Mau Mau Sex Sex (2001)

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Posted on May 12, 2004 under Documentary, Exploitation |

Produced and directed by Ted Bonnitt
Written by Eddie Muller and Ted Bonnitt
Featuring
- Dan Sonney
- David F. Friedman
- Frank Hennenlotter

Although Mau Mau Sex Sex might easily be mistaken at first glance for the earlier exploitation documentary Sex and Buttered Popcorn, but a second glance will reveal a large and welcome difference: there’s no Ned Beatty in this one. Let us all give thanks.

The movers. The shakers. The sleaze flick makers.

And if, while watching the earlier flick, you said, “This is great, but there just isn’t enough of Dan Sonney and David Friedman here,” you’re in luck. Because while Sex and Buttered Popcorn largely used exploitation pioneers Sonney and Friedman for color commentary, Mau Mau Sex Sex is as much about those two men as the genre in which they labored. Filmmaker Ted Bonnitt spends as much time as possible with his cameras trained on those two, either together or singly, to discover the personalities who made the “golden age” of exploitation cinema what it was.

The 84 year-old Sonney, for example, explains how his family grew into cinema: his father, a miner turned policeman, found fame as the cop who collared gangster Roy Gardner, and turned that fame into carnival touring and speaking engagements. He then participated in a cinematic re-enactment of the arrest, got movies in his blood, and moved to California to make his living at cautionary crime movies, working his way up to more blatant exploitation fare like the notorious 1934 Maniac (which never did much business until it was retitled Sex Maniac).

“And whenever I think about converting all of these to DVD, I just weep.”

76 year-old Friedman, on the other hand, was a Hollywood studio sales rep who knew all the stars and got all the contracts, but somewhere along the way he decided he’d rather be in business for himself. He took that fascination he’d always had with the “dark side” of cinema — a passion that seems to be part and parcel of his childhood obsession with carnivals and freakshows — and carved out a profitable niche on the fringes of entertainment where the studios feared to tread.

Between the two of them, Sonney and Friedman were either directly involved in, or at least knew the filmmakers behind, every notable (or forgettable) exploitation movie and marketing hook since the end of World War 2, and their first-hand accounts of the films they didn’t make (like Forbidden Adventure — there’s a market for flicks about native women breeding with great apes?) are almost as entertaining as their behind-the-scenes reminisces on such films as Blood Feast and The Defilers. And for added leavening, film archivist Frank Hennenlotter (himself the bad movie auteur behind such flicks as the Basket Case series) comments separately on the unbelievable gimmickry that went into the moviemaking and marketing. When a guy with a track record like Hennenlotter’s is left almost speechless by some of the goings-on in these meant-to-be-forgotten movies, you know we’re talking about films that shock and titillate, not incidentally, but as their main raison d’etre.

Um… Why are you looking BENEATH the photo?

In addition to charting the course from simple nudist flicks, through nudie-cuties, to “roughies,” the documentary also devotes plenty of time to “Where are they now?” concerns. Friedman runs an amusement carnival; as Sonney says, Friedman is “the world’s greatest carnie,” and with his pot belly and his omnipresent stogie, he looks it. As far as he’s concerned, it’s the same industry as exploitation filmmaking, only with a different medium. The camera following him around for a “day in the life” shows that he’s still all about selling the sizzle.

Sonney, on the other hand, is retired, and it’s pretty clear that Bonnitt was at a loss when it came to interesting footage. In the interests of equal time, Sonney is shown doing the dishes, walking on his treadmill, playing gin, going out for lunch to the buffet… I said to myself, “If they show him going to the can, I’m leaving.” (Actually, they do show him finding the head, but it’s later on in the film.)

Too late for a lozenge.

Most telling, though, are the comments made by family members, often when the principles aren’t in the room. each man has been married to the same woman lo these many decades (no, I don’t mean they were both married to the same woman — that sounds more like one of their flicks), and each makes a show of his devotion and fidelity. (Sonney: “I think that every child should have a mother and a father, that don’t drink.”) Sonney’s wife only mentions how happy they’ve been together, but the one of his four daughters who lives with them to help care for them does reference the cognitive dissonance of attending the nearby Catholic school while knowing full well how Daddy made his money.

Friedman’s wife is even more revealing in her reticence; without looking at the camera, she simple says that she had to choose to ignore what she knew her husband was doing all those years.

Hey, it was either this, or another shot of old fat men.

In the end, the exploitation industry as both men knew it ground to a halt when hardcore porn finally became a full-fledged industry. Having worked so many years teasing and titillating audiences, neither had the desire to move on into an industry which simply sells the steak without the sizzle (one might even say they sell it “raw”). They had assumed that their films would be forgotten — neither one was working toward the creation of art, after all — but a visit to the warehouse of an LA film archivist proves them wrong: The archivist has shelves and shelves full of prints of their movies, and with deals providing stock and archival footage, it’s likely that their tawdry quickies will be seen in some form forever.