Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and Russ Meyer Month II.

We got things started on a rough path this month with Common Law Cabin. This is widely known as a lesser Russ Meyer entry which was likely a pretty rough snapback from his mid-60s black and white masterpieces like Mudhoney, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and Motorpsycho. That’s not even discussing the major splash he made with the controversial Lorna. That last one we need to get to sooner than later.

Despite 1967 being a bit of a drop for Meyer in terms of critical appeal (Good Morning and… Goodbye! also didn’t win over many critics), he was still the king of mainstream adult entertainment. 1968 would prove to be a huge success for him as this is the year that Vixen was unleashed on the world and became known for being an actual date night type of films for young, and rather randy, couples to go see together.

But there was another movie released that same year with Vixen, and that’s going to be our focus for this week’s review – Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers!

Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! was released five months ahead of Vixen. This stars Anne Chapman in her only appearance in a Russ Meyer film. Now, Chapman wasn’t exactly not Meyer material. She was, after all, busty and a brunette. I think that was mostly Meyer’s type. She did appear in a few other films with titles that make me want to check out some more of her, uh, body of work. It might be good to track them down sometime.

The film has some interesting contemporary reviews around it. The Los Angeles Times seemed to dislike the film, but, in a weird way, they also kind of complimented Meyer. The part that didn’t seem too complimentary was that they felt this movie didn’t really do much in terms of showing any significant change or growth in Meyer’s films. It was like they were commenting on Meyer basically recycling most of the common things you’d expect to see in a movie. The aforementioned busty brunette, a showgirl or a woman who is a sex worker, an affair, and so on and so on. You get it. However, the review also said that Meyer himself was almost standing in his own way by having such a clean and nearly naive mind. That conflicts directly with the “dirty” movies he made. While Hollywood and European movies were growing up and becoming a little more violent or darker in content, Meyer’s films almost seem too positive alongside them.

That’s a weird way to critique a movie in a negative way by saying the director is overly nice and has a positive view of the world.

In pure Russ Meyer form, the movie starts fast with a rockin’ soundtrack and action straight away. We have cars racing back and forth in the desert while a topless girl in an old school race car driver’s helmet dances between the cars zooming by in front and behind her. The movie then cuts to a topless joint where some guys are watching another topless girl dance on stage. Holy shit, Russ, less than 45 seconds into the movie we’ve got four naked titties. Let’s calm down here and save some for the rest of the movie, yeah?

Things go from bright and fun and dancing to sinister and dark as two guys pull up outside the topless bar with nothin’ but bad intentions in mind. They’ve got switchblades and guns in the trunk. Maybe most sinister of all, they have faces that just tell us they are up to no good.

The topless club is The Red Carpet. Outside is a picture featuring their star dancer. The two baddies check that out a couple times. They go inside The Red Carpet. The squirrellier of the two guys, the guy with the mustard-colored turtleneck, is quite taken by the dancer. Once inside, he almost can’t take his eyes off the dancing siren. His partner, on the other hand, is here for business. As they get drinks at the bar, the more serious of the two can’t help but notice the massive amounts of cash this joint brings in on a night like this.

What’s more… he’s casing the joint. He finds a Budweiser sign on the wall that the safe is located behind. He makes a call and tells the person on the other end everything he’s been able to sort out just by sitting at the bar and not looking at the topless girl dancing on stage. The pro thief says that all he needs is for the owner, Paul, to be out of commission after the place closes up and he’ll be able to clean out the joint with no problem.

What’s great is that these guys are being sent to knock over The Red Carpet are acting on the orders of Claire, the madam of an L.A. brothel. She even calls Paul to ask him if he’s going to stop by the brothel tonight. Apparently, despite being married to an extremely attractive, very Russ Meyer, girl, he’s a regular at the whorehouse down the street. Anyway, he’s like, “Nah, the missus is kind of on me about how often I go over to your joint because, you know, she’s hot, and, you know, she’s probably wondering what your girls have that she doesn’t because, seriously, have you seen her tits? They’re really something else. They’re the kind of boobs that Geoff would like to use as pillows and take a nice long and restful nap on.”

Uh… What was I saying?

Oh yeah… Anyway, what strikes me about this movie is why would Claire need Paul’s place to be knocked over? Is his strip club where people only look at boobs really outshining a brothel where you can probably even touch boobs? I think this is where that one reviewer was commenting on Meyer’s naive innocence. In the world of sex, a girl with nothing more than a great pair of bazongas is all it takes to hold men’s attention. An actual brothel, where not only can you see tits, but touch them and get your dick wet, must bring down the strip joint.

There’s probably a little more to it than that. There is an angle in this conversation between Claire and Paul about how he’s getting this action on the side because he’s been busy with the club and rarely home. He’s been home so rarely that he even says he’s not sure that his wife, Kelly, even lives there anymore. So it’s maybe possible that Paul is seeking action on the side because he assumes Kelly’s doing the same thing. I’m not sure. What I’m also not too sure of, again, is the whole motive and plan around robbing Paul. Claire introduces Paul to a new girl and tells her that he’s important because he sends high-value clientele from his joint to her’s so he needs to be well-treated. I think this movie’s plot is getting lost in its own story.

What I am sure of, though, is that review talking about Meyer’s approach to sex is an interesting one. At least in this stage of his career, he plays at it almost like a kid playing friendly games of freeze tag or hide-and-go-seek. Or, hell, maybe it’s more accurate to compare it to a sexy game of Risk. The game is friendly and not meant to hurt anyone. Everyone has a territory that they are comfortable with rules clearly defined for each one of those territories. Sex is fair game and open and treated as something almost any and every healthy person should partake in. There are few examples of pure monogamy in his films – especially the ones in the late 60s.

Think back to Common Law Cabin. The only characters that thought about monogamy as a good and natural thing were the two teenagers and the stuffy doctor who had an out-of-control wife. No one else really practiced the act. It’s not looked at as a bad thing that several characters had different partners in either sex or a makeout session or, even emotionally (it’s possible the stuffy doctor and the main character’s wife were a little more emotionally interested in each other than they were their own partners). Still, Meyer almost plays with sex as if it is the most purely natural thing in anyone’s life. You’re attracted to people. You want to have sex. It’s part of biology and being in the animal kingdom.

That’s all fair and fine and dandy. However, it does come off as a little naive. Even Vixen, who I said was a pretty nasty person, plays at sex (as others do in the movie) as if it’s a fun time and nothing to be too serious about while still saying some awful things about black folks. Her sexual promiscuity is her most innocent trait. Meyer’s best films are the ones that play at sex as either a part of a larger narrative (Supervixens and Up!) or as an undertone (Mudhoney, Motorpsycho, Faster, Pussycat!, and Beneath the Valley of the Dolls). Some of his more “naive” approaches to the concept, like this one or Common Law Cabin, I think are just meant to be some fun with naked girls and titillating ideas of attraction and desire.

Still, I like to think that the brothel wants to bring down the strip club for the most childishly naive motive – this featured dancer is so damn good at dancing and has such great tits, it’s hurting the brothel’s business.

Well, that was a digression.

Okay, back on track. Paul does finally accept Claire’s offer of pussy. She’s able to convince him to leave his club immediately because she has “something special” for him that he will not want to miss out on. Do girls at brothels only ever work just one night? Does he HAVE to go there right then and there or he’ll forever miss out on the hottest sex ever? This is all part of the larger scheme. Claire needs Paul there to take him out of commission while the goons rob the topless bar.

Paul is introduced to Christiana. She’s the one who Claire called something special that she wanted Paul to experience. Is there anything spectacularly special about her? I don’t know. She’s pretty and all, sure. I think Claire is way more my taste, though. She talks about the Kama Sutra a lot. Okay. So she knows how to be a prostitute. I guess that’s helpful in her line of work. What actually kind of cracks me up is that when she gets into Paul’s pants, she comments on how bushy his package is. He’ll shave for her if she wants him to, but she says she’ll shave him herself. That is one of THE most weird things I’ve seen in any Russ Meyer movie and I’ve seen Hitler get dominated and his butthole played with by a couple non-white people in one of his movies.

Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers is only 76 minutes long. It’s about the madam of a brothel conspiring to rob a strip club that is owned by one of her most important clients. We’ve spent the first fifteen minutes seeing pretty much ONLY the owner of the strip club being set up to get laid. Yes, yes… This is all part of the larger plot I suppose, but this movie is 15 minutes old and the primary plot of the movie has not progressed past stage one and we’re already 20% of the way through the movie. But don’t worry, the next five minutes are spent with Christiana talking about growing up Mennonite while she toplessly shaves Paul’s junk. It’s a fine story that she tells, but… I’m starting to feel a little bit like Paul did as she was preparing her shaving kit and he was left to get drunk on the bed. Let’s get the show on the road here.

Anyway, Paul blows his load and passes out.

Sure, Claire comes in to help keep him nice and distracted, but here we are, now 33% of the way through the movie and all we’ve seen is Paul’s trip to the local whorehouse and him plowing two ladies at the joint. Wasn’t this movie about a robbery? Well, yes, but that was only the plot that acts like a delivery method to sell tickets. The real show, I guess, is watching this guy get drunk and fuck ladies.

Of course, we don’t actually see him fuck ladies. Meyer didn’t really make hardcore movies. Again, he treats sex as this almost chaste, idyllic thing between a man and woman in nature. It’s why we see insert shots of less sexual things that connect to either Christiana or Claire’s ideal of heightened arousal. That’s actually been the most interesting thing in this movie. The conversations between Paul and the two women or seeing what the women think about as they are approaching climax. That reveals how Meyer may be wanting to get you in the mood for his most favorite thing ever with his movies, but he does have some eye or consideration for what makes a movie interesting to actually look at.

Naturally, there are varying degrees of success of that in his films, but this one’s charm is how we are learning about characters even if the plot is not so interested in getting a running start.

Things take a turn for Paul. When Claire gets out of bed and decides to go back to her business, Paul tries to keep her with him. This gets a little rough and forces Claire to call in the bodyguard for the girls to knock him out. She tells her guy to get him dressed and send him home. His new, uh, “haircut” will raise enough questions for his wife to keep him busy for the rest of the night.

Speaking of Kelly… Anne Chapman is every bit the Russ Meyer type. Buxom, brunette, sleeps naked… It all checks out. What I really especially like about Meyer’s type is that these are not beanpole types of girls. Yes, I don’t think there are letters even dreamed up by language experts that appropriately label their bust sizes, sure. I would even go so far as to say some girls in these movies have bust sizes that are even too big for my personal tastes. That said, these girls ultimately look normal. These aren’t size 0s or 2s running about and making anyone feel bad about how their own body types. These women are likely more sizes 6, 8, and 10 at the small end.

Their looks are extra exotic, but it isn’t something that is unattainable by a real woman. Maybe not all of the women who might see these girls on posters or in these movies will have the same bust sizes, but they may not be too far away from their general builds and hip size. Plus, the typical Russ Meyer girl’s looks also play into his general theme of giving women power in his films. That picture above of Anne Chapman is from a scene in which she is dressing down Paul for being a horndog and a male slut. But she’s always shot in a way that makes her look strong and powerful. Her head is straight, her back is straight, and she’s shot from a very slightly lower angle. Again, Meyer knew how to make a film and make a statement with film. For as good as Anne Chapman looks, she’s no dummy. She’s no super skinny bimbo. She is woman and, at the risk of coming across cringy, she will roar.

While Paul was getting laid at the brothel, Kelly got a call from the strip joint. The star dancer, Joy, up and quit when a customer got a little too rough with her. Kelly gets an idea… Paul once said she was the greatest he ever saw. So… why not let her fill in as the featured dancer? She’s got the goods, but Paul shoots down the idea straight up. Oh, and she also noticed that Paul’s junk is now shaved clean. Paul starts getting a little too handsy with Kelly and it’s implied he rapes her.

After they both shower, Ray, Paul’s right-hand man at the club, calls and tries to convince Kelly to come down to the place and dance for the customers who are getting a little more impatient. When Paul gets out of his shower and seems to be in no condition to think about anything other than passing out, yet again, Kelly gets dressed and goes to the club to satisfy the customers and get the cash flowing again.

The scenes at the strip joint are also very interesting in how Meyer shot them. It’s a lot of quick edits. It’s almost psychedelic in structure. The music is loud. The girl is only shown in brief cuts as she shakes and gyrates and thrusts around. Then we see shots of the cash register. Then the patrons simply drink their beers and stare at the dancers with almost no real emotion as if they are simply pacified. It’s saying something about how easily men can be satisfied and how the power to make business and everything else work in the world belong to women.

After performing, Kelly is upset. She doesn’t understand why she acted the way she did or why she felt she had to dance. Ray says it was simply something she had to get out of her system. It’s clear while she danced, again Meyer doing that intercutting of other business, she was thinking about how Paul fucks other women. Kelly admitted the more she watched the men watch her, the more she wanted them to watch her.

While Ray and Kelly work out her feelings about everything going on, Cal and Feeney, the two robbers sent by Claire to rob Paul’s joint, hide in the bathroom to get to work after they leave. Kelly and Ray clearly have some feelings for each other. She always kind of liked him but he came off a little too strong. He wants her to leave Paul because he’s fucking every woman he sees and Ray wants to treat her the way she deserves. Ray puts some music on the jukebox and they dance together. He invites her back to his place for a swim in his pool and they make out as they leave.

Things are starting to come to a head. Cal and Feeney are now free to work on the safe and cash register at the bar. Kelly is finally getting her orgasm thanks to Ray and his perfectly mixed drinks and nice pool. Paul wakes up and realizes his wife is nowhere to be found. He goes to the bar and walks in on the pair of robbers doing their work. So, again, Paul is knocked out, but this time it’s from being bashed over the head by a pool cue.

After getting her rocks off, Kelly demands to be taken home. She doesn’t want to see Ray again. Ray is pissed but does take her back to the bar to get her car so she can go home and forget the night ever happened. Back at the bar, Paul comes to just before Kelly and Ray come back to notice there are lights on inside the bar. Ray goes to check it out and Cal knocks him out with the pool cue too. After several more minutes, Kelly comes in and she, too, gets knocked out and tied up. Eventually, Cal and Feeney will finish robbing the place, but it’s probably not going to be until next Friday.

I joke, but that’s actually kind of the case. Cal goes over to Paul and tells him that the safe is a little too much for his blowtorch to handle so he needs help getting it open. One of the guys has to help or there’s gonna be real trouble. Paul doesn’t tell Cal what he wants to know. Ray doesn’t either. What Ray does tell Cal is that the third person tied up in the bar is Paul’s wife.

And for those of you who have an extremely specific Russ Meyer-type girl tied up like a damsel in distress fetish, this one is for you.

Cal and Feeney decide to use this information to their advantage. Cal reveals to Paul that Kelly danced tonight at the bar for all the men. She really was a big hit tonight. What’s more, Ray was real swell to look after Kelly to make sure no one else put their hands on her. Cal even talks about how Ray spent some real quality time together after everyone else left. Paul is pissed at both Kelly and Ray.

But never mind him fucking every prostitute at the brothel.

Anyway, Cal and Feeney let Ray loose to open the safe, but Ray makes a run for the door. Cal throws his knife and gets it nice and lodged in Ray’s back. The next plan of attack is to take Kelly over to the pool table. Feeney’s going to have his way with her while Cal goes back to work on the safe. Paul yells for them to stop and tells Cal that the combination is under the bar, but Feeney won’t stop trying to rape Kelly. Cal is dumb enough to leave the torch on which allows Paul to burn his binds off. He grabs the bar’s gun and kills Feeney. Cal uses Feeney’s gun and Kelly to force Paul to drop his gun.

Just then, Claire comes in like, I dunno, one of Charlie’s Angels.

It’s revealed to Paul that Claire was behind it all. She should have known better to trust Cal and Feeney to pull off the job. Cal ultimately shoots Claire who returns fire to kill Cal. Instead of seeing to Kelly to make sure she’s alright, Paul goes to Claire and caresses her in her final moments. She tells him she wishes she and he could have made it one last time before dying. Paul then looks at Kelly and then leans over to kiss the dead Claire on the lips.

A musical montage plays moments from the movie as Paul looks at Kelly and I scream at the computer for Kelly to get as far away from Paul as fucking possible.

So that’s the movie. The movie is not the worst of the Russ Meyer movies, but it is wonky. It takes a long time to actually get to the real meat of the movie – Paul and Kelly have a shit relationship and there’s a robbery that needs to happen. Even though it takes a lot of time to get there, the movie has a lot of interesting pieces that ultimately maybe say more about Russ Meyer and the movies he was making in the 60s than anything else. That review I keep going back to that comments on Meyer’s near child-like view on sex and crime and violence and all of that is very accurate when looking at this movie.

The movie never really goes as dark or violent or explores the crime element fully. At the same time, the sex of the movie is nearly pointless aside from being not too bad to look at on a more primal level. It really does come across as nearly chaste and giddy in its intentions.

Next week, we move into the 70s with Black Snake. If you don’t believe I picked the movie solely based on the title alone, you have not been around here very long. So, that just means I need to make sure you return to make yourself more comfortable here at B-Movie Enema!