If you’re as old as I am (and if you are, my condolences to your knees, but my compliments on your bumper crop of ear hair), you may remember that back in the 1960s, TV shows—even anodyne programs like Saturday morning cartoons, or Leave It to Beaver reruns—were frequently interrupted by a shrieking alarm and a droning voice announcing Armageddon, otherwise known as a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.
This week we’re broadening our horizons, because our remit is Bad Movies, and that takes in a lot of territory, including chapter plays, like the 1943 Batman serial we’ve been working our way through (click here for previous episodes: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3), industrial shorts, and mental hygiene films. The latter, particularly, overlapped with America’s Civil Defense era, covering everything from the exhaustively trivial (Lunchroom Manners, What to Do on a Date) to the overwrought and depressing (Duck and Cover, Narcotics: Pit of Despair). Some of these movies, ten or fifteen or twenty years old, were still being shown when I was a kid—with their sprocket tears, muffled audio, and random missing frames intact—and they were pretty much all the same. Largely made for public school students—in other words, a captive audience—the whole point of the exercise was to make teens stare at 16mm images of things they weren’t supposed to do. That could include anything from heavy petting on a date, to juvenile delinquency, to driving at unsafe speeds, or…to meeting a homosexual in the wild.
Fashions change, whether they be clothing or civic paranoia, and when I was in school, the big social panic was all about drugs. We seemed to get a new anti-narcotics flick every month, but they were essentially all the same movie, in much the way drivers education films were all basically the same cinema verité splatterfest, whether it was Appointment with Disaster, Mechanized Death, or Red Asphalt.
However, before drugs became an all-consuming passion for the powers that be, they were concerned about other stuff America’s youth might be getting up to, including boys…well, being boy crazy. Thus, deeply weird and unnerving filmmaker Sid Davis, in association with the Inglewood Police Department, decided to nip all that man love in the bud with a little picture called Boys Beware. (In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that there are no homosexuals in this movie about homosexuals. I know this, because they actually screened it in my social studies class one week, and the police officer who brought the film and spoke to us afterwards was at pains to assure us that the “homosexual” in the picture was really another police officer only playing the part of a homosexual (and not very well if you ask me; his clothes are trash, his knowledge of Patti LuPone’s career is flamboyantly unimpressive, and his seduction technique involves far too much pastrami).
So I wanted to savage this film, because my teacher threatened to send me to the Office if I didn’t stop making fun of it in class, and frankly, I’m still bitter. But given the brief running time—briefer, in fact, than the Batman serial episodes—I thought this might be a good opportunity to try something different. As some of you know, I do a podcast called The Slumgullion with writer-actor-director Jeff Holland, and he kindly joined me for a Mystery Science Theater 3000-style riffing of this classic specimen of Mid-Century Gay Panic.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this little experiment in multi-media mockery. Please let me know if you’d like to see more of these. Or absolutely no more of these. I’m okay with either.
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