting some nasty backwoods barnyard fun here. However, Sixpack Annie plays it sweet and safe, and comes up with an agreeable Li’l Abner Meets an R-rated Love, American Style TV episode. With nudity.
Good God in the morning does “Sixpack” Annie Bodine (Lindsay Bloom) like tight-fittin’ clothes, horny hands all a’grabbin’ and a’clutchin’ at her, and of course a six-pack of Blatz® on ice, ya lightweight Yankee pussies! Ass-back in the woods and sand patches of rural Florida, ‘taint much to do but git yoreself all likkered up and tear-ass ’round in yore truck…lessen you might cotton to some midnite skinnydippin’ with a good-lookin’ boy, like Bobby Jo (Bruce Boxleitner). Workin’ in yore Aunt Tess’ (Danna Hansen) fly-specked diner shore ain’t no fun, ‘specially when you rekkin she’s about finished with it, anyhow, seein’ as how the bank’s jerk-off Mr. Piker (Donald Elson) ain’t gonna hold over the $5600-and-change note anymor’n. What’s a busty, sexy, stupid whore to do?
Whaaaaal…she could pull double harness with slobby goof-ball Sheriff Waters (Joe Higgins), who’s achin’ to dig his fat sausage fingers into Annie’s ample pulchritude. Or she could pull up stakes along with her sex-crazed friend, Mary Lou (Jana Bellan) and swing down to Miami, where Annie’s sister, even more stacked Flora (Louisa Moritz) is a’workin’ as a hooker. She’s shore to have the money.
Going to the drive-in—as God intended man to see a movie—back in the early-to-mid ’70s was an entirely different experience than going today, for a myriad of depressing reasons, chief among them (besides the fact that Americans are no fun anymore) that form fitted function. Many times the low-budget product you were watching had been specifically designed for that particular kind of low-budget exhibition. In other words: tacky movies for a tacky ozoner. You don’t eat pheasant under glass at a greasy spoon’s counter—you get a hot dog.
If a hard-to-see projected image, god-awful food, tinny, scratchy sound, screaming kids running up and down the ramps, and the hurried, stomach-churning groans of couples humping not more than two feet away from you in that rusted-out Toronado parked next to your pumpkin yellow with optional simulated wood side panels 9-passenger Pontiac Bonneville Estate Wagon with the 455hp engine—the adult sounds that made your old man yell, “Roll ’em up!” as he peeled out to another parking spot—if all of that made it less than optimal to catch the mise-en-scene nuances of say, the already-indecipherable cinematography of The Godfather Part II on the Jesse James Drive-In screen, well…then some brightly-lit tits-n-ass shots dropped in among a fill-in-the-blank horror/blaxploitation/sex comedy/biker flick/redneck actioner would keep you in your vinyl-clad bucket seats, that’s for sure.
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Anything that reminds me of those long-gone days at the drive-in usually gets the nod from me, and Sixpack Annie is no different. Now…do I wish the sex and dirty jokes were as hot and heavy as Lindsay Bloom’s décolletage? Tell you what: check out that poster art. Read the ad lines. Now…what do you want Sixpack Annie to be about? I know what I want it to be: sexy, drunken Sixpack Annie playing grab-ass with every two-bit horny yokel that crosses her path, while running through the cypress and scrub, her clothes magically coming off like an FDS commercial gone berserk, before she hooks her legs over her truck’s gun rack in anticipation of Conventioneer Week. I’m exaggerating…but not by a whole lot.
That poster and that concept demand exploitative fun. Fun that exploits. Not something essentially sweet. Or light. And if it’s going to be funny…it better be humor that’s raw and raucous, not sniggeringly puerile, like the censored blooper reel from The Dean Martin Show Meets Hee Haw wrap party. I want Sixpack Annie to be a horny, nasty, ribald good time, goddammit!
Too bad it ain’t. If Sixpack Annie has a major flaw (among its several hundred minor ones), it’s just that it’s too…nice to be exploitive, too clean to be truly raunchy, and too tame to be drive-in approved naughty. Sassy Sue or Country Hooker it ain’t (biggest mistake: why the hell didn’t it stay in the backwoods—that’s where a backwoods comedy belongs, isn’t it?). If the word “f*ck” wasn’t thrown out several times during the course of Sixpack Annie, along with some fleeting nudity, it would be hard-pressed to merit a “PG-13” today, let alone the “R” it sported then and now.
Now, don’t get all ornery with me. I ain’t gittin’ uppity about efforts like these. I’m not judging it by yore high, elevated “movie classic” standards, like Smokey and the Bandit (just the first one), anything where Joe Don Baker has sideburns, or where Christopher Mitchum was substituted for an unavailable Joe Don Baker, or anything directed by Charles B. Pierce. I’m takin’ Sixpack Annie fore what it is. And it is…okay for 1975, and better than that for 2023.
Most of the cast helps. Joe Higgins, whom ’70s TV viewers will remember from what seemed like hundreds of generic commercials featuring his comically rednecked sheriff, is actually quite funny when he takes an expertly-executed pratfall. And Richard Kennedy, of Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS infamy (among many other drive-in classics), is amusing as a leather-lunged good ‘ol boy getting drunk at Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez’s bar. One-time up-and-comer-now-seedy-fellow-exploitation-director Ray Danton approximates George Hamilton‘s surface-of-the-sun tan while embarrassing himself with his five-minute cameo.
Genial Bruce Boxleitner shows his ass at the beginning of the movie before he inexplicably disappears for good (my wife, tarrying a bit too long on that freeze frame before offering a simple, “8 ½,” saw no further need to continue watching). Sid Melton gets farted on (Jesus what a low point for this good comedian). Granted, it’s dealt by Louisa Moritz (Verna LaVerne!), whose “just past it-but-still-stunning” figure is barely glimpsed in a see-through nightie (another cheat for the viewers). Doodles Weaver glumly channels Archie Campbell with some faux-dirty wheezes that would have made a 1975 5th-grader yawn. Stubby Kaye comes over okay (at least he looks game). Billy Barty shows up (he’d do anything for a paycheck…). And American Graffiti‘s Jana Bellan promises a lot with that rack…only to do nothing with it (why is she even in the picture?).
As for Lindsay Bloom…the shame of it is you can just tell she’d be okay with a better director (apparently one-shot Graydon F. David, under an alias) and a better script (mostly from David Kidd, of The Swinging Cheerleaders fame). Aside from her acting chops, the most basic requirement of exploitation moviemaking is met: her body is phenomenal (seriously, when are those tie-up halter shirts coming back? Because I love them). Had Sixpack Annie been anything other than instantly disposable, built-like-a-brick-sh*thouse Lindsay Bloom quite possibly could have made a memorable starring debut.
As for Bloom’s line readings, she has an agreeably raucous growl and a petulant, even mean little frown that I found both funny and sexy…whenever the director reminded her to use it. She’s also good when she’s ad-libbing her outraged/angered reactions to whatever is going on around her. However, you can also tell she needed some help with the scripted one-liners (to be fair: probably nobody could have helped with most of them). Help she obviously didn’t get. Pity, that: she looks great, and she had potential…but it was wasted in this good-natured but ultimately dopey drive-in moonshine.
Read more of Paul’s film reviews here. Read Paul’s TV reviews at our sister website, Drunk TV.
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