Immoral Mr Teas / Eve and the HandymanMost fans of exploitation cinema will have no doubt heard of director Russ Meyer and his pioneering sexploitation flicks so I won't bore you with details you would've heard a million times before. Prior to watching this disc I was only really familiar with Meyer's classics such as the Vixen series, Up!, Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! and hadn't watched any of his lesser known work. I enjoyed these films a lot and found them a lot of fun so I was eager to check out this double feature disc from Arrow. Notable for kicking off the nudie film boom, The Immoral Mr Teas was Russ Meyer's second film. The film is somewhat tame by today's standards of course but it's cool to look back and see stuff like this that pushed the envelope. Meyer tip toed around censorship standards by not putting characters in sexual situations when nudity was shown. The amount of naked flesh on the screen must have caused quite a stir in 1959. The film revolves around Mr Teas (Bill Teas) a man obsessed with boobs. He goes about his day delivering stuff and envisions the beautiful women he runs into naked. Teas constantly finds himself buried in cleavage and hot under the collar. You can see some of the typical conventions of Meyer's work beginning to take shape with this film. The over the top characters, random scenes and of course boobs are all there just more subtle in this outing. There's a couple of quite surreal dreamlike sequences that I thought were pretty cool and the scene where the little girl throws a rock at Mr Teas had me in stitches. Like the majority of his work it is an exercise of making the most of a low budget. Rather than have synced sound Meyer opts for a voice-over which gives the film a mock biology documentary feel. This made the film cheaper to make and it adds to the humor by coming across as a spoof of these documentaries shown in schools during the era. The Immoral Mr Teas is perhaps more interesting for its historical importance as it's quite dated and the formula gets repetitive. Despite its short running time I found this one quite dull after awhile. Eve & The Handyman followed next and I gotta say I enjoyed it a lot more. This flick was a lot more crazier than I was expecting and was filled with some eccentric wild scenes. A handyman is followed about by a private eye chick (played by Meyer's wife at the time Eve) who observes his daily activities for reasons that get explained towards the end of the film (I won't ruin it for you). This film was filled with goofy humor and some really cool staging. Quite bizarre but in a good way. Eve & The Handyman was quite different from his other films I've seen which was its strong point to me. I loved the scene with the alarm clock that won't stop ringing and I thought the crazy artist scene was brilliant. This one took me by surprise and it was the highlight of the disc for me. Fairly barebones in the way of extras the just contained some trailers and a couple of TV spots advertising the Meyer flicks Arrow have released. I found the disc interesting especially in regard to the evolution of his work and how it showed he branched out from his normal conventions of nudity and violence. Some extras about the making of the films and their importance in regard to his career would've made the disc a lot better. Personally I wouldn't recommend this disc as your starting point if your new to the world of Russ Meyer but it's well worth the time of those already indoctrinated who will appreciate it more.
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