THE HARRY NOVAK COLLECTION VOLUME TWO
DVD. Revelation.

The second of Revelation’s Harry Novak triple bills is another mixed bag from his back catalogue, this time offering three sexploitation films from the end of the 1960s and start of the 1970s. All Novak’s films are essential viewing, but this set is let down by the inclusion of one of his duller efforts and an unfortunate technical issue with The Toy Box.

The Notorious Cleopatra is another of Novak’s historical, Shakespearean efforts. Unlike The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet, featured in the last volume, this is a more straight-faced effort – no immediately dated humour to be found here. Instead, we have a bloated Caesar meeting up with Cleopatra (Sonora), with assorted softcore antics following. It’s not one of the better Novak productions – Peter Perry’s direction is efficiently basic, but the film is a rather flat affair, notable only for the fact that it has a black female lead – something unusual for sexploiters of the time.

Rather more interesting is Wilbur and the Baby Factory, if only as a bit of a time capsule. It’s a rather convoluted tale, with Sixties radical Wilbur (Tom Shea) being recruited by a shadowy organisation to father two thousand babies, all as part of a eugenics scheme set up by W.W. (Stuart Lancaster), a bitter millionaire with “a penis the size of a peanut”. The film is a curious hybrid – it doesn’t really have enough nudity to work as sexploitation, but there’s probably too much flesh for general audiences; an the film itself can’t seem to decide if it is a lightweight romp or a darker, more unsettling study of power and corruption. In the end, the film is most interesting now as a slice of counter-culture weirdness, but this alone makes it worth a look.

However, the weirdness of Wilbur and the Baby Factory is nothing compared to The Toy Box, which may be one of the most deliriously odd films ever made, and some sort of testament to the power of psychedelic drugs. A bizarre mix of soft porn, horror and a very bad trip, the film sees a groups of stoned swingers locked in an old mansion to perform oddball sex and violence vignettes in exchange for a financial reward. Their benefactor is an elderly man known as ‘Uncle’, who may or may not be dead, and it soon seems that the play-acting is becoming very real. The final revelation at the end of the film is so completely insane that you’ll start to wonder if someone hasn’t slipped some hallucinogens into your drink.

With a mostly-naked and seemingly stoned cast including Marsha Jordan, Maria Arnold and Uschi Digard, over-dubbed, ridiculous dialogue that adds to the weirdness (like Doris Wishman, director Ron Garcia tries to avoid actually filming the person speaking, allowing for post-production addition of dialogue to silent-filmed scenes), disturbing, sexually violent scenarios (which include necrophilia and gloopily bloody murder) and a frankly incomprehensible narrative, The Toy Box is one of the most twistedly odd films ever made. Unfortunately, the transfer used for this release is terrible, with shadow areas bleeding across the screen in a fuzzy green where there should be solid black. Of course, this does add to the trippy feel of the movie, but that’s hardly compensation. Having not seen Something Weird’s US release, I can’t compare the two, but this is unfortunately the worst looking DVD transfer I’ve seen in a long time.

Also on The Toy Box disc is a long Novak featurette that is interesting, if rather padded (much of it is simply full trailers for his various films – excellent in themselves, but I would’ve preferred more Novak interview content), helping round this set up.

DAVID FLINT

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