The Booby Hatch (1976 Review)

aka The Liberation of Cherry Janowski

Director: Jack Russo, Rudy Ricci

Cast: Sharon Joy Miller, Rudy Ricci, Doug Sortino, David Emge

Synapse Films / NTSC R1 / Unrated / 1.66:1 Widescreen / Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono / English Language / 82 minutes / PURCHASE

Growing up in the ’80s in the United States, I remember ribald movies like Porky’s, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Revenge of the Nerds as movies that my parents would make us kids leave the room while the adults watched them. Of course a few years later I would watch them and be astounded at the perverse toilet humor and the boobs… oh, the boobs. I think the fact of my parental units making the whole thing so taboo may have contributed to my prediliction towards the sleazy, graphic, boundary pushing films I love to this day. But even before that, filmmakers were catering to the perverted mind of the masses. Synapse Films has uncovered one of those zany entries into the anals (sic) of intercourse related hilarity.

The Booby Hatch tells the story of Cherry and Marcello, both of whom work for Joyful Novelties, Inc., a manufacturer and in-house scientific tester of sex toys and enhancers. Cherry is one of those girls who falls into sex at every turn whether it’s good for her or not. Her degenerate next door neighbor lures her into “compromising situations” and forces himself on her, her therapist uses groping and panty sniffing as forms of treatment and her stuttering handyman talks dirty to her at the drop of a hat. The one person she actually wants to have sex with is her asexual roommate who wants nothing to do with her. What’s a hot sex toy tester have to do to get a little welcomed dick around here?

Marcello has almost the opposite problem. He used to be the “A-Number 1″ male merchandise tester at Joyful Novelties (for which you need to be packing a hard “johnson-rod”), now his pecker is no better than a wet noodle. In other words, according to one of his co-workers, he “has a tired weenie”. He tries everything and everybody to help him get back on track but to no avail. His rooster just ain’t crowing. His boss tells him that he needs to get it up, or he will be fired and even tries to help him by hooking him up with the state-of-the-art female robot sex slave. Marcello is at his wits end and feels that there is no more reason to live when, out of the blue, he and Cherry have a chance encounter.

If you want a humor and vibe barometer for The Booby Hatch, think along the lines of Benny Hill collaborating with John Landis to make his classic The Kentucky Fried Movie. It’s zany, off the wall and as perverted as an albino transvestite dwarf with a chicken up his ass. Okay, nothing is that perverted, but the Hatch is goddamned close! Cross-dressers with Mickey Mouse fixations, machines that fuck women to death through intense orgasms and still other women balling a gorilla, it’s nutty I tell ya! But you haven’t seen “nutty” until you’ve seen the human banana split (see below)… I’m just sayin’. The cue-card reading acting and completely daffy music adds to the fun, especially the incredibly catchy Polka theme song that tells the story of Cherry and Marcello.

I am always amazed at the abilty of quality companies like Synapse, who can take an obscure movie like this and resurrect the picture and sound to look nearly perfect. Of course you have to take into account the age of the source material, but even with that, the transfer is great and the Digital Mono is loud and clear. The disk has tons of extras including commentary with Russo, Ricci and Streiner, a featurette entitled “A Flyboy in Earth Shoes”, the original theatrical trailer and a complete alternate cut of the movie with the alternate name “The Liberation of Cherry Janikowski”. This is a “must-have” for any exploitation collector or fan that likes to have his funny bone tickled once in a while.

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