Fantastic Fest Review: BAT PUSSY Will Evaporate Your Libido
Sex scenes in cinema - porn, especially - get a lot of flak for not being realistic. They’re too polished, adhering too closely to an unrealistic ideal, a performative version of lovemaking lacking any of the clumsiness and personality that characterises the real thing. And y'know what? That's a fair complaint.
Bat Pussy is what happens when you go too far in the other direction.
Originally released in 1973, later resurrected by Something Weird Video, and now transferred to HD by the American Genre Film Archive, Bat Pussy is one of cinema’s great mysteries - or at the very least, a mystery. Nobody knows who directed it, who starred in it, or where it was made; for whatever reason, the film has no opening titles or closing credits to guide us in these matters. It’s a cheap, would-be sleazy slice of 1970s porn - often credited as the first porn parody, though its parody content is minimal at best - whose every moment is fascinating and wholly unarousing.
The vast majority of Bat Pussy does not concern the title character, but an unhappily married couple named Buddy and Sam. Shot mostly from a single, fixed camera position, their scenes ostensibly show them having magazine-inspired sex, titillating the audience with their raunchy escapades. But thanks to their staggering sexual ineptitude and propensity for bickering, we’re treated to awkward fumbling and repetitive insults instead. Buddy and Sam are two characters who absolutely hate each other, constantly accusing each other of infidelity of various descriptions as they attempt to muster some modicum of sexual performance. You could compress their dialogue down to about ten minutes of actual content, so one-note is their ceaseless argument: Buddy is a “goddamn motherfucker,” always off with “some other broads,” while Sam “sells her pussy for three cents on the corner.” And crucially, neither of them know how to fuck.
That last insult certainly isn’t empty. If 90 percent of directing is casting, whoever directed Bat Pussy started their shoot with a serious handicap. It’s not so much that Buddy and Sam aren’t particularly attractive people - anyone can be sexy if they’ve got the right attitude. It’s more that Bat Pussy’s cast are some of the least sexually competent performers ever to be cast in a sex-driven motion picture. Buddy is seemingly incapable of sustaining an erection. Sam mostly lies still, letting her babbling dialogue fail to do the work for her. Both are clearly impaired by one substance or another, their groping hands only occasionally coming close to their intended targets. Despite Buddy’s constant insistence that he’s going to fuck Sam in various ways (including “in the nose,” a phrase repeated with alarming frequency), the film contains no penetration. There are attempts at it, certainly, but there’s no pushing Buddy’s toothpaste into Sam’s (allegedly enormous) tube.
As far as the superhero-parody content of Bat Pussy goes: it’s minimal. We cut away from Buddy and Sam occasionally to Dora Dildo, aka Bat Pussy, whose superpowered vagina twitches to alert her that someone’s shooting “a fuck movie” in her “holy Gotham City.” Why a character called Bat Pussy with such a fondness for nudity would be so anti-porn is a mystery, but after all, consistent character motivation and porn rarely mix. Bat Pussy sets about locating Buddy and Sam, bouncing across hill and vale on an inflatable space hopper, eventually crashing into their room and...joining in with them, boasting only slightly greater knowledge of what bits go where.
What makes Bat Pussy so fascinating is not just its threadbare story, its detestable characters, or its bad sex. At fifty minutes long, the film surely contains nearly every frame shot for it, meaning that watching Bat Pussy is the same thing as watching Bat Pussy get made. The sound periodically cuts out so that the director can give direction from off-camera, but the picture continues playing, the actors nodding in response and carrying on. (God only knows what direction they were given.) Sometimes the actors drop character, laughing or giving instructions to one another in sotto voce. In the film’s menage a trois climax, Buddy repeatedly refers to Bat Pussy as Batwoman, resulting in Sam straight-up correcting him mid-fumble. The whole thing feels very regional (specifically, the Southwest), very authentically amateur, and almost human.
Bat Pussy ain’t everyone’s bag. It’s mostly all one unedited shot, filled with unappealing characters doing unstimulating things. It also probably requires a big-screen presentation, with an audience, for its particular delights to pop properly. But for observers of the weirder details of human behaviour, there’s a lot to be said for it. Bat Pussy will do nothing for the libido, but as a vintage smut curiosity, it’s hard to beat.
