Kitsch Will Keep Us Together

When my wife Kim and I met, through online personals ads 2 1/2 years ago, both of us mentioned a love of kitsch as interests in our profiles.

There is no kitsch shortage in our household. Reproductions of old signs, postcards of Airstreams, and lava lamps are among the kitschy things we have.

My main contribution is my b-movie posters. They were a gift from a long-gone girlfriend in the mid-eighties. Her parents made their living working flea markets. She saw the posters at a flea market and bought them for me. I don't think she spent more than $50 for all four of them-- I spent far more having them framed. I looked up the Blood Feast poster on ebay recently and found that it can go for between $400 and $950.

I mentioned the other day, my efforts to save my Blood Feast poster after part of it got wet when my basement flooded.


My favorite parts of the poster are the admonition not to bring impressionable adolescents to see the movie-- who else but adolescents were going to see it?-- and the little blurb "Introducing Connie Mason-- You Read About Her In Playboy." Yeah, you were reading, huh?

I have three other posters that were unharmed because they were on the walls of our living room, rather than in the basement.



Mill of the Stone Women, or Il Mulino Del Donne Di Pietra as it was called originally, is a big hunk of Italian cheese. A writer journeys to a town to write about the mysterious Professor Val, and takes lodging in the local mill-- a mill that the locals call "The Mill of the Stone Women." Hmmmm... wonder if anything nefarious is afoot there?

The dubbing is incredibly bad-- worthy of a Japanese monster movie-- and of course there was controversy. Toward the end the end of the movie, a women's blouse slips down, exposing a tiny glimpse of nipple. Hey, it was 1960.

Mill of the Stone Women came out on DVD a couple of years ago, by the way. Blood Feast is on DVD as well.



Women of the Prehistoric Planet came out on DVD a year or so ago, but only as part of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 collection (Collection #9, for those of you keeping score). Most of you probably know the premise of MST3000-- that a hapless astronaut and his robot companions are trapped on a satellite, where evil scientists force them to watch the worst movies known to mankind. I think the fact that this movie was featured on MST3000 says it all.



The Bellboy and the Playgirls looks like it might be the worst of the bunch-- it looks like it was a bad Jerry Lewis movie but without Jerry Lewis. It has never come out on DVD, which is odd, because it was the first movie written and directed by a guy who went on to a fair amount of fame-- Francis Ford Coppola. This predated his schlocko thriller Dementia 13 (which is on DVD) by a year.

How much do you want to bet that the first thing he did with all the money he made on The Godfather was to hire a team to go out and buy and burn every existing print of The Bellboy and the Playgirls?