NOT Available on DVD: CHATTERBOX

‘NOT available on DVD’ column since it began nine months ago and I realize that 19 of the previous 24 films I’ve written about are from the decade of the 1970’s. It’s not that there aren’t worthy forgotten films of the 50’s, 60’s or 80’s that have yet to see life in digital format, it’s just that, being born in 1961, it was the ‘70’s when I came of age and I’ve always had a fixation with the many films I saw at the drive-in in the last half of that decade. Besides, only from the politically incorrect ‘70’s could have come a disco musical comedy about a woman with a talking vagina.

CHATTERBOX, made in 1977, is no porn film (though bare breasts abound), but a silly R-Rated comedy based on a ridiculous but titillating situation that today doesn’t seem at all sleazy or dirty but really funny and kind of innocent. It’s basically a one-joke premise, but it’s a unique premise and CHATTERBOX manages to sustain itself for a breezy 73 minutes without the joke wearing too thin.

Filmed under the title LIPS (yeah I’m glad they changed the title too), CHATTERBOX tells the story of innocent hairdresser Penny Pittman (Candice Rialson) who’s in bed with her boyfriend one night when she’s surprised to hear a voice from her loins critiquing his sexual performance. She visits her gynecologist, Dr. Pearl (Larry Gelman) in the hopes that he can help get her muff to shut up, but Dr. Pearl has a better idea. He becomes her agent and takes Penny and her showtune-belting cervix, cleverly named Virginia, on the road to celebrity. Penny and Virginia appear as guests on Professor Irwin Corey’s TV show where Virginia sings a funky disco tune called ‘Wang Dang Doodle’ which rockets her to stardom. Penny has sex with a baseball team after Virginia sings the national anthem and they co-star in a musical porno film surrounded by dancing men dressed up as singing chickens!

A send-up of porno films (such as DEEP THROAT), CHATTERBOX is light-years away from being a great movie, but for a low-budget 70’s time-waster, it’s a lot of fun. The humor is raunchy but goodhearted and the double entendres fly fast and furious even though not many of the jokes really work (not surprising considering how big Rip Taylor’s role is) but the film really comes to life during the bizarre musical numbers. CHATTERBOX often has an awkward and cut-rate feeling to it (the boom mike makes several cameos), but with panache, copious nudity, and a dollop of charm, the brash satire manages to pull it off. Despite its premise this is probably the most wholesome, inoffensive movie ever set against the backdrop of vocal genitalia (and would make a great double feature with the 1988 talking penis movie ME AND HIM).

Director Tom DeSimone had mostly worked in the adult film industry in the years leading up to CHATTERBOX under the moniker Lancer Brooks. He would go onto to direct the cult films HELL NIGHT (1981 with Linda Blair) and REFORM SCHOOL GIRLS (1984 with Wendy O. Williams). His direction of CHATTERBOX is mostly lackluster and rushed but surprisingly lively during the film’s montages and musical numbers (the catchy songs, including ‘Cock-a-Doodle-Doo’, were penned by Neil Sedaka!).

Though the voice of Virginia is curiously uncredited, DeSimone assembled a fun ‘70’s cast. Irwin Corey was a groundbreaking improv comedian who liked to bill himself as ‘The World’s Foremost Authority’, and Rip Taylor was a loud TV funnyman known for his effeminate high-voiced shouting, toothy grin and handlebar mustache. These two old-school comics give CHATTERBOX a burlesque-style, ‘Laugh-In’ vibe that dates the film nostalgically. But the real success of CHATTERBOX was casting the right actress in the lead who was a good enough sport to work with material where her vagina is the focal point of the story. A blonde stunner with a sexy smile and come-hither blue eyes, Candice Rialson was a B-movie starlet who lit up drive-in movie screens with appearances in exploitation films such as PETS, SUMMER SCHOOL TEACHERS, MAMA’S DIRTY GIRLS, and CANDY STRIPE NURSES, (all in1974). She also had a few parts in mainstream movies, most notably as a student who has ‘I Love You’ written on her eyelids as she flirts with her professor, played by Clint Eastwood, in THE EIGER SANCTION (a gag stolen outright for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK). In 1975 Rialson appeared in Mel Brooks SILENT MOVIE and had a small part in LOGAN’S RUN. Rialson was sexy as a natural, girl-next-door, Ann-Margaret sort, and never came off as sleazy despite the roles she took. Her biggest film was Joe Dante’s 1977 satire HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD in which she starred as starlet Candy Hope and that film is proof that she deserved much more of a career than she ever received. An excellent actress and natural comedienne, Rialson was never shy about taking off her clothes and became so notorious for her B-movie work that mainstream directors were hesitant to hire her, other than to play small roles like the “second blonde girl” in her last film, John Huston’s 1979 thriller WINTER KILLS (Quentin Tarantino was such an admirer of Rialson’s work that he based Melanie Ralston, the character played by Bridget Fonda in JACKIE BROWN, on her). By the end of the decade, Rialson had vanished from the big screen and many assumed she had become another tragic Hollywood casualty, but ‘Femme Fatales’ magazine tracked her down in 1993 and it was revealed that Candice had simply left show biz to become a wife and mother, though sadly she died of cancer in 2006 at age 54 (though Irwin Corey’s still kicking at 96!). The glory that was Candice Rialson deserves to be rediscovered but most of her movies are MIA on DVD. CANDY STRIPE NURSES and HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD were released on New Concorde’s ‘Roger Corman Classics’ label, but are now out-of-print. I highly recommend Code Red’s new DVD of Rialson’s first film PETS, an odd mix of murder, sex and bondage that’s perhaps her showcase film.

CHATTERBOX was released on VHS on the Vestron Video label in the mid-80’s as well as on the short-lived CED Video Disc format and I hope that it, and more Candice Rialson, will someday find its way to DVD.