DILDO HEAVEN Is a Campy Delight

“When life’s a mess and fraught with stress,” a chipper young woman raps over shots of puffy white clouds in a clear blue sky–– “reach for your dildo!” 

The mix of cuteness and raunch embodied in the original theme song that plays over the opening credits of Dildo Heaven (2002), newly restored by Muscle Distribution, is 200-proof Doris Wishman. Best known for her pioneering work in ‘60s softcore with films like Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965) and nudie cuties with snappy titles like Nude on the Moon (1961), Wishman, the Queen of Sexploitation, was working the register at a Miami sex shop by the time the ‘90s rolled around. The explosion of hardcore in the ‘70s hadn’t been to her taste, and after dabbling in the genre with Satan Was a Lady (1975), she retired from filmmaking for several decades. 

After striking up a friendship with avant-garde musician Tom Smith of To Live and Shave in LA, though, Wishman’s cult following began to develop at the end of the millennium. The acid-tongued octogenarian worked with fellow bad-tastemakers John Waters and Linnea Quigley on her last film, Each Time I Kill (2002), and was featured on Real Sex and Late Night with Conan O’Brien where she terrorized Conan and dryly made fun of Roger Ebert (another titan of sex flicks–– lest we forget he wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) for his dissatisfaction over the fact that Chesty Morgan’s 73-inch bust wasn’t exposed enough in her film Deadly Weapons (1974). “I’m sorry you’re frustrated,” she bawled, “is there anything I can do for you?” Weeks before her death at the ripe old age of ninety, Wishman debuted her shot-on-video return to cinema, Dildo Heaven, at the New York Underground Film Festival and received the warm reception she deserved as the most famous female director in the mid-century skinflick trade (Joe Bob Briggs once called her “the greatest female exploitation director in history”). Alas, the film was never distributed–– an oversight to her filmography that’s now, thankfully for Wishman heads, being rectified. 

For those uninitiated into the Wishmanverse, her films fall neatly into the realm of cult cinema for their combination of zany creativity, relative technical crudeness (her favorite way to transition from scene to scene is to have an actor walk their chest or crotch into the camera), and clear feminist take on the boys club that is softcore. They’re mostly no-budget melodramas loaded with sex, booze, and violence; her women are either sadists who take no prisoners or good hearted women in love with two-timing men (or they’re aliens/artists/athletes with an aversion to clothes–– but that’s a different matter). Their narratives are clear products of an American sense of self that’s long gone, a world where men drink scotch neat, women wear wigs on dates, and lounge music plays. 

Dildo Heaven may take place in 2002, but its heart remains firmly in 1965, and that contrast is one of the more delightful elements of this charming oddball work of exploitation cinema. After the rousing opening rap sets the tone somewhere in the key of a sex-ed episode of The Magic School Bus, a perky voiceover credited simply to “Everette” introduces us to our heroines: Three working girls, Lisa, Beth, and Tess, hellbent on seducing their bosses. Over the course of the film’s slim runtime, the three loll around their apartment in various states of undress trading stories of their misadventures and make various passes at the decidedly un-handsome objects of their desire, often wearing wigs, often while lounge music plays. In true Wishman fashion, it’s a story about gaining feminine self-respect, laughing at men, and getting laid as often as possible. 

Meanwhile, the women’s Peeping Tom neighbor Billy provides comic relief–– and an excuse to recycle footage from older Wishman films, mostly played on a television with a keyhole cut into a piece of paper stuck in front of it (“I needed more footage and I had no money!” she explained on Late Night). The end result of these voyeur sequences is frequently bizarre, verging on surrealistic. Billy peers through a shrub for example to find a bikini-clad woman seductively eating a banana at him, courtesy of The Immoral Three; he looks into an apartment to see a sapphic sequence from A Taste of Flesh obviously shot off a TV (stripes dance over the scene), making his astonishment that his diegetic “neighbors” are getting it on–– particularly given how many scenes show his actual neighbors watching other people getting it on, sometimes in scenes from the same film he’s now apparently not watching–– beautifully contrived. His antics are straight out of Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), the aesthetics closer to Lemon Stealing Whores. 

Somehow, Dildo Heaven’s mix of naughtie aughties shot-on-video mise-en-scène and mid-century sensibility manages to pack a double dose of nostalgia–– for The Room or Girls Gone Wild as well as Diary of a Nudist. A group of spray tanned topless women in g-strings dance for a surly muscle man on a yacht as old school bossa nova bubbles out of a radio. For a movie ostensibly about dildos, these girls are also surprisingly old fashioned about even the concept of a sex toy, leading to one adorable scene at the sex shop where Wishman worked in which the cashier brilliantly explains, “you just have to decide whether you want something that vibrates or something that’s just a dildo. That’s the difference between a dildo and a vibrator.” There are also out-and-out moments of magic realism in the film, from horniness-induced nightmare sequences of dildos being shaken in a woman’s face (the crews’ hands are visible at the bottom of the frame), to a scene involving a shady character named Dr. Faust that I simply won’t spoil. Aficionados of exploitation filmmaking and cult cinema will be tickled by this strangely sweet Wishman sex flick that wants to teach us all a valuable lesson: “when a current flame you’ve twice caught cheating claims that for you his heart’s still beating, send him away–– don’t let him stay! Reach for your dildo!”