The Presidential Peepers

THE PRESIDENTIAL PEEPERS is currently marketed on DVD by After Hours Cinema with the usual shameless hype of "lost film found". I was especially taken aback by its touting star Tina Russell, replete with an endless biographical essay about her, when in fact this is one of her least interesting films, showing her to zero advantage. If they knew anything at all, they would have issued WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO MISS September? or THE DEBAUCHERS, two of her best efforts.

Even in briefer roles, say as the XXX deliverer in Kemal Horulu's THE SEXUALIST for example, Russell shines and is often the best thing in a picture. Not so in PEEPERS, a desultory piece of junk now merely trading on her name.

The so-called historian who wrote the misleading notes (a shill is a shill is a shill) for this DVD reissue alludes to the film's structure resembling a framing device for a collection of the stag loops of the day. Gee whiz, even an idiot will recognize that it is made of ACTUAL loops, not mere resemblance. High in the billing Helen Madigan never shows up in the film proper, only having sex in the silent loop scenes, while both stars Russell and Marc Stevens appear in both the new and blatantly old footage.

Purpose of the exercise is to take off on the Watergate scandal, making fun of President Nixon, while taking lame potshots at Henry Kissinger and J. Edgar Hoover in the bargain. It's zero budget boasts sets of a card table and sheets hanging on a wall to represent offices, notably that of Hoover, here dressed as a buffoonish Keystone Cop. Maybe Clint Eastwood & Leo DiCaprio with some of that Warner Bros. money will do a better job.

Nixon lookalike Richard M. Dixon improvises the dialog fast & furiously, but he simply isn't funny. In fact he works up enough flop sweat that I wish they'd included a flashback of him muffing the Nixon/Kennedy debates on TV.

This farrago devolves after some poor gags into scenes of Nixon's assistants Haldebog (Russell), the Chinese Ambassador (a dazed looking Mei Ling, who can't even respond properly to Dixon's questions and wisecracks) and Spiro (black actor playing Agnew, to which Dixon comments "he doesn't look Greek") running around D.C. pointing towards something, CUE the stag loop. They're supposedly ferreting out pornography as part of the president's secret mission to eliminate its scourge on our nation.

For me, several of these loops turn out to be the non-movie's highlights. They are chosen in the main to spotlight some of the most humongous breasted XXX starlets of the day, all natural looking and it is a turn-on (at slow speed on your DVD player) amidst the unfunny nonsense that passes for new footage. Running gag is Dixon ogling the décolletage of his secretary Rosemary (lovely Gretchen Mann). Later on there's a porn sequence involving the various assistants in which the blonde supposedly representing Rosemary doesn't look like Mann -she escaped having to stoop to doing porn here. Not so lucky were Russell and Stevens, in their umpteenth teaming together, and ending up in a sloppy orgy with that good old dumb stand-by, whipped cream sprayed on everybody.

Ugly George shows up teamed with sound recordist Stevens as his cameraman for undercover sleuthing and horror of horrors we see George naked. His claim to fame of inventing the "Girls Gone Wild" format is trumpeted on this DVD as a big deal -it's like giving credit to the guy who invented herpes.

Strictly aimed at fans of stag films (like me), but as a feature film it's a no-show.