Cody is making his way through all 400+ movies made by Charles Band. This time, an X-rated fairy tale.
Grindhouse expert 42nd Street Pete refers to the decade of the 1970s as "the sick, sick Seventies." Genre filmmaker Charles Band simply says, "The '70s were weird." Either description is fitting when you take into account that this was the decade when making X-rated twists on familiar fairy tales suddenly became a way to draw in stacks of cash. The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio was a hit in 1971, so Alice in Wonderland and Once Upon a Girl... followed in 1976. Because of this, when his stand-up comedian friend Frank Ray Perilli suggested to Band that he should make an erotic fairy tale musical as his fourth feature as a producer, it seemed like a good idea. Certainly a better idea than when Perilli suggested that Band's first feature should be Last Foxtrot in Burbank, a spoof of Last Tango in Paris.
Group 1, the company that distributed Band's second and third films (Mansion of the Doomed and Crash!), quickly agreed to distribute his erotic fairy tale musical, so the project was off and running. It only took a handful of weeks to take this version of Cinderella from concept to production, with Last Foxtrot in Burbank star and Mansion of the Doomed director Michael Pataki returning to helm the film, working with a $400,000 budget and a script by Perilli.
If you know the Cinderella fairy tale, you know what's going on in this movie. A young woman named Cinderella (Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith) lives with her abusive stepmother (Jennifer Stace) and hideous stepsisters (Yana Nirvana and Marilyn Corwin), forced to work as a slave for them around the house. When a Prince (Brett Smiley) throws a ball to find a bride, Cinderella gets to attend with the help of a Fairy Godmother (Sy Richardson) and ends up winning the Prince's heart.
The version of the story just happens to be packed with nudity. Cinderella's breasts will pop out of her top while she sings a song. Some of her housework involves powering the corn cob vibrators her stepsisters use. The Prince throws a ball because he is no longer thrilled by sex, not even when he has four women in bed with him, and is seeking to find a woman he can be thrilled by. When Lord Chamberlain (Kirk Scott) is sent out to deliver invitations, he has sex with some of the women he crosses paths with. For some outdated sexuality and racial jokes, the Fairy Godmother is a queer Black man.
And when she attends the ball, Cinderella is not only gifted with a fancy outfit and a horse-drawn carriage. The Fairy Godmother also gives her a special vaginal ability, turning her into "a snapper."
Cinderella has a running time of 94 minutes, and the actual storytelling is packed into a small percentage of that. Most of the film consists of lengthy softcore sex scenes. A variety of people have a variety of sex throughout. It's not exactly thrilling in these days of hardcore porn being easily accessible at all times, but I'm sure plenty of viewers have gotten some excitement out of it over the decades. Especially when they caught this during its initial release in the '70s, or if they saw it on cable or VHS in the '80s.
For me, the movie went on a bit too long and started to wear out its welcome in the second half. But for an erotic fairy tale musical, it's surprisingly good and actually has some decent songs in it.
Cinderella was a big success for Group 1... which brought about the end of Band's working relationship with the distributor, because none of that success trickled down to the producer of the film. Even so, its box office numbers did inspire Band to return to the basic idea the following year, when he made another erotic fairy tale musical. That one was called Fairy Tales - but before he got there, he would circle back to his preferred genre, horror. He worked with one of horror's greatest icons on a film called End of the World, which is next up in the "Full Moon by the Numbers" series.
I'm thankful for that, because I don't think I could handle watching two erotic fairy tale musicals back-to-back. This is the kind of movie I could only tolerate watching on rare occasions.
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