Lolida 2000 (1997)

Posted on May 11, 2005 under Exploitation, Sci-fi |

aka Lolita 2000, aka O Lita 2000

Written and directed by Sybil Richards
Starring
- Jacqueline Lovell
- Jake Kealy
- David Squires
- Skylar Nicholas
- Derrick Casey
Produced by Pat Siciliano
Executive produced by David de Falco and Michael Feichtner (and Charles Band, uncredited)

I’ve said somewhere before (I’ll let you search for it; I’m a busy man) that the softcore features to come out of Charles Band’s Torchlight Entertainment, and later Surrender Cinema, have as their sole redeeming feature the complete avoidance of the key “erotic thriller” idea, i.e., that sex has to be dangerous to be exciting and filmworthy. Thus, Band has been responsible for some of the most “sex-positive” erotic movies this side of the Playboy Video collection. And thanks to the genre trappings each contains, they are all more defensible (or at least, more easily rationalized) for fanboys who might feel uncomfortable bringing home Wet ‘n’ Wild XXI.

But when I say that that’s their sole redeeming feature, I mean it. And Lolida 2000 is exemplary of some of the biggest drawbacks to be found in these movies for anyone watching them with organs other than the gonads: production values that flatter even the Moonbeam and Pulsepounders! lines, plotlines which invoke the storytelling traditions behind the genres only to discard them when the slightest bit of imagination is necessary, and nothing to look at but lots and lots of unremarkable pseudo-humping.

For those who can’t figure it out, the most common two titles for this movie (the “Lolida” and “O Lita” variations) are CYA devices to try to avoid any of the backlash around the 1997 movie version of Lolita, which then makes one wonder why they intentionally invoked that association at all. The first person we meet introduces herself to the camera as Lolita (Jaqueline Lovell), who is broadcasting the following stories as an act of defiance in a repressive future run by “The Society.” See, she used to be a censor for The Society, deleting objectionable material from data discs one at a line, things like music videos (from Bad Channels) and softcore erotica… until one softcore scene arouses her so much that she has to unzip her silvery spandex suit and pleasure herself. She steals what she can and makes her escape, and now she’s beaming these erotic stories into space to bounce off satellites and essentially be free of Society meddling. Power to the People with the Porn!

The meat of the movie, then, is these stories which she finds so subversive and compelling. And all I can say is, Is this what we want bouncing around the cosmos as our species’ calling card?

Sex-positive photo negative.

The first story is of Sherry (Gabriella Hall), a young buxom brunette artist with some issues. When a naked woman sits to pose for her figure-drawing class, Sherry has visions of the model being pulled back and forth while colors play ominously about her. Her husband, Tom, is frustrated that she never wants to go out on the town (or, presumably, to get busy with him), and instead wants to spend all of her time washing her hands and taking showers. Finally, after a dream in which she finds herself groped by green, scaly hands (yeah, we’re really pushing the limits of “sex-positive” here), she sees a therapist.

Her shrink helps her realize that her history of blackouts and out-of-body experiences dates back to when she was thirteen, and was abducted by aliens! That remote personal history is pretty vague — and thank goodness, because I really didn’t want to see a thirteen-year-old actress in this movie — but the most recent experience, from which her current personality traumas stem, is laid out for us clearly, complete with Sherry’s explanatory voiceover:

While painting one day, smoke fills her studio, and she wanders into it, to find herself naked and being kept in a vaguely space-aged cell. Having been “examined” and pronounced “ready for experiments” by the “Visitors,” she gets a cellmate tossed to her: Sasha (Darko Malesh), a hunky naked fellow with long, romance-cover hair and an Eastern European accent. (Wow! Eastern European? Really? In a movie from Charles Band? Who woulda thunk!) They’re both frightened (and naked), they start to teach each other their languages, and after a couple of days, naturally, they endup consoling each other. You know, the kind of consolation which involves a woman running her hands up and down her front and flipping her hair around and such.

Once they’re done, they get dragged to the examination room with the metal tables, where (as Sherry’s voiceover tells us) the Visitors want them to do it again, so they can watch. You mean the Visitors don’t have cameras in the cells? Looks to me like the Visitors are missing out on a lot of primo action, if this is what they came here for. Anyway, Sherry and Sasha oblige, and abruptly the tone of the voiceover changes from scary and ominous to accepting and life-affirming; she says that now she’s waiting for the Visitors to return, because being with them is what she really wants. The end.

No, really. That’s where that story ends, or stops, or drops in its tracks like it’s been shot. It’s so abrupt, I almost wonder if all of that were originally meant for a longer feature that got abandoned mid-production, and the footage got recycled into this one.

“Really? From SuperTarget?”

And now, for a completely unrelated lesbian interlude, as Lolita and a girl we haven’t seen before and don’t see again start waving their packages in each other’s faces. Whoops! Lolita sheepishly realizes she still had the camera on; I guess the abrupt ending of the previous story caught her off guard, too. She lines up the next of these amazing stories for us:

On a distant world, a blonde starship pilot named Casey (Skylar Nicholas) is caught violating Kelvan space and incarcerated in a subterranean penal colony (and yes, this is one of those movies where you’re allowed to do your Beavis-and-Butthead laugh at the word “penal”). Could you guess that the warden is a bitchy bulldyke who dresses like a member of Judas Priest? You could? Okay, well, could you guess that Casey’s cellmate is a bighaired babe who’s just as stacked as Casey is? Oh, you could? Dang, you’ve seen too many of these movies. Well, I bet you didn’t know that that cellmate is Maya (J. Nichole Italiano-Zaza, aka centerfold Nikki Nova), a “feline” — heck, I didn’t until she mentioned it. I guess I was supposed to gather that from the outrageous eye makeup.

Casey plans on breaking out and getting to her ship, but she’s still got time in her schedule to reject an overt proposal from the warden, then turn to her cellmate for, um, comfort. This gives us the classic lines from Maya:

“Have you ever been with a feline before?”

And when Casey tries to say that that’s not her scene:

“How do you know if you’ve never tried?”

Well, it turns out that feline lesbians go about it in pretty much the same fashion as ol’-fashioned terrestrial lesbians — first a striptease, then lost of major frottage, accompanied by the inevitable hair-flipping. (That’s not how real Earth lesbians do it? Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.) But somehow, that just doesn’t satisfy Casey’s needs, so when she sees a hunkish male starpilot in the cell across the hall, she starts flashing him some coming attractions, and eventually he escapes from his work detail to come and introduce himself. Insert requisite hair-flipping etc.

Who needs a saucer?

Their hairflips have scarcely died down when the guards (all two of ‘em) burst in and drag the erstwhile lovers apart — the male pilot to be beaten within an inch of his life (off screen, naturally), and Casey to the offices of the warden, where she’s manacled from the ceiling, and given some soft’n'frothy prison loving. Boy, I sure hope Casey had a good handle on her sexual orientation before this, because otherwise she’s going to end up a very confused young woman. Anyway, after the the expected lesbian bump’n'grind is mostly done, Casey engineers to leave the warden strung up in her own restraints and escapes. Ah, those feminine wiles.

Casey goes back to rescue her feline friend, and her boytoy pilot, but the latter is too badly beaten to join the escape, and Maya gets cold feet about leaving since she’s been here so long (they must have Whiskas on the menu), so Casey crawls through an airduct alone, only to find –

– that the whole thing’s been a virtual reality mindtrip by the Kelvans, who considered her a legitimate guinea pig for their relatively harmless experiment. Then they let her go (in Dollman’s flying saucer). The end.

Of the three stories here, this is the only one which qualifies as a story, i.e., with a beginning, middle, and end. That doesn’t mean it’s a good story; it’s more on the level of a “Hey, I’m a fifteen-year-old boy and I want to be a science fiction writer!” But it is a story. That’s something. Isn’t it?

Lolita comes back and introduces the third story: a hunky truck driver named Jake (Jake Kealy) scrubs his face in the truck stop men’s room, until Keely, the ditzy but stacked waitress (Heather James), comes in and propositions him. (And I’m thinking, boy, if you can have five minutes of sex in the men’s room of a truck stop and not be interrupted by other patrons, your business is seriously on the wrong route.) She kinda intimates that she’d like him to stick around a while; to his credit, he doesn’t laugh in her face at the idea of a trucker completely ignoring his schedule after getting the milk for free; instead, he simply says that he doesn’t have enough time.

As he leans against the sink (great, gotta wash up all over again), he’s attacked by flashes of color. And when he walks out of the men’s room, the entire truck stop is now in the 1950s. (But Heather James is still the waitress.) he looks around in confusion, then looks around some more as an amorous couple in one of the booths gets even more amorous. And well he might look confused; who knew that bobby-socked teenyboppers (again - “heh heh heh”) had pierced navels? (Oh, and by the way, this is the footage that Lolita saw waaaay back at the beginning that convinced her to fight The Society. It’s boob recycling!)

How many truckstop waitresses have you known that you would WANT to see dressed like that?

Then suddenly he finds himself on the same set redressed as a post-apocalyptic fight club, watching sweaty men in studs beating each other. (Please, tell me we’re not going that direction…) And then it switches to a two-girl catfight (thanks for small favors), who just happen to be Heather James and the 1950s actress. They start out fighting and scratching, but somewhere along the way lose their interest in the violence and start getting a lot more friendly; oddly enough, the all-male audience treats this with annoyance and disinterest.

Well, a crazy old coot who’s been in the truck stop/club/bar in every time period explains to Jake that he’s “time-slipping”; since he complained about not having enough time, now he’ll have all the time he needs. Then some post-apoc goons chase him back into the men’s room, and when he comes out — it’s caveman times!

So he does what anyone would do in the circumstance: Finds a friendly cavegirl (the 1950s actress again) and starts having sex with her. Then they’re joined by her friend (Heather James again) in a three-way for a few minutes, until two cavemen pull Jake away and shove him off-camera; then we watch the cavemen and the caveladies go at it for several more minutes, and then it’s the end. Yup; that’s where it stops. I swear, it looks to me like someone skipped out on the third day of that three-day screenwriting course.

Lolita finishes up with a short triumphant message to The Society: she’s already changed her broadcasting location, so she’ll continue to elude them while she beams these all-important stories out to whoever. And then, after she spends another minute pleasuring herself for our benefit, the credits roll.

Now, here’s the kicker: The framing story bears more than a little resemblance to the setup for Test Tube Teens From the Year 2000. The alien abduction story? Forbidden Zone: Alien Abduction. The future prison story? A equal parts Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity and the two Virtual Encounters movie (which also share a number of cast members). The time travel/cavegirl story? A combination of Beach Babes 2: Cave Girl Island and any of the plentiful time travel softcore flicks that Surrender Cinema released. Every segment of this whole production is pretty much inspired by something else on from Charles Band’s softcore productions. I might go so far as to imply that it’s almost “incestuous,” but that would definitely NOT fit the intended sex-positive mold.

Nothing says “classy” like creating a Frazetta cover.

A side note: Jaqueline Lovell, “Lolita,” is definitely one of the best things about this movie; her fresh and engaging personality stand out in comparison to the prefab bimbos that fill most of the stories. She’s since left the seamier side of acting, moved to New York, and is struggling with entering mainstream cinema there; I heartily recommend her ongoing memoir/journal, “Gnawing at the Big Apple.”