Gums (1976)

March 5, 2026March 5, 2026 / swampflix / Leave a comment

Steven Spielberg’s sharksploitation progenitor Jaws celebrated a 50-year anniversary last year, and the occasion was marked by a wide theatrical re-release, followed by an extensive, interactive exhibition at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles. I assume, then, that its most noteworthy porno parody, 1976’s Gums, will be receiving the same 50-year fanfare later this summer. If one is not already in the works, it’s not too late to slap a theatrical re-release together, thanks to the fine folks at the American Genre Film Archive already having a cleaned-up scan of the curio on-hand, ready to roll. Gums is included as a B-side bonus feature on AGFA’s Blu-ray release for Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers, the only other film of note from director Robert J. Kaplan. In a way, Gums does recall that earlier, mightier title by hiring porno queen Terri Hall to swim through an underwater garden of sea cucumbers (i.e., a coral reef composed of gigantic cocks), but it’s overall too restrained and too straight to match the delirious heights of Kaplan’s hippie-NYC masterwork. It’s a straight-up, few-frills Jaws parody with a one-joke premise: What if, instead of a killer shark, a beach town was terrorized by a killer mermaid who bites off men’s penises mid-fellatio. In 1976, there was enough pot smoke in the air to land that kind of novelty in movie theaters across the country, allowing Gums to contribute to Jaws’s legacy in a way that deserves some official acknowledgement, however small.

In the cold-open kill, a young man skinny-dips fully nude instead of a young woman — the camera zooming in on his flaccid penis before it’s castrated via mermaid. Once detached, it then floats to shore as a disembodied dildo. That dildo is the closest thing you’ll see to an onscreen erection in this film, since Gums opted to stick to a softcore rating in order to swim its way into as many theaters is possible, treated more as a campy midnight-movie novelty than a Porno Chic marital aid. Like the shark in Jaws, Terri Hall’s cock-chomping mermaid is mostly hidden from the audience in the first half of the (mercifully short) runtime, leaving the audience to hang out with her horned-up macho victims for far too long. Spending so much downtime with such beloved Jaws-spoofing characters as Deputy Dick, Dr. Smegma, and Captain Clitoris, I was reminded of Roger Ebert’s “First Law of Funny Names,” which declares that “funny names, in general, are a sign of desperation at the screenplay level.” Gums has no clue what to do with itself when not filming Terri Hall swimming between killer blowjobs underwater, as it cannot fill its runtime with hardcore sex without censoring the action with comic book panels of phrases like “Pork!” and “Slurp!” So, it stages a collection of go-nowhere bits, throwing anything it can think of at the audience to reach feature length: stock footage of real-life beavers, a buzzard puppet with a human hard-on, home movies of mating pet dogs, a Mel Brooks-style Nazi spoof, and whatever else got a chuckle from the crew while passing joints around the set. It’s all obnoxious nonsense, but it’s at least constantly surprising obnoxious nonsense. When the non-mermaid main characters are abruptly replaced by puppets in the final scene, there’s no possible reaction other than “Sure, yeah, whatever.”

The only dialogue exchange in Gums that got a genuine laugh out of me, was when Dr. Smegma (the Hooper stand-in) explains to Deputy Dick (the Brody stand-in) that true mermaids don’t have actual fish tails, that their tails are “psychological.” It’s a hilariously labored, unnecessary excuse for the lack of craft in Terri Hall’s costuming, which essentially amounts to some dramatic drag-queen eye makeup and a coral tiara. It’s also one of many instances in which the script seems to be working out its core gimmick in real-time, sometimes even workshopping what the eventual title will be with alternate options like Deep Jaws (in reference to Deep Throat) and Thar She Blows! (which is repeated at top volume ad nauseum). For all of its failed humor and self-censored sensuality, though, Gums does achieve some semblance of arts-and-crafts beauty in its underwater photography, whenever it drops all of the schtick onshore to instead focus on Hall hunting down her next victim. Maybe there’s not enough substance there for it to earn its own year-long Academy Museum spotlight, but maybe it could be included in the ongoing Jaws celebration as a backroom exhibit, hidden behind a red curtain like the porno rooms at the video rental stores of old. All they’d need to add is a few video arcades showing loops of Terri Hall swimming around pantsless in her underwater sea-cucumber garden to demonstrate the kind of effect Jaws had on the wider culture (beyond inventing the summer blockbuster as we know it). Gums doesn’t deserve much, but it at least deserves that.

-Brandon Ledet

Bat Pussy (197?)

September 2, 2020September 2, 2020 / swampflix / 9 Comments

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