Primitive Love (1964) from Brainscan and Tuna

Brainscan's comments in yellow:

Remember the one about the guy who went to a fight and a hockey game broke out? I know how he feels.

I rented a movie and a travelogue broke out. Well, that'a lie. Two, in fact.

I didn't rent a movie. I rented an American-Italian production on celluloid film called Primitive Love (1964). A thing. Couldn't call it a movie. Shouldn't, at least.

And it wasn't a real travelogue. Most of it wasn't. It was a fake travelogue in which the producers attempted to use a National Geographic exemption to get some tits and ass into their... thing.

Lemme explain. In Primitive Love, Jayne Mansfield the actress plays Jayne Mansfield the noted cultural anthropologist (Jayne in a dark wig - she's supposed to be an Hawaiian native), who has come to town to show her documentary on tribal mating rituals to a professor-type person.

As she checks into her hotel she is spotted by a pair of porters who want nothing more in life than to get a good look at Jayne's hooters. And so they drop everything else they might be doing to spy on Jayne as she dresses, undresses, redresses and reundresses. The "actors" who play the porters mug so shamelessly they make Jim Carrey at his most florid and frenetic appear like Morgan Freeman at his most restrained and elegant. Words can't adequately describe them, so I grabbed a couple of frames just to show y'all. Mind you, these are not the worst of their respective performances... just a couple of frames from late in the movie.

• Here are the two porters. It hurts just to look at them.

One section is particularly interesting because it shows Jayne doing a striptease. This comes at the end of things as our anthropologist-heroine attempts to prove that she can bedazzle and bewitch the pair of porters. But Jayne never gives up some goodies in this film.

And that makes some sense because it was 1964 and even in Italy very few movies had stars in their birthday suits. What to do, then, if you want to show off somebody's T's and A? The answer comes in the middle 25 minutes, as Jayne shows the professor her 8mm film. Throughout it, women who are far too well-dressed, well-coiffed or light-skinned to be real natives dance, fish, recline and run around topless. I counted six such native-babes. The producers must have figured that the only respectable way to show skin in the early sixties was to package it as a National Geographic-like documentary. It can't be dirty if it's natural, I guess, even if the principals are native to San Remo, not the Serengeti.

IMDB has this one rated a respectable 5.2/10 and the only comments about it are positive. Hey, I like odd movies but this I do not get. The movie, er...thing, pissed me off something fierce. I despised the porters and the guys who played them, I was bored by the lack of a plot, annoyed by the 25-minute-long psuedo-documentary and aggravated by Jayne's constant, no-reward teasing. Bad is one thing. Relentlessly stupid and proud of it? Well, that is something else altogether different... and this one is as relentless and as proud of its stupidity as any thing I've ever seen.

Tuna's comments in yellow:

Primitive Love (1964) is an Italian exploitation film with the gaff (to lure in the suckers) and the square (to make everything ok) in the same film. The gaff? A film named Primitive Love staring Jayne Mansfield. The square? Lots of native breasts a la National Geographic. 

As you might have guessed, this is a new offering from Something Weird Video, and is chiefly interesting as a great example of the genre. Nothing is listed at IMDB in the way of ratings, reviews, etc. This is an F by nearly any standard, except as a curiosity. However, it is a prized part of my collection for its historical significance. It also helps that it is another great restoration job by SWV from very old source material.