The Mind Blowers

Lost in the depths of the Something Weird back catalog, THE MIND BLOWERS is an interesting artifact - hardly a gem, but with enough peculiarities sprinkled through to make it worth a look. Hailing from '69, it marks the last year of the B&W NY sleazies, right before hardcore came on the scene and turned the entire industry on its head.

Opening with great shots of 42nd Street in its prime (replete with marquees advertising now-obscurities like THE PINK PUSSY: WHERE SIN LIVES), we're introduced to a number of the Deuce's denizens, including a couple sailors on shore leave, a hip young couple with a frigid distaff half (interestingly, her partner is Warhol superstar Eric Emerson, slumming it here), a nelly-ish gay dude, and a sexually-liberated chick. They're all about to become THE MIND BLOWERS, when each ends up invited by a friend or acquaintance to the lab of Prof. Wolfgang Gotterdam, who, along with his idiot assistant Dumbkopf, is conducting unorthodox experiments in sexual impulse transmission. Instructing each volunteer to focus on the most erotic fantasy they can imagine (during which the Professor even sees fit to grope the hippie girl!), Gotterdam records their brainwaves and later plays them back for different participants, leading the swishy gay dude to take a walk on the straight-and-narrow, the liberated girl to turn into a Bible thumper, the macho sailor to indulge in some male-male lovin' with his buddy, etc.

While hardly reinventing the wheel in terms of sexploitation, THE MIND BLOWERS starts off with a solid premise. It admittedly spins its wheels a while getting to the lab (Emerson and his girlfriend stop to take in an "art film," which allows for a gratuitous interlude of lesbian canoodling), but after that things become fun - if erratic - once the cast gets there. The guy playing Gotterdam hams it up appropriately, and the personality-swapping scenario is solid, allowing the different characters to step out of their shells. The problem is that the film doesn't quite know how to dramatically maximize this - the characters swap inclinations but never learn anything in the process. The film seems to be setting up a major narrative thread of the lonely gay guy longing for his dream hunk, but it never hooks them up - any character development is dropped the second everyone has had their sex scene.

Having seem this years ago, the film always stuck in my mind for this surprising male-male content - a rarity even in this era, when sexploitation was still figuring out exactly what audiences did and didn't want. The movie's refreshingly progressive in this regard, which makes it frustrating things just bottom out into a standard orgy at the end. Add on to that that the film seems almost actively disinterested in presenting appealing sex - all the scenes are shot from a minimum of angles, each unflattering, and usually just show a couple embracing with little clear view of anyone's body - and you have a frustrating result, replete with many of the quirky touches that make better sexploitation films work, but undone by a total disinterest in telling a coherent narrative. Not exactly a MIND BLOWER itself, there's still enough in this film to make it worth a watch - at least for Warhol acolytes and fans of closet-case sexploitation - but temper your expectations.