Bat Pussy
AGFA
As a connoisseur of offbeat film, this is a great time to be alive. Every day it seems another company has rescued a forgotten ’80s slasher movie or regional horror flick or low-budget near miss from obscurity and has lovingly restored it, painstakingly working to insure these little-seen films get the same attention as other, more “respectable” flicks.
Even the worst of these films can serve as a time capsule-like glimpse into how the world looked decades ago when lack of lightning-fast communication preserved little scenes of regional identity. And sure, you might have to overlook traditional ideas of “acting” or “plot” to discover some of these gems, but they still function as a window into someone’s creative process, even if that process was inept or misguided.
That’s what I thought before watching Bat Pussy.
This untitled, uncredited early ’70s film was unearthed in 1995 in a pile of abandoned film in the back of an adult movie theater. Something Weird converted the film to VHS and named it Bat Pussy, after one of the three strange characters. This bizarre movie became something of a cult hit.
So what is Bat Pussy about? Basically a Jerry Reed-looking somewhat drunk man attempts to have sex with a beehive-haired woman as they berate each other with insults that sound like they came from a young, gleefully offensive John Waters. There are also a few pauses where the man stops to take instruction from a wisely unseen director. Just when the audience grows accustomed to this, a woman named Bat Pussy becomes alerted to the couples’ attempt to film their horrible sex, and decides to put a stop to it.
Bat Pussy wears what looks like a pair of pajamas or long underwear and rides a hippity-hop, safely obeying all traffic signs. What will happen when Bat Pussy finds the unnamed couple? What form of justice will she unleash? Well, if this sounds like something you’d be interested in, your reviewer certainly doesn’t want to ruin it for you.
American Genre Film Archive and Something Weird have done an amazing job of restoring and presenting Bat Pussy, cramming the Blu-ray with essays on the films discovery, trailers, and an hilarious commentary track where the Something Weird presenters sound just as lost as any other viewer, but still viewing their wayward child with love. A bonus sci-fi movie, Robot Love Slaves is just as inept and but after seems like Citizen Kane in comparison.
It takes a certain kind of viewer to appreciate the bizarre twist into superhero parody, the unattractive people attempting sex, and the new and inventive sexual insults they throw at each other, but for those select few, there is certainly no other film like Bat Pussy, and AGFA and Something Weird are to be applauded for releasing it into the world.
