Passion in the Sun!
aka The Girl and The Geek
1964
Starring
Josette Valague as Josette Valague
Dale Berry as Sgt. Mike Green
Mike Butts as The Geek
Dee Dent as Sans Souci girl
Rain Drop as Sans Souci girl
Dick Eason as Raul Ortiz
Back before we were blessed with Cinemax, HBO, VCRs, the Internet, and DVDs, if you wanted to see naked women, you had two choices. Either go to a burlesque house and lose your entire paycheck, or go to a dirty, dingy theater where scratchy prints of “nudie” movies and other schlock played and only be out the price of a seat, and your dignity. When I think about my father or grandfather having to resort to such lengths to see the fairer sex, I feel for them. I feel even more thanks to my viewing of Passion in the Sun!, a typical entry in the mindless nude movies of the time. Short on plot, short on voice acting (everything is dubbed in later), short on special effects, short on full frontal nudity (damn laws keep these films from going full monty), and short on your patience, Passion in the Sun! attempts to make up for these massive flaws by giving us long shots of the main character running and frolicking naked, action dance sequences taking place in the Sans Souci dancehall, monster action (if you can call this guy a monster, I’ve seen janitors that look more frightening), fistfights, and high speed chases.
The best part about this film is the women. Not because they are naked, though that is a big bonus and admittedly the only reason why all copies of this film weren’t burnt and the director publicly drawn and quartered, but it’s the women’s bodies. The women are surgically unaltered, we got real curves, real body shapes, real women the way they were meant to be. None of this silicone/artificial/anorexic/bleach blonde/fake tan/botox soaked woman, this is the real deal. Before naked women in these movies were mass produced by Ford assembly line, they grew naturally in the wild. Rare these days, but not yet gone the way of the dodo.
Writer/director/producer/star Dale Berry really outdid himself with this film. We have a “geek” escaping his hamster wheel cage at the local carnival sideshow while his redneck carney captors try to catch him. We have two cops running around town (one played by Dale Berry) who go to investigate, the sirens blaring for the entire opening credits, like the beginning of the Naked Gun movies, except not funny (unless you count sad as funny.) We have famous stripper Josette Valague returning from Vegas via airplane, famous in that she plays a famous stripper who has the same name as she does in real life, except this is her only movie, I’ve never heard of her, and neither has anyone else ever, even the people who made this film, and Josette Valague herself. The two cops then have to pick up two guys from the airport, one of which is arriving with a mysterious package, and the other named Raul who is nailing an ugly, ugly woman who scares up with the second major nude scene. Raul goes to pick up his friend, but the cops are there, so they kidnap Josette and the cops give chase. What follows is a very very long chase sequence that also involves Josette in the backseat of the villain’s car getting the crap smacked out of her the entire chase. The chase is even interrupted by a dance sequence by one of the girls of the Sans Souci, the club Josette works at. Once the dance and nudity is over, we are back to the chase sequence. The villains do one of the oldest tricks in the book and stop their car just off the road through a gate while the cops scream past chasing a ghost car now. They throw Josette in the trunk, then start fighting each other. One of them kills the other. Since they look alike and I don’t really care, I’ll just say Raul killed the other guy since I don’t know his name.
Josette used their idiocy to escape, also stealing the briefcase with the “bundle” in it that is really valuable, so Raul starts to chase her. What is in this mysterious bundle? Is it money? Drugs? Guns? Gold? Some guy’s soul? A soccer ball? A photo of Richard Nixon naked? We shall never know, for the movie refuses to tell us. I believe that it’s the same thing that was in the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. Back to the footchase, the cops figure out the ruse, and find the car, the dead guy who’s not Raul, and start chasing by foot. We get a lot of shots of people running around random places that I have no idea where any of them are or how close any of them are in relation to each other. They also run to the same two bars of music repeated over and over and over and over hundreds of times for minutes on end. The only relief is a quick Sans Souci break! Dance, girl, dance!
Back to the chase, we get the same two bars again! Josette is far enough away from Raul that she feels the need to go skinny dipping. Now….you have just been kidnapped, seen a guy murdered, have the killer chasing after you, and have his mysterious bundle that he has killed over, and you are going to get completely naked and frolic in the water. Okay. I’m not complaining because she’s naked, and I’m shallow like that. The skinny dipping also brings a change of music, which is a welcome reprieve. After some time, Raul’s slow dumpy self manages to catch up with her, who seems amazed she’s still being chased, looking like she forgot what all the trouble was over. I think Josette Valague isn’t the brightest bulb in the bunch, but this acting makes it look like she genuinely forgot that she was in a movie with some guy chasing her. Oh, well. The chase resumes, and so does that accursed music with only two bars in it! Damn you, two-bar song!
Sans Souci!!! This Pocahontas girl is pretty keen, I’d poke her hontas if you know what I mean. Though she’s probably not a real Indian, and this performance is insulting to American Indian heritage. It’s stereotypes like this that keep the various tribal nations down in this country. When will we learn that American Indian women are not all strippers, only 95% of them?
Josette returns to show that the chase where she is running for her life has bored her again, so she’s now sunbathing topless and drifting off to sleep. Hey, Josette, YOU”RE BEING CHASED BY A MURDERER! RUN!!! Josette makes the girls that take showers in Friday the 13th movies when Jason is attacking people look like Napoleon’s strategy-wise. Josette probably gets outsmarted by the rocks onscreen right now. What is she, the guy from Momento? Does she have any short term memory? She remembers something, because she dreams about herself dancing at the Sans Souci! Way to ensure yourself a second dance routine besides your finale dance, Narcissa!
Wait a minute, why is she tanning herself in the SHADE?????????
Her tanning done, she decides to wash her bra and panties, the only clothes she has left. Wait, GEEK ATTACK! Run, Josette, run! Maybe now you will remember being chased, since a Geek has joined the hunt! Geek, as in “Guy with hair and some makeup randomly placed on his face,” chases Josette, as his women getting techniques are obviously borrowed from Harpo Marx and Animal from the Muppets. The Geek grabs her and starts to tie her up, but Raul wanders in, and Geek attacks and kills Raul while Josette runs off. Josette is currently completely naked, as an attacking Geek leaves you naught the time to collect your undies that you were washing. Josette finds a truck sitting in a field, with a suitcase in it full of clothes her size, and the keys in the ignition as well. Geek hides in the back of the truck, because we can’t have the movie end this quickly.
Josette ends up driving to the same Carnival that the Geek escaped from earlier, because they didn’t have many locations to film at for this film. Too bad it’s not the Carnival of Souls or some cool place, just some random carnival. The dialogue at this point in the movie reaches Shakespearian proportions between Josette and the Geek:
“AAAAAAAAAAAA!”
“UuuuUUuuUUuuurrr…”
“AAAAAAAAAAAAA!”
“UUuuuUUuuuUuurrr…”
Brilliant!
The Geek kills the ugly cigarette smoking woman from the beginning of the film, his former owner. She was the prototype for all those trashy women who show up on Cops screaming about their baby’s daddy while wearing a stained T-shirt in their doublewide. Josette seems to forget she is being chased by the Geek again, and decides to go for a ride on the “Wild Mouse” rollercoaster. The Geek starts the controls, then runs out onto the tracks. He soon gets a Wild Ride of his own, as the cart rolls over him, That’s one dead Geek. Josette staggers off again, and the cops show up at the Carnivale. How’d they get there? ESP or something. There is no reason that they should have been there, but here they are. They crime scene photograph the dead cigarette woman and litter, then finally notice Josette. Real crack troops, they are. The radio chimes in: “Very good Car 109. You guys really earned the night off, so enjoy!” And they do. At….Sans Souci!!
Josette spots them in the audience, and the last ten minutes of film is her dancing, as the other two girls do background dancing (the Asian one obviously saw the choreography five minutes before the cameras started filming, but she finds it hilarious, as do I.) The cops stare creepily, and smack their smokes down, and mash cigarette butts. The second song is pretty swinging, if I do say so myself (and I do, I really do.)
This film has more fluff than a marshmallow factory. We got padding after padding after padding, and a main character with Attention Deficit Disorder or Amnesia that keeps forgetting her life is in danger in order to run around naked. I for one support running around naked, but it shouldn’t be your highest priority, especially if you are being chased by a killer or a Geek. It is neat seeing the old school meaning of Geek onscreen, nowadays, a Geek would just be another Nerd character. Just imagine Revenge of the Geeks where instead of Lambda Lambda Lambda, we have Geeka Geeka Geeka, a Frat full of circus geeks. It would be like Freaks meets Road Trip. I should get to work pumping out a script!
Rated 2/10 (Josette dreams of dancing; “I can’t remember the dance moves, that’s funny!”)
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