Elevator Girls in Bondage

The exceedingly putrid psychedelic drag queen troupe The Cockettes are indubitably one of the most aesthetically displeasing collectives of quasi-humans in humanoid history, but members of the culturally malicious group did manage to star in a couple worthwhile flicks, including the spoof Tricia's Wedding (1971), which spoofed Richard Nixon's daughter’s wedding ceremony by adding LSD and flagrant fags to the mix, as well as the Kenneth Anger-esque arthouse flick Luminous Procuress (1971) directed by Steven Arnold (The Liberation of Mannique Mechanique, Messages, Messages), yet Elevator Girls in Bondage (1972) directed by Michael Kalmen is indubitably their most accessible cinematic work, even if it is not their greatest. An absurdly amateurish celluloid work that wallows in its own cinematic incompetency as part of the ‘big joke’ that is its celluloid low-campiness, Elevator Girls in Bondage, as one would probably infer from the rather ridiculously risqué Meyer-esque title, is an exploitation work that actually transcends to the level of stupid surrealist pornography, featuring a number of ambiguous genitals in various states of arousal, including swarthy cocks busting loads on famous paintings. An aesthetically abhorrent tranny Marxist spoof of capitalism and heterosexuality, Elevator Girls in Bondage (1972) is also the virtual cinematic adversary to Women In Revolt (1971) directed by Paul Morrissey and produced Andy Warhol, and as members of the Cockettes admitted in the somewhat recent documentary The Cockettes (2002) directed by Bill Weber and David Weissman, the West Coast weirdoes in drag were not exactly too keen on the Factory trannies as they found their attitudes to be a bit too prissy, pompous, and less than positive. With its curiously crude commie cock-sucking and cast of radically retarded Trotskyite trannies, Elevator Girls in Bondage is thankfully a celluloid work so lecherous and ludicrous in its poofter political persuasion that it manages to marvelously discredit any sort of scathing sociopolitical message it autistically attempts to make, but not in such a penetrating fashion as self-described ‘right-winger’ Paul Morrissey’s intentionally anti-leftist work Women In Revolt, a farcical film where “leftist liberation” ends in scatological self-sacrifice of the excess-ridden enslaving sort. Like the ungodly hippie homo celluloid hate-child of Andy Milligan and John Waters, Elevator Girls in Bondage is campy celluloid excess on anti-orgasmic overload that reminds the viewer how truly ugly and vulgar certain members of humanity really are on both the inside and outside. Featuring countless hairy beavers, skinny unshaven asses, and tiny titties, Elevator Girls in Bondage is a rather odd and semi-straight flick for a campy celluloid work featuring the Cockettes in that it features more cunts than cocks, but they are just as intrinsically unappetizing all the same.

The boney, boner-loving girls of Elevator Girls in Bondage are feeling rather oppressed living during the so-called “depression 1972” as sub-erotic ‘elevator girls’ who spend all day and night going “up and down” for the low-paying customers of a superlatively seedy, semen-soaked hotel. When not working or hardly working, the elevator girls powder their pussies and take unglamorous bubble baths together as they are lascivious lesbos of the ultra unglamorous sort. Of course, when one of the girls, Trish (played by Johnny McGowan, a female fellow that was described as “The prettiest one” of the ugly drag troupe) is hogtied and ‘bound for pleasure’ by one of the pernicious patrons of the hotel and the fascist Divine-esque owner of the hotel, bald-headed Sally (Kreemah Ritz) refuses to get the ‘pigs’ involved, the elevator girls begin to reconsider their jobs and ultimately agree that revolutionary pussy politics is the answer. While one of the girls, Rita La Rantz (Reid Larrance), decides to quit and work at a ‘soy sauce factory,’ the feisty Führer of the oppressed elevator girls, Maxine (played by Rumi Missabu, an alpha-Cockette), decides to form a campy commie club to trample persecution as persecuted proletarian perverts. Luckily, a seemingly autistic blond-haired revolutionary named Bun E. Hug (played by director Michael Kalmen), a faggy flowerchild Maxine describes as follows, “He’s brilliant. He knows all about Karl Marx and The Grapes of Wrath…a stunning weirdo,” schools the sassy gay gals in political and social subversion and they form a maniac Marxist union, “The Pussy Protection Club.”  Before the girls know it, they have an iconic portrait of the Marxist messiah himself, Karl Marx—the famous photo where he looks like a Talmudic negro, like a more bloated version of slave-turned-sage Frederick Douglass—hanging on the hotel wall and begin singing crude and campy renditions of commie propaganda songs like “Bread and Roses – Dump the Bosses Off Your Back.” Not long after, the elevator girls are maliciously manhandled and anally probed via a phallocentric gun for being pinko poofs by a corrupt cop. Additionally, the perverted policeman tears up the elevator girls' beloved Karl Marx poster and when the girls complain about their property being destroyed the officer of the law makes the extremely valid point of rhetorically stating, “since when do you believe in private property?!” Realizing they make cruddy commie intellectuals, the elevator girls get their revenge by gang rapping the fellow who hogtied Trish and the guy busts an ample amount of saucy semen on the 1871 oil-on-canvas (and now cum) painting “Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1” aka “Whistler's Mother” by American-born painter James Abbott “art for art's sake” McNeill Whistler, thus 'battling bourgeois art' in the process. Maxine is ultimately arrested for her misguided Marxist shenanigans and the rest of the elevator girls threaten to strike as members of the disenfranchised rank-n-file who have “the right to strike.” In the end, the elevator girls plan to buy the hotel and pay for Maxine’s bail, but a couple gigantic iguanas wearing tophats nonsensically appear and thankfully destroy San Francisco and all the putrid people in it, including the evil capitalist bitch Bald-headed Sally, who is devoured by one of the radical reptiles.

A pure and unadulterated piece of impure celluloid psychedelic-exploitation retardation, Elevator Girls in Bondage provides a better case for staying away from drugs than any after-school special and a more mocking attack of Marxism than any National Socialist propaganda movie, which was certainly not the intent of the commie cocksuckers of the Cockettes, thus making the work all the more unintentionally enjoyable in an ironic sort of way. With the terrorist trannies of the film interpreting Marxists maxim like “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” as “you can do whatever what you want when you get what you need,” it is easy to see why the dildos dudes of the Cockettes subscribed to a hippie form of communism, even though Soviet icons like Maxim Gorky made such scathing anti-sodomite remarks as “Destroy the homosexuals—Fascism will disappear.” Of course, Elevator Girls in Bondage is certainly a somewhat accurate, albeit decidedly degenerate, depiction of the sort of slave-morality-driven debauchees that claim to subscribe to ‘the gospel according to Karl Marx’ today in the homophilic USA. A patently perverse piece of innately intentional celluloid trash that has as much artistic merit as a Polaroid of a turd taken by a toddler with Down syndrome that was directed by a feeble filmmaker with less skills than the average drunken frat-boy film school student, Elevator Girls in Bondage still manages to be a constantly entertaining exercise in campy cinematic excess, which probably is in part due to the fact that the film only has a 56-minute running time, as well as its all-morally-retarded cast. In fact, Elevator Girls in Bondage is more captivating than virtually anything ever directed by commie frog Jean-Luc Godard, but it is undoubtedly second to Luminous Procuress (1971) in terms of Cockettes cinema.  A magnificently mediocre piece of Marxist moronism, Elevator Girls in Bondage has hopelessly saved at least one young man or woman, from adopting a worthless Weltanschauung like communism and/or trannyism.  If you're too much a victim of left-wing vice to understand Morrissey's Women in Revolt, give Elevator Girls in Bondage a try and it might save you from contracting AIDS, wearing a $20.00 Che Guevara t-shirt, and/or going to a gay pride protest.

-Ty E