Sexploitation Double Feature: Female Animal/Teenage Mother

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3.5/5The Film

FEMALE ANIMAL:

Produced by IIP, Female Animal is an decent, albeit, slow moving sex film that's foreshadowed by the interesting history behind it.

Angelique is a European peasant girl on an island somewhere in the Mediterranean. She makes her living as a prostitute, selling herself to the local men. One day, a wealthy man with a shipping business named Count Medici pays her a visit and becomes enraptured with her beauty. He gives her a respectable job as a servant at his mansion, but then begins to shower her with gifts and money and hopes to be able to buy her love.

When a love triangle erupts between Angelique, Count Medici, his son Alain and his mistress named Francesca all three of them lay claim to her and try to win her over once and for all. The heated tensions in the household and the bizarre situation that she's found herself in causes her to question what she really wants out of her life and soon it will be time to make a decision that will affect the rest of her life.

While some of the concepts are interesting, Female Animal was just a bit too long. If it had been trimmed of maybe 15 minutes or so, it would have been a pretty solid sleaze film, but that extra running time cause it to slow down and bring the film down a notch or two. The cast are great though, and Angelique is more than enough fun to look at. Likewise, the locations and interiors used in the film add a certain amount of charm to it as well.

TEENAGE MOTHER:

Jerry Gross' directorial debut follows the exploits of a curvy high school student named Arlene (played by a real life Arlene named Arlene Sue Farber) who hangs out with her squeaky clean boyfriend, Tony (Howard Le May) while wondering what to do about the salacious advances of a local greaser type named Duke (Frederick Ricco) who drives around town swigging J&B out of the bottle and who has some of the finest dance moves ever committed to celluloid. When the school year starts, a new sex education teacher named Erika Peterson (Julie Ange) causes some controversy in the town by teaching the kids about anatomy and how it works.

While Arlene fakes a pregnancy to trap Tony into staying with her, Duke's drug dealing boss fears that Ms. Peterson's teachings will dig into his profitable pornography picture business and so he gets his greaser thug and a strange janitor to set her up. Once Arlene tells everyone she's been knocked up, however, the parents start to hold Ms. Peterson liable for a lot more than they realistically ever should have even considered. Thank goodness there's a nice guy coach (Fred Willard) around to help!

You want trash? You've got it. Tough talking, bad dancing greaseballs? Nutty janitors? Sexy Swedish sex education teachers? Fred Willard? Puritanical hypocritical parents? Random J&B bottles? Yeah, it's all here and more - a lot more. For the uninitiated, Teenage Mother is pretty infamous for a tacked on ending in which the audience witnesses a very real and very uncut film showing a live birth. It's all here, kids, snips and all. Preaching to its audience from a fairly lofty perch, the picture purports to deliver a social message about why kids should abstain or at the very least play it safe, but it's been made so cheaply and marketed with such a sleazy, hyper-sexualized marketing campaign (be sure to watch the trailer which completely misrepresents the film in every way possible) that all of that gets thrown aside. Why? Because it's obvious that all of this build up and moralizing was simply an excuse to bust out some really graphic footage of a baby popping its way out of some gooey female genitalia.

You can almost hear Gross saying 'gotcha' when it's all said and done but at least it's a fun ride.

2.5/5Video

Female Animal is presented in non-anamorphic 2.35.1 and is unfortunately not enhanced for 16x9 television sets or flagged for progressive scan playback. Colors are a bit faded, and there is minor print damage present throughout, but there aren't really any compression or edge enhancement problems. It's an acceptable transfer overall, but don't expect to be wowed by it. It also appears to be the same transfer used for the EI release of the film from back in 2002. Teenage Mother is presented in 1.33.1 fullfame and honestly it doesn't look bad in this aspect ratio at all, though the sides are maybe a bit tight in some spots.

Neither film has been extensively restored and there's very obviously some room left for improvement (it would have been nice to see Female Animal in anamorphic widescreen instead of just letterboxed) but they're watchable enough and the recent double feature offering of Teenage Mother backed with Teenage Graffiti presents the same film in a nicer anamorphic transfer.

2.5/5Audio

3/5Extras

Rounding out the extras are two different trailers for Female Animal, the excellent trailer for Teenage Mother (which really sleazes things up and completely misrepresents the film), and trailers for a few other Retro-Seduction Cinema DVD releases - The Deep Throat Comedy Collection, The Collegiates Collection, and their Punk Rock/Pleasure Palace release. Menus and chapter stops are also included.

No liner notes this time around but inside the keepcase is an insert containing poster art reproductions for both films on the disc.

3/5Overall

Female Animal and Teenage Mother both hold up well as enjoyably trashy drive-in pictures. It's hard to take either one the least bit seriously but they're entertaining enough. Retro-Seduction Cinema's transfers aren't so hot but carrying over Sherman's commentary from their previous release was a nice touch.

Want more info? Hit the Retro-Seduction Cinema website by clicking here!

Film Rating		DVD Rating
Director:	Jerry Gross/Jerry Gross	Film:
Writer:	Octavio Bellini/Jerry Gross	Video:
Released:	1970	Audio:
Cast:	Arlene Farber, Robert D’Arcy, Jeanne Avery/Arlene Farber, Fred Willard, Julie Ange	Extras:
		Overall: