...back in this reviewer's good ol' early Navy days...that is, before the onset and convenience of home video, and those occasional late-night 'gathering of the buds', at one of the 'buds' conveniently located homes...those smokey & darkened back rooms, and the flickering chatter of an overheated film projector...the murmuring and the snickers and the 'woo-wooing' and the clinking of beer cans...this reviewer's fondest memories of having been 'formally' introduced to the steamy and provocative arena of sexploitation cinema, were the late-night trips we all made, to the local, albeit tucked-away-back-in-the-fields drive-in theaters, in the early eighties. Passion pits, found while stationed in Orlando, Florida...Groton, Connecticut...Great Lakes, Michigan...Norfolk, Virgina. Breaking away from our arduous pre-weekend Naval school studies, or the dust and grit of a Friday workday in the shipyard, once the sun hit the level of dusk, a dozen of us...all young, dumb and full of (...what?? Did I just hear a high pitched 'cuckoo'?? Never mind...) would pour ourselves into a couple of rickety, run-down vehicles, and do some wayward, random bar-hopping. A couple of us would occasionally 'get lucky', and that'd be the last we'd see of them, that night...a couple others, green behind the gills, being unable to hold their 'Milwaukee's Best' (...and that's after the first 12 or 15 of them; hey, you just can't beat a case of beer, for a mere three bucks and change, right??), would pass out, and a readily available taxi would pigeon the wimps back to base...
...the rest of us, beaten down by rejection, but still enjoying a respectable buzz...still, with another case or two of the ol' 'MB' to polish off, and nothing else to do...would roll on over, sometimes on mere gas fumes, to the local, though quite out in the sticks, late-night drive-in theater, which...once the midnight hour rendered a subtle cymbal strike...would covertly screen some of the best, albeit some of the most wildly outrageous softcore film classics...most of which were dated back to the golden age of '70's 'blue' movies. Edgy sex scenes, but not too explicit...wacky fantasy scenarios, which could never possibly happen in real life, save for what might be imaginatively written in 'Forum' magazine...comical interludes, to break up the monotony of the steam sex moments (...oh yeah right...they were so-o-o-o bo-o-o-oring, too...again, yeah right)...shoddy production values, and ridiculously looking cardboard sets...and some of the most ludicrous, over-the-top performances, both in character interaction, as well as during the sex scenes...and all this for the stuffed carload price of five bits...
