D2D entry #45: Chatterbox
(Featured in Horror on 42nd Street.)
I imagine that it would be difficult to make a good, artistically valid movie about a talking vagina. The sheer geek-show appeal of the concept threatens to overwhelm any sort of serious intent. That said, if anyone out there feels an unquenchable drive to make the definitive talking-vagina film, whatever they craft is likely to be better than Tom DeSimone’s agonizing Chatterbox.
In a way, that’s unfair — this film may be ostensibly about a speaking, singing, eternally horny Hey Nanny Nanny, but the true reason it was made was for the benefit of Candice Rialson’s breasts. I can think of worse reasons to make a film, as the late Ms. Rialson had terrific breasts. I would happily watch eighty minutes of footage that consisted of various closeups on her breasts a la Russ Meyer’s Mondo Topless. However, DeSimone couldn’t leave it at that. No, he had to construct a “proper” film around the wonder of her breasts, and his conception of a proper film, for whatever reason, is a shticky showbiz comedy about the rise and fall of a singing twat.
It’s a musical, it’s a comedy, it’s a sex film… it’s none of those and less. The songs are abominable, the sex is unerotic by design (‘cause eroticism and humor can’t coexist — never mind you in the back there shouting about Vixen! and The Opening of Misty Beethoven…) and the comedy is a precise demonstration of the dangers of level-one thinking. Take about five minutes and think about the jokes that could center around a talking vagina. Everything you just thought of is in the film. Now take another five minutes, dig a bit deeper, try and get a bit wittier. Whatever you just thought of is better than what’s in Chatterbox. The closest DeSimone and company get to genuine wit is the line, “She doesn’t want to be just another anonymous organ, something that you never think about, like your pancreas. Nobody ever thinks about their pancreas.”
It’s telling that even with an outre concept, the filmmakers have to clumsily cast about for things to fill up the running time, such as a lengthy spoof of “The Dating Game” or the climactic Hollywood-musical setpiece. It all ends with Rialson standing on a cliffside in front of the sea, which put me in mind of the end of the striking Isabel Sarli vehicle Fuego except that I was rooting for Rialson to jump. Of course she doesn’t, because if she did the filmmakers couldn’t pull out their shitty shock-twist cop-out ending. Chatterbox aims low, fails even as kitsch and ends up a justly obscure incurious curiosity.
