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 This daughter of Fanny Hill is a "18th century courtesan who caters to royal
kink." Her clients include dukes and the Marquis de Sade. They say there is a
"surprise shock ending" and also lie by telling you that this movie is a
"lavishly produced sexploitation gem resplendent with hoop skirts, sex, powdered
wigs, sex, harpsichord music, and of course, sex." The only thing lavish
about this movie is the boxcopy. 1966, 72 minutes, DVD
This allegedly erotic film is a day in the life of Kissy Hill, the daughter of
Fanny Hill. Since I spend most non-working hours helping out to put on
shows to save our community center (when I'm not delivering meals to
retarded shut-ins), I had no idea who this Fanny Hill was. I figured she must
have been a pretty important person if they were making a movie about her
daughter. So I fired up the web and was shocked, shocked I tell you, to find
out that this Fanny Hill character was a common trollop! It turns out that
Fanny was a hooker back in the 1700s in England in a novel that John Cleland
penned back in 1749. It told the tale of a country girl who goes to the city
to get laid as much as possible for money and ends up the Queen of England or
something (I think this plot was recycled in the John Goodman hit King Ralph). Those of living in the land of the free, home of the brave, play ball, etc.
had to wait until 1966 to see this book legally. Apparently it was banned
because it had a lot of naughty bits and the U.S. Supreme Court had to decide
whether us Yankees were mature enough to handle its steamy contents. Now I
guess that dirty old John Cleland had some problems
back in merry ole England hisself when he decided to put his dirty thoughts to
paper and ended up serving a little time in the pokey for his book that
probably didn't begin with "It was the best of times, it was the worst of
times" but instead started with something along the lines of "I always thought
that the stories of hookers who made it in the big city were false, until it
happened to me." But what about the movie? Is it a worthy successor to the
novel?
Um, if you mean, should the filmmakers go to jail, then the answer would have
to be a resounding yes. The way they turn a softcore costume drama into an
exercise of boring and aimless romps in the bedroom is positively
criminal.  The trashy-looking Stacey Walker (I kept getting a Tonya Harding vibe. Is she
still living in her Corvette, by the way?) stars as Kissy Hill and she does
little more in this movie than make pouty faces at us and spends most of her
time putting on and taking off her stockings. They really needed to hire
someone to be in charge of continuity in this epic bowel obstruction because
sometimes Kissy would be wearing sheer black stockings and other times she
would be back to having on black fishnet stockings in the same scene (do you
think that
maybe they shot out of sequence here?). This is one of those deals where all
hope is lost once the movie begins, any chance for a bawdy good time
evaporating as a parade of amateur porn-star wannabes introduce themselves and
their characters while this minimalist harpsichord music churns repetitively in
the
background. You'll be longing for your favorite porn guitar riffs before long
(I prefer something along the lines of "Peter North: Movement in D Minor"
myself) as well as your favorite porn tape. The concept (and I use that term
rather loosely) of this film is that Kissy wakes up, gets dressed for us
(thanks for that - we'll wait outside) and then her man servant (seems to have
a bit of lisp to go along with his very tight blue tights) periodically
announces her gentlemen callers. The first is the Duke of Roxbury. He is an
old dude and I wondered where you get sixty year old guys who are willing to
appear in a film like this (Can you imagine your grandfather appearing in a
movie about patronizing a hooker?) and remember this was B.V. (Before Viagra).
The Duke makes out with her a little bit and then Kissy busts out the free
buffet. Is this a whorehouse or a casino? They spend many long minutes with
the Duke snarfing down as much food as his spastic colon can hold, all the
while Kissy plays footsie with him under the table. Finally, he's done and
instead of undoing the top of his pants, asking to have his finger pulled, and
then napping the rest of the afternoon as most elderly guys do after a heavy
meal, he rolls into bed with her and begins the first of the memorably bad
love scenes (note: all the love scenes involve rolling around and lots of
sloppy kissing and that's it). It all ends with stuff breaking and the Duke
unconscious from Kissy's good loving (hey, there's that nap he should have
taken right after dinner). As bad as that sequence was, the worst was still
around the corner.  The next slug that Lackey (or whatever his name is) shows in, is the Count de
Sade. The Count is into some pretty twisted and ultimately laughable stuff.
This particular Count is a big, fat sweaty dude (you could see several
characters breaking a sweat in this film - these out of shape losers need to
tone up and work on their cardio if they're going to be in a movie that
requires them to wear powdered wigs and breeches) and it makes you wonder if
this movie wasn't crafted as some kind of wish fulfillment stuff for lard-ass
guys that fancy themselves a bit on the sophisticated side (It isn't dirty -
it's bawdy because it takes place in olden times!). That's great, but whose
wish involves seeing flabby guys mucking around on screen? Now, the Count
likes Kissy to slap him and she does that sort of half-heartedly, then she goes
to the trunk of toys and the next thing you know she's putting on cowboy boots
and breaking out the whip. So this guy gets whipped on his back, but I'm
thinking about what a rank amateur this dude is because she's just kind of
tapping him on his jacket. Shoot, that ain't a whipping, that's just a
tickling. Then his shirt gets pulled up and I suddenly realized that I had
just been victimized by the old "be careful what you ask for" saw. It's
interesting how the cameraman managed to pick the least flattering angle to
shoot this Oliver Platt sized guy because we get to see his gut protruding on
the floor and I was thinking that surely there was one guy that didn't load up
on KFC that could have been hired in Tubby's place. Kissy also kind of walks
on him and the viewer was left concerned for her safety, lest she disappear
between his rolls. After this, the Count tells her he has a new game called
"hide
the ruby" or something. This involved him throwing gumdrops into her belly
button and then eating (really?) them. At this point I was on the verge of
playing "hide the revolver in my mouth". 
The next guy Kissy has on her docket is a hillbilly who came from his farm
because of Kissy's fame. I think there's a little talk about how all he's ever
done is kiss his cows or something. I think those of us in the Biz call that
foreplay. They get jiggy with it and I don't recall anything else about that
encounter. After each session, Kissy writes in her journal about the
experience. These are usually about one ten word sentence that say something
like, "There are men and then there are men." This gave the film a Doogie
Howser quality allowing the viewer to gain insight into the lessons that Kissy,
and the audience by extension, had learned from each whoring episode. Of course
those lessons were limited to stuff like "There are stupid, boring movies and
there are Kissy Hill movies." Next up in the sexual olympics is the team
competition. Kissy's friends show up and they all decide to play these little
sex games that are remarkable only in their lack of imagination. The lead guy
(a bald dude that looks like a yucky cross between Yul Brenner and Smashing
Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan) starts the first game by having the girls
sniff something (good thing they didn't use this movie - those suckers would
have passed right out) and the first one to sneeze does a little striptease for
them. All of their games involve someone doing a striptease. This is awful
because you get a succession of gals fumbling around with their costumes,
unable to undo them (it's called dress rehearsal!), but allowing the film to
be padded out to a toxic 72 minutes. The other game involves who can throw a
dart closest to the bullseye (Yawn, when are you breaking out the Yahtzee
set?). Then they couple up and go at in front of the others, though in a very
discreetly filmed manner. If you're looking for copious amounts of nudity
here, forget it. If you're looking for copious amount of fat guts, then the de
Sade sequence will surely quench your thirst. After a hard day of humping everything on hind legs, Kissy retires for a well
deserved (and medically necessary) bubble bath. Some woman shows up and tells
the man-servant that Kissy and her are old friends and that she'll just show
herself in to the bathtub. She comes in and tells Kissy that she's heard a lot
about her and that she can see why men would give up everything for her (heck,
I gave up 14 bucks, that's pretty much everything for most us here in the
trailer park) and generally sucks up to Kissy. This is where the best part of
the movie comes in. This woman reveals she is the wife of the Duke (old dude
that liked all that food) and she's not appreciative of the work that Kissy has
taken off her hands. Kissy ends up smothered or something in her bed and the
movie shows its only smarts by leaving the audience cheering their fool heads
off that this boring skank is now roasting in hell besides the filmmakers
(please tell me they're dead!). This was as pleasant an experience as one of
the STDs that Kissy surely picked up and passed along in her career. Not more
explicit than most of your modern soap operas and having so little character or
style that absolutely no one will enjoy it (porn hounds, bad movie fans, and
any other human on earth, included). A series of badly staged love affairs
does not a movie make. Now, the disc does have a bunch of extras, but who in
their right mind could ever bring themselves to sit through them? After seeing
her in this, do any of you want to watch Stacey Walker play volleyball (well
other than to see if she gets it spiked in her face)? Does anyone really want
to listen to the producers commentary ("Uh, okay this is that crappy scene
where ugly guys humped Kissy, and oh, you might be interested to see that this
is a crappy scene where a fat guy threw gumdrops on Kissy"). The most chilling
thing about this disc is that there are trailers for movies with titles like Fanny Hill Meets Dr. Erotico, Fanny Hill Meets Lady Chatterley, Fanny Hill Meets The Red Baron (Come on!) and The Lustful Turk. The only question I have about all this is how bad are those movies if The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill was the first to be released on DVD? The mind simply goes limp, like a fat guy
out
of gumdrops.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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