Bat Pussy has proudly earned two distinguishing titles in the annals of schlock history. It’s believed to be both the first feature-length Porn Parody film and the absolute worst porno ever made. The first claim is the most difficult to verify since no one knows exactly when Bat Pussy was made or who was involved in its production. The film was discovered in a Memphis porno theater store room in the 1990s. The only indications of its time of production are a 1970 issue of Screw Magazine featured heavily in its opening scenes and the fact that it was a contemporary spoof of the Adam West-starring Batman television show, which ended in the late 60s. Thus, the exact whos, whens, wheres, hows, and whys of Bat Pussy are likely never to be solved, other than in vague estimations like “sometime in the early 70s” and “somewhere in the American South.” What’s much easier to verify is that it is, in fact, a spectacular failure of a porno film and very likely the worst of its kind to ever achieve theatrical projection (and decades-delayed home video distribution through AGFA & Something Weird).

A bitter married couple have fumbling, non-starter sex after finding foreplay inspiration in an issue of Screw. They are aggressively Normal people working mostly unscripted, obviously just having a goof. As the couple feebly attempts to mutually perform oral sex, the man struggles to maintain an erection while the woman frets over the tussle’s damage to her beehive up-do. Unsure what to say or do as the sex is obviously going nowhere, they riff in a faux-agro banter, like a shittily improvised spoof of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where every other word is “motherfucker.” They’re incredibly Southern and likely just as drunk. The bedroom set where they’re fooling around echoes as if it were a cavernous warehouse instead of a private home. 35 minutes into the 50-minute runtime, the titular superhero Bat Pussy arrives to rescue the audience from these hostile, lazy sex acts. She’s immediately stripped of her superhero costume and joins the couple for an equally uninspired threeway, which continues until the production abruptly runs out of celluloid.

Obviously, the main attraction of this pioneering Porn Parody is Bat Pussy herself. The second she’s announced as Dora Dildo, aka The Mighty Bat Pussy, it registers as a huge relief, as her far-off Pussy Cave (later revealed to be an outhouse) is our only locational reprieve from the frustrated sex in the married couple’s “bedroom.” The hope is that Bat Pussy will break up the proceedings with some much-needed levity, but the reality is she takes her sweet time getting there. Apparently, her crime-fighting motivation is an urge to stop all citizens of Gotham from making “fucking movies” unless she is involved herself. Superpowered vaginal twitches alert her that the married couple is planning to make a porno without her involvement, so she dresses in her knockoff Batman costume (an awkward ceremony we watch in real-time), and speeds off to the couple’s “bedroom” via an exercise bouncy ball while nondescript surf rock drones in the background. It’s a hilariously vicious prank on the audience, then, that she’s immediately stripped of her costume once she arrives at the couple’s bed, joining the impossibly shitty sex instead of putting a stop to it.

Dora Dildo is too limited of a player here to totally save the movie from its aggressively unerotic tedium, so the remainder of its entertainment value lies in its Ed Woodian incompetence. The most alarming, memorable moments are when the three actors are unsure about what to do next in bed, and fearfully look to the crew behind the camera for direction (which is sometimes audibly shouted back to them mid-scene). Those frequent fourth wall breaks feel like a violation of an unspoken artist-audience agreement and add an even more sinister tone to the endlessly awkward sex that eats up most of the runtime. My favorite moment of the entire picture results from the mean-drunk husband repeatedly referring to Dora as “Batwoman” in the midst of their threeway, until his costars finally can’t take it anymore and correct him, “It’s Bat Pussy!”. Then they all laugh. It’s moments like that and the bouncy-ball Pussymobile that make me want to hail this film as classic underground schlock, but the eternal belligerent improv that fills the gaps between them are too torturous to fully forgive. Bat Pussy may very well be the worst porno film I’ve ever seen, bless its drunken Southern heart.

-Brandon Ledet