The Other: A Beginner’s Guide to Exploitation – Electronic Lover/The Spy Who Came

As part of a new feature here at SE&L, we will be looking at the classic exploitation films of the ’40s – ’70s. Many film fans don’t recognize the importance of the genre, and often miss the connection between the post-modern movements like French New Wave and Italian Neo-Realism and the nudist/roughie/softcore efforts of the era. Without the work of directors like Herschell Gordon Lewis, Joe Sarno and Doris Wishman, along with producers such as David F. Friedman and Harry Novak, many of the subjects that set the benchmark for cinema’s startling transformation in the Me Decade would have been impossible to broach. Sure, there are a few dull, derivative drive-in labors to be waded through, movies that barely deserve to stand alongside the mangled masterworks by the format’s addled artists. But they too represent an important element in the overall development of the medium. So grab your trusty raincoat, pull up a chair, and discover what the grindhouse was really all about as we introduce The Beginner’s Guide to Exploitation.

Electronic Lover (1966)

Buried somewhere deep in the heart of Manhattan, a sadistic voyeur named “The Master” sends his sibling slave (who he refers to as “Brother”) out to spy on the ladies of New York. Hoping to catch them in flagrante delicto – in other words, naked and naughty as the day is long – Brother stumbles around the city with what looks like a vacuum cleaner attachment in his hands. Turns out, it’s a high tech camera, allowing the perv to pry into the privacy of the numerous nasty girls Master has his erotica eye on. As he aims his plastic probe into the windows of his prey, our technological Peeping Tom sits back in his burlap-covered bungalow and monitors the collection of lady lumps from a screen on his room-sized computer. When Brother mucks up and messes with the image, Master shouts out long, laborious monologues, peppering his rants with various demands for more, MORE, MORE!!! When the women get wise and confront him, Master goes all moist, proving that his dysfunction is more emotional than erectile. Indeed, he is an Electronic Lover, only potent when transistors and a ‘motherboard’ are involved.

In the annals of exploitation, it is hard to find a film as outrageously bizarre as Electronic Lover. Granted, it’s not as surreal as The Godmonster of Indian Flats, and can barely hold a craven candle to Confessions of a Psycho Cat or foreign freak-outs like My Baby is Black or When Men Carried Clubs and Women Played Ding Dong, but in contrast to the rest of the raincoat canon, this creepy peeper exercise is mighty malfeasant. Besides, any movie which features a man making out with himself (thanks to a well placed wall mirror) and relying on some simulated self-service to get his repugnant rocks off is already illustrating its grand depraved delusions. The sickeningly incestual conceit between Master and Brother – he of the wealthy erotic eccentricity, the other a mute doormat who prowls around town looking for lewdness – is accentuated by the random bits of babe burlesque, each of our well-known sleaze screen queens (including Uta Erickson and Linda Boyce) exposing their epidermis for the sake of some slick exhibitionist’s wet daydream. Since most of the movie follows along the thinnest clothesline of a plot – Master wants Brother to find the realistic replicas of his nightmarish fantasy fodder – director Jesse Berger does little more than offer up various vignettes of simulated slap and tickle.

Indeed, the best parts of Electronic Lover aren’t the groovy grindhouse gals going gonzo in their bare ass brazenness. No, the moments that will have your cinematic synapses in an uproar arrive whenever Master has one of his certified nutty nervous breakdowns. Desperate to find the vice in his icky internal visions, he yells at Brother in long, hilarious harangues that sound like outtakes from a pervert’s primal scream sessions. Face scrunched up like it’s smashed against a window, eyes wide open (the better to catch the profuse sweat flowing off the loathsome lothario’s face) and mouth mimicking a grimace, Master (played by nobody Mike Atkinson) could give Rev. Jim Jones a run for his Messianic madman money. So convinced he owns the world that he feels free to spy on it, Master makes the crucial mistake that most deviants do – he lets his lust dement and destroy his life. That’s why we buy the odd living arrangements, the frequent hallucinations, and the ending that twists everything onto itself until the narrative shouts “Uncle” and finally falls apart. One of those heralded “has to be seen to be believed” efforts, Electronic Lover is a brazen bit of binary ballyhoo.

The Spy Who Came (1969)

Harry Harris is one of New York’s finest – and slimiest – vice cops. When he’s not wowing his superiors with his evidence tampering skills, he’s “pumping” his suspects for potential information. One day, after several long hours of framing hookers, Harry heads off to a local bar to drown his sorrows. There he meets a very odd young lady, so robotic in her expressions that automatons are jealous of her rigidity. Turns out she’s a plant, a way to get Harry into the hands of a drug addled Arab sheik who wants to blackmail most of the UN. Seems they have pictures of Harry humping the citizenry, and will show them to the lawman’s future bride if he doesn’t cooperate. With the fuzz on his side, the Middle Eastern madman has that much more extortion emphasis on his possible targets. Naturally, Harry agrees, and soon discovers the unholy horrors of the operation’s white slave situation. Luckily, his boss finds out about the set-up and sends in a French detective from Interpol to help break up this cabal. The rest of the movie is made up of shots of women being whipped, stripped and clipped, all in hopes of being the bait for The Spy Who Came.

Unlike Electronic Lover, a film that constantly wants to remind you of the entire Master/Brother dynamic, The Spy Who Came sets up its storyline, and then quickly abandons it for more garish girlie gawking. Once we’ve established that Harry is a letch, that the Arab is insane, and that the broken down castle that acts as a hideout is really nothing more than Olga’s House of Shame minus Audrey Campbell, we settle in to enjoy what director Ron Wertheim has to offer. Sadly, it’s more of the scripted strip show routine, women baring it all for the sake of some salacious skin flicking. It starts when our entranced tart shows up at Harry’s favorite dive bar and begins seducing him. Her vacant stare must have some sort of aphrodisiacal powers, since our hero hops into bed with her PDQ. It’s only later than we learn that this is Harry’s miscreant MO. A funny scene has our villainous Arab presenting the police officer with photos of his dalliances, and actual film of his faux fornicating. No wonder he’s so willing to help out the criminal cause. Harry’s seed has been spread from one end of the Big Apple to the other.

Thankfully, the film fails to follow up on the whole UN/diplomatic immunity/international scandal plotting and instead turns into your typical episodic erotica. One of the highlights here is a sequence where a ‘sex slave in training’ is educated on how to pleasure a man. Practicing various positions – doggy, reverse cowgirl – to an instructional recording seems strange enough. Now add in her partner, a particularly bizarre looking male mannequin (complete with absent eyes and dislocated arms) and you’ve got some of the most hilarious sensual slapstick ever caught on celluloid. Our unknown actress deserves some kind of amorous acknowledgment for making feigned frigging with a wooden doll seem totally plausible. As for the rest of the narrative, it’s a deranged downward spiral into more nudity, more nonsensical plot turns, and a final action sequence that features our Arab antagonist naked, the worst armed guards in the history of criminality, and a bunch of toga wearing girls chasing a topless temptress as she tries to escape. Wow! Though the title is a tad too clever to actually link directly to the story, The Spy Who Came is still a sensational head scratcher of a film. Its purpose is as cloudy as its morals.

As they do every so often, Something Weird Video (via their distributor, Image Entertainment) unleashes these unknown exploitation gems on an already jaded fan base. Including lots of interesting supplements (trailers, archival short subjects, educational films and groovy grindhouse galleries) and the best tech specs available (in this case, 1.33:1 monochrome images and Dolby Digital Mono mixes) the leading company in taboo-busting temptations really delivers this time. Even the jaw dropping late ’60s look at science (a surreal slice of Americana called “The Philosophy of Computing”) adds to the overall success of this strange presentation. While there are far more definitive examples of what made the skin and sin genre famous, Electronic Lover/ The Spy Who Came are two terrific bawdy brain busters. Each example of freakish flesh peddling is as crazy as it is carnal – for better and for worse.