Linda Lovelace for President (1975)

Powerful

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Notorious 70's Golden Age adult cinema icon Linda Lovelace decides to run for president as the chosen candidate of the freshly formed Upright party. Directors Claudio Guzman and Arthur Marks fumble the ball when it comes to the utterly ramshackle narrative, but fortunately keep this infectiously asinine enterprise bouncing along at a constant breakneck pace and maintain a cheerfully puerile kitschy tone that's positively engaging in its unapologetic giddy inanity. The blithely crude script by Jack Margolis is rife with bawdy double entendres, offensive racial stereotypes, leering sexual innuendo, and groan-inducing below the belt jokes. Naturally, Lovelace disrobes with pleasing regularity and participates in a few raunchy simulated sex scenes. The game cast has a field day with the loopy material: Micky Dolenz as a clumsy myopic bus driver, Val Bisoglio as a raving lunatic preacher, Garry Goodrow as a crazy Nazi, Joey Forman as a kooky Chinese guy, Morgan Upton as a lecherous pedophile, and Chuck McCann as a bumbling hitman. Popping up in small roles are Art Metrano as a nutty sheik, Diane Lee Hart as a foxy harem girl, Scatman Crothers as a pool player, and Robbie Lee as a ditsy hillbilly hitchhiker. Although not much of an actress, Lovelace nonetheless has a bubbly and charming enough personality to keep this zany movie humming. A dippy hoot.

At a political convention staged in an open field, during which we're treated to such zaniness as Polish jokes and pie fights, "Deep Throat" star Linda Lovelace is chosen, unbeknownst to her, as candidate for President of the United States. Following this too-long-at-15-minutes intro, we see Linda address a crowd of admirers. "Thanks for coming," she tells the crowd, then, following embarrassed giggles, "I guess I'm really blowing it." More laughter. And these are the good jokes. Not that anyone would've expected any better from this sloppy farce that plays like a dirty-minded Three Stooges movie--only not that good. While everyone else in the movie overacts shamelessly (apparently cast members were directed to simply run around like idiots, shouting nonsense--in a "kooky" accent if possible--while the cameras rolled and everyone hoped for the best), Lovelace manages to walk through her movie with relative dignity. And walk through she does, wearing the type of pained smile one sees on wives enduring a visit from their mother-in-law, stopping occasionally to lose her dress, showing off her silicone-injected breasts and indulging in some simulated humping. Lovelace claimed, years later, that she was coerced into making "Deep Throat," yet she seemed so much more at ease and natural in that movie. It's "Linda Lovelace for President" that she seems to be making under duress. Along for a paycheck (and not a very big one) are Scatman Crothers and ex-Monkey Micky Dolenz in small roles. This rare pop culture oddity is worth a look if you can find a copy, though its entertainment value is solely derived from its unabashed awfulness and seeing the late Linda Lovelace make a pitiful attempt at launching a "legitimate" film career.

A country-looking, healthy-skinned, lithe and robust Linda Lovelace reads lines clunkily, but has a gentle, unpretentious charm in this Altman-derivative idjit jamboree, a sketch comedy about the state-of-the-art fellatrix's run for the Oval Office. (Yes, it IS oddly prescient!) In Lovelace's memoirs, the account of the making of this movie (directed, according to her, by old blaxploitation hand Arthur Marks) is hellacious; what's on the screen seems like a blend of HEE HAW and a Maoist-era Godard movie (in its cheapness and improvisatoriness, that is). I especially liked the young bohunk who married an orangutan and gave birth to a talking chimp who sounded somewhere between Minnie Pearl and Minnie Ripperton.

A TREMENDOUSLY ENTERTAINING FILM ON THE EXPLOITS OF A PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN BY NONE OTHER THAN LINDA LOVELACE. AFTER RECEIVING THE SUPPORT OF HER UNCLE SAM, LINDA DECIDES TO GIVE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT - A THIRD PARTY CANDIDATE. SEE A TALKING MONKEE, SEE A WHITE GIRL CALL A BLACK MAN "BLACK WHITE TRASH", SEE MICKY DOLENZ DRIVE A TOY BUS DOWN A NAKED GIRL'S HINEY. WHAT MORE COULD YOU ASK FOR?