“Mau Mau Sex Sex” is undoubtedly the most provocative title of the year. What’s great fun about the film is that it is like a peek behind the Great Oz’s curtain. And surprise! He’s back there cackling up a storm. Actually, there are two of them: Dan Sonney and David Friedman, the pioneering hustlers who gleefully fleeced the moviegoing public from the 1930’s through the 60’s. These venerated scamsters are part of the American tradition of turning the forbidden into a three-ring circus and profit center. In “Mau Mau Sex Sex”, the fun is contagious! -Elvis Mitchell, New York Times
The film follows Mr. Friedman and Mr. Sonney as they return to some of their old haunts — skid row theaters and tiny studios — swapping outrageous stories as they go. They’re the Sunshine Boys of smut! -David Kehr, New York Times
Delightful…Affectionate. -Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times
This spirited documentary shows us the hazards of filming volleyball at nudist camps and the marketing possibilities of women mating with gorillas. -New York Daily News
Four stars! Joe Bob says check it out. (Dan Sonney and David Friedman) who were once considered enemies of the church, smut-peddlers, and embarrassments to the film industry itself come off as the normal ones, especially when compared to coke-sniffing degenerates like Don Simpson, who produced “Top Gun” and other hits and whose biography drips sleaze all over your fingers. Dan and Dave were, in the final analysis, a couple of swell guys, quaint, old-fashioned, and unfailingly good-humored. You’ll enjoy hanging out with ‘em. – Joe Bob Briggs /United Press International
A Genuine American Success Story -Chicago Tribune
David Friedman and Dan Sonney are the uncles we all wish for. They’re guys who tell great anecdotes and have a business that makes the rest of the family a little afraid. -Boston Herald
Ogle a century’s worth of cinematic sex. Ted Bonnitt’s engaging documentary offers a trove of campy, cheesy, titillating and historically significant clips. -Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer
An entertaining look at exploitation flicks made from the 1930s through the late 1960’s. Hilariously innocent by contemporary standards. -Lou Lumenick, New York Post
A perfect time to relish yesteryear’s schlock cinema. -New York Village Voice
A wry documentary visit with two showmen who devoted their careers to developing, expanding, and profiting from the exotic world of exploitation movies. -David Sterritt , Christian Science Monitor
This documentary is a win-win situation. Plop two dirty old men, who happened to make exploitation films of all varieties–sex odysseys, torture flicks, space spoofs and movies where native women mate with gorillas–and just let them go. A perfectly-conceived idea–this is a one-time kinda deal. -Philadelphia Weekly
Conveys the sheer delight of watching these bizarre movie artifacts. -TV Guide
Ted Bonnitt’s documentary stays abreast of the many genres and eras that Sonney and Friedman leapt through in search of the long green, and it provides a portrait of the (con) artists as old men. Viewers don’t just get to see nudity and gore galore; they also witness Friedman’s wife reacting to his infidelities with droll witticisms and Freudian slips, and they learn about Sonney’s idea of a good movie for his Catholic churchmates (a documentary portrayal of childbirth). Break out the cigars! -San Francisco Bay Guardian
“You’ll salivate at the prospect of ”Mau Mau Sex Sex,” -Boston Globe
It is fun to see these movies. Because for better — and mostly for worse — we will not see their like again. -Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger
A love letter to a nearly forgotten corner of American pop culture’s underground. -Variety
A fond trip down mammary lane. There’s no shortage of archival naughty bits on display, and the two subjects are bona fide characters. -Hollywood Reporter
It’s fun hanging out with these two old thieves; Sonney and Friedman sold sensationalism bluntly and frankly, and enjoyed every minute of it. -L.A. Weekly
A delightful visit with two unheralded indie cinema veterans with a surplus amount of anecdotes and zany film clips. -FilmThreat.com
Excellent! Debuting documentarian Ted Bonnitt does an ace job explicating and celebrating the exploitation films of yore in this affectionate, informative winner. -The Phantom, Videoscope Magazine
The most entertaining and hysterical documentary I’ve seen in a long, long time! I cannot recommend this enough. This is the film that should be shown to every film class in the world. The text, the bible, the film of sex and sleaze of a bygone era! -CultCuts Magazine
Hilarious! Funnier then any Jack Lemmon-Walter Matthau teaming- Plays like Grumpy Old Perverts! -Willamette, Portland, OR
The New York Times
‘Mau Mau Sex Sex’: The Fun Behind the Scenes in Sleaze and Exploitation
By Elvis Mitchell
“Mau Mau Sex Sex” is undoubtedly the most provocative title of the year, though Ted Bonnitt’s documentary on the golden age of exploitation — cheaply made pictures that found any excuse to get their stars to doff their tops — is only skin deep. What’s great fun about the film is that it is like a peek behind the Great Oz’s curtain. And surprise! He’s back there cackling up a storm. Actually, there are two of them: Dan Sonney and David Friedman, the pioneering hustlers who gleefully fleeced the moviegoing public from the 1930’s through the 60’s. These venerated scamsters are part of the American tradition of turning the forbidden into a three-ring circus and profit center.
So it makes sense that “Mau Mau Sex Sex,” which opens today at the Cinema Village, finds Mr. Friedman fine-tuning the midway of a carnival he owns in Alabama, making sure that policemen get free tickets so they’re around “in case of trouble.” He revels in his own sleaziness while imparting his tales. “We will proceed to separate the suckers from their shekels,” he says. And he addresses the difficulties of nudist colony films: the colonists were unerotic, so he planted models in their midst, and it wasn’t easy to show the requisite volleyball games without revealing genitalia.
Mr. Friedman’s happiness is so infectious that you realize what is missing from reality shows like “Cops” and “America’s Most Wanted”: the joy criminals get from putting one over on the unwitting. If only more of his laugh-inducing movie posters, with borderline-explicit tag lines, were shown. Instead, we get the spectacle of seeing Mr. Friedman, who thinks of himself as “one of the leaders of the sexual revolution,” featured in one of his own films. And yes, he’s as crummy an actor as anyone he ever hired.
His sometime partner, Mr. Sonney, tells of getting his start in a manner so folkloric it could be the plot of an exploitation flick. His father, Louis, was a coal miner who managed to load 33 tons of coal in one day, an achievement that got him a job as a policeman. After arresting a well- known criminal, Mr. Sonney’s father was asked to star as himself in a film about his own life. This crude bio-pic has the dead echoes, harsh lighting and bad acting of every exploitation film ever made, and it inspired a move to California and a plunge into the movie business. Sonney’s father made a movie called “Maniac,” which bombed until it was rereleased as “Sex Maniac.” The gambit inspires Mr. Friedman to reiterate the Sonney philosophy: “A movie is like a flour sack; no matter how many times you shake it, a little more flour comes out.” And Mr. Sonney adds, “If it don’t, you just keep changing the title to get some more flour.”
That’s where “Mau Mau Sex Sex” comes from. Dan Sonney bought a 1950’s documentary about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and thought there wasn’t enough going on, so he added scenes of fake tribal violence and topless African women cavorting against an extraordinarily cheesy painted backdrop. “Mau Mau” failed to draw an audience. “It was like a travelogue,” Sonney groans. “If you’d put a name on it like `Mau Mau Sex Sex,’ that’s what sells.”
The documentary doesn’t provide enough context despite the hilarious and knowledgeable commentary from the horror film director and avid fan Frank Henenlotter, who sums up the films by saying, “Sometimes, watching them, you have to even wonder if they were made on the planet Earth.” The picture could have used John Waters, probably the world’s reigning expert on exploitation and a man who so loves the genre that he has devoted his career to it; his films are essentially throwbacks to the rock ’em, shock ’em school of filmmaking, with movies that ranged from “The Defilers” to the gore-and-nudity films of Hershell Gordon Lewis (whom Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader have cited as an influence).
It would not have hurt this film to make clear that exploitation movies, as innocent as they are now perceived to be, promulgated racism and sexism. An example is the 1930 sexploitation film “Forbidden Adventure,” which Mr. Henenlotter rightly describes as “jaw dropping.” It was a supposed documentary about explorers discovering a tribe of topless women who have sex with chimpanzees and gorillas — or rather, guys in gorilla suits; their urgency could probably be attributed to having to return the rented ape outfits. But Mr. Sonney and Mr. Friedman are fun-loving businessmen. “There’s a little bit of larceny in it,” Mr. Henenlotter says of the practice of their craft. In “Mau Mau Sex Sex,” the fun is contagious.
MAU MAU SEX SEX
Produced and directed by Ted Bonnitt; written by Eddie Muller and Mr. Bonnitt; director of photography, Mr. Bonnitt; edited by Mr. Bonnitt, Christopher Rowland and Mr. Muller; music by Eddie Baytos and the Nervis Brothers; released by Radio Pictures. At the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 80 minutes. This film is not rated.
With: Dan Sonney, David Friedman and Frank Henenlotter.