Kitty Litter: SEX KITTENS GO TO COLLEGE (Allied Artists 1960)

Let’s get it out of the way right now- SEX KITTENS GO TO COLLEGE is bad. Real bad. Like mind-numbingly bad. Despite the presence of sex kittens Mamie Van Doren and Tuesday Weld, this movie is a smelly litter box in desperate need of cleaning. It’s an Albert Zugsmith extravaganza, so you know right off the bat it’s gonna be a stinker. Zugsmith had once been a producer at Universal, overseeing prestige films like WRITTEN ON THE WIND and TOUCH OF EVIL. But when he went into independent productions, Zugsmith chose to go the low-budget exploitation route and even though he managed to attract some well-known names, his little epics usually stunk to high heaven.

The movie revolves around the talents of Mamie Van Doren, a beautiful creature whose best assets weren’t her acting. She plays Dr. Mathilda West, a genius hired to take over the science department at Collins College. Thinko, a supercomputer/robot type thing, recommended her without realizing she was once Tassels Montclair, a stripper known as the Tallahassee Tassel Tosser. Yuk yuk. All the men on campus go gaga over her because she has blonde hair and big hooters. Yuk yuk yuk.

There’s really not a lot of plot to describe. Tuesday Weld’s boyfriend, the inimitable Norman “Woo Woo” Grabowski, is the captain of the football team who’s afraid of women. Yuk yuk. Mickey Shaughnessy and Allan Drake are two gangsters hunting down “Sam Thinko”, who’s bleeding their boss dry by winning all his bets, not realizing it’s the computer/robot thing. Yuk yuk. Brigitte Bardot wasn’t available, so they got her little sister Mijanou to play an exchange student doing “research” on American men. Yuk yuk yuk. Louis Nye makes an inauspicious film debut as Thinko’s creator Dr. Zorch, and his assistant is none other than Vampira (not in costume, though)! Pamela Mason is dean of students who’s hot for rich Texas school benefactor Jackie Coogan. Martin Milner (billed as Marty) is on hand as an administrator; he’s also credited as associate producer so he should’ve known better. John Carradine is a horny professor; he and Mamie dancing the Charleston and Tango together is probably the film’s highlight.

Conway Twitty is here to sing one unmemorable song. There’s some monkeyshines with Mamie’s per chimp Voltaire. And for some reason, Charlie Chaplin Jr and Harold Lloyd Jr were hired to do bit parts as a fireman and policeman, respectively. Why? Who knows? All I know is that the thing plays like an extended burlesque skit, and a pretty lousy one at that. The only interesting tidbit I dug up while researching this mess is that Drake was a stand-up comic whose claim to fame was that his wife was having an affair with Mafioso Anthony “Little Augie” Carfano, and both were found executed in Little Augie’s Cadillac a year before Drake made this bomb.

You can probably tell I really don’t have much to say about this piece of crap except to tell you to avoid it, unless all the above nonsense appeals to you in some kind of perverse way. Don’t torture yourselves the way I did by sitting through this turkey. It’s my job to view schlock like this; you have other options!