Succumb (1970)
Size : 682MB
Resolution : 480x360 (4:3)
Duration : 01.15.06
Stars: Charles Orlando, Paul Scharf and Kay White
User Review : The substandard porn film LEI'D IN HAWAII was recycled, with tons of added XXX footage and a whole new voiced-over "storyline" to yield SUCCUMB, an incomprehensible exercise in tedium. I didn't attend adult grindhouses back in its day, but it did bring back bad memories of the "insert new title card" approach that I had to suffer through with many a softcore drive-in feature.
The principle is simple: take a few scenes from a film, add some generic porn footage, and then re-dub or narrate the resulting mess as if it were a movie. The only point of interest here is the insulting nature of the narration, which I will document later.
For buffs interested in such minutiae, matters are further complicated by the fact that LEI'D IN HAWAII currently exists in two radically different versions, DVD vs DVD-R, with different story lines. SUCCUMB includes Hawaiian-shot footage from each version, but adds a ton of generic porn about two hookers back in L.A. lifted directly from the 1973 film HOOKER'S HOLIDAY. At several points the narrator pre-empts audience "WTF?" reactions by baldly asking of the hookers' story: "was there any connection with Myra?", the heroine here. Answer: no.
Myra is shown in recycled LEI'D footage going off with cult leader Peter to an island "southeast of Molokai". That tipped me off as to this film's ancestry, as I had just reviewed both versions of LEI'D in August, and this same Molokai reference was retained. For SUCCUMB the character is renamed Peter, and he has an odd, drugged-out henchman named Hung Tu (!) who is played by an Occidental, smacking of those bad old '30s racist days when leading Oriental character roles in Hollywood films were generally played by Caucasian thesps (unlike the earlier Silent Era when Sessue Hayakawa and Anna May Wong were stars).
Myra's been kidnapped and we get to see her (or a double) in XXX scenes mauled by both male and female slaves of Peter & Hung Tu. It's not clear what the age is of the footage. Although IMDb has listed 1970 for SUCCUMB (probably randomly chosen date), at one point Myra is fingered by a female slave with such excruciatingly tight closeup photography that the index finger actually looks like a case of fisting! This new footage, plus the 1973 scenes from HOOKER'S HOLIDAY, has led me to re-estimate SUCCUMB's release date as 1975.
Anyway, per our humble narrator, we are treated to endless scenes of 2 prostitutes back in Burbank, having sex with a couple of Johns, and then supposedly two "agents" of the narrator (!). This bloats the overall running time to a whopping 75 minutes, way too long for an all-sex movie of the '70s. The identity of the original film from which the hooker scenes were lifted escapes me.
The narration obfuscates rather than explains, and is fraudulent on its face when at one point Peter (the artist formerly known as Tiki) is used in one scene as the arch-villain, and just a few seconds later is picking up a phone as supposedly another character who is a good guy. Film ends with a very lame reprise of the original plot of LEI'D that daddy back home was sending HIS agents (including the narrator (!)) to look after Myra and her pal, cueing the same rescue footage that ends LEI'D. It's all a jumble and not worth trying to really sort out.
Clearly the filmmakers were trying to stretch any and all footage to make a few extra bucks, similar to the horrible Jerry Warren sci-fi/horror efforts that define paste-up jobs for genre fans. What irritates me in retrospect is that the perpetrators of this sort of garbage assume implicitly that their audience is brain-dead, when in fact the folks whose minds have been evidently destroyed by drugs are the filmmakers themselves.
Abominable Muzak soundtrack is mainly Beatles tunes: "Help!", "Daytripper", "Girl", "And I Love Her", "Try and See It My Way" and "Nowhere Man", buttressed by oh-so-sleepy renditions of '60s hits including "I Will Follow Him" (minus Little Peggy March), "Blue Velvet", "Sweet Memories", "Country Roads", "Don't Say Nothing' Bad About My Baby", "How Do You Mend a Broken Heart", "Our Day Will Come" and even the standard "It's Impossible".
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Suc_cumb_1970.avi
Undulations (1980)
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