The Naked Zoo

Drugs N’ Kisses

The Naked Zoo
USA 1970
Directed by William Grefé  
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Okay, this one will have some spoilers.

The Naked Zoo is the fifth of the seven films presented in Arrow’s wonderful He Came From The Swamp - The William Grefé Collection. It’s also presented in its original, shorter cut... which had reshoots and re-edits by somebody else and included extra nudity and a performance by Canned Heat... plus the longer version (which I watched), which is the best assembly Grefé could get from multiple sources of his original director’s cut. Like The Psychedelic Priest (reviewed here), it’s a very loose film in that, although it has a set up and a great punchline to that introduction in the last few seconds of the film before the credits run, it’s got very little narrative structure at all and feels, for the most part, like a load of scenes put together almost randomly, to convey an attitude of the kind of drug and free love culture of the time rather than anything else.  

The film stars Steve Oliver as main protagonist Terry Shaw (and also antagonist, as far as I’m concerned), a writer of poetry who doesn’t have a publisher with enough cash to get his second book out and who sleeps with various young ladies throughout the course of the movie in his swinging, bachelor lifestyle but also sleeps with older women, using and abusing them to get their monetary gifts as a kind of gigolo. One of these older ladies is Mrs. Golden, played by Rita Hayworth in one of her last movie roles. There’s a nice story about how Grefé managed to get her agent to agree to her involvement in the They Came From The Swamp - The Films Of William Grefé  documentary (reviewed here), by dumping the initially declined and not nearly adequate amount of cash on her agent’s desk up front.

Miss Hayworth’s scenes are, it has to be said, the only real sequences which you could possibly credit with having any kind of traditional narrative or story follow through in them. Grefé managed to get a big name star to hang his movie on but I suspect he only had her for a few days so her scenes are few and far between but, scattered through the movie at intervals, between parties. And I do mean between parties, as the majority of the rest of the ‘action’ involves us following Terry as he goes from mood swing to mood swing at various ‘cool cat’ drugs and ladies parties, even going so far as to go nuts and start a camp fire in one apartment which, when viewed by today’s young ‘uns, probably looks more than a little strange. And, yeah, okay it is but it’s also not uncommon for stuff like this to be happening in films at the time, as a kind of ‘character short hand’ for just how free and liberal everyone is. Grefé tilts the camera, swings it around and does multiple visions within the frame to match the antics and drug trips of various characters and it all goes pretty well, even though a lot of the characters, including Terry, come off as pretty mean spirited and not fun people to be with.

The scenes with Rita Hayworth are the anchors for the whole story (such as it is) and things kick off when her wheelchair bound husband catches her and Terry 'in the act' and runs amok... okay, wheels around amok, firing a pistol and trying to kill them. He doesn’t succeed in this but does manage to accidentally kill himself by running his wheelchair into the fireplace and knocking his head. Terry abandons Mrs. Golden to sort it all out herself and assumes he is in her will, so he stands to inherit her cash. In a later scene near the end, he finds out about her heart condition, deliberately gives her the wrong psychedelic pills to exacerbate that condition and then gives her the scare of her life posing as her dead husband. She dies of a heart attack and... well, I guess she does leave him her money in the will because he gets his next book published and it’s a roaring success.

And it’s not a great film but it chugs along at its own pace just fine and I think I’m really beginning to like this director now. I’m grateful to Arrow for releasing this set because, there’s no way any of his titles would have grabbed my attention and now he’s definitely on my radar as someone to watch.

The great thing is it’s got a nice, twist reveal ending. And I almost didn’t see it coming because the format of the film as a rag tag bunch of scenes drifting together to make a whole really doesn’t tip you off to the fact that the film would have this kind of reveal... and it involves a character who the audience hasn’t met yet and is only briefly mentioned in a scene early in the movie. I saw it coming literally only one minute before it happens and, without giving anything away, if finishes the movie with a freeze frame moment where you know exactly what’s going to happen without the director actually showing it... which is a nice thing here. Sometimes a bit of restraint and holding back can certainly pay off.

All in all, I really quite liked The Naked Zoo, once I’d warmed up to it a bit. I’m not sure I’d know anyone in my circle of friends I would recommend it to and I’m not sure where the audience for this one is at these days but, I had a good time with it and, if you want to take that as a recommendation, then that’s fine by me.