Any Which Way You Can (1980)

ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN

ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN (1980) Three stars
If I believed in feeling any guilt whatsoever about feeling pleasure, I might call ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN a guilty pleasure.

It’s another one of those sublimely ridiculous movie packages that I can’t help but not to like. I mean, it could play on a double bill with ROAD HOUSE.

We all have “guilty pleasures,” and they form one of the most rewarding experiences that we can have at the movies.

If you describe ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN as a movie with a little bit of everything, that’s still selling it short. I mean, it’s not every day that you have Clint Eastwood in a comedic role, an orangutan named Clyde (played by Buddha and C.J., although there’s no screen credit) who steals every scene that he’s in, a concluding fight scene that can go head-to-head with the later ROCKY sequels and THEY LIVE, a buffoonish motorcycle gang, Ruth Gordon (1896-1985) in what can only be called the “Ruth Gordon” role, and a country song played seemingly every few seconds.

This is the only motion picture that starts with an Eastwood and Ray Charles duet on a little ditty over the opening credits named “Beers for You.”

Personally, I feel the movie could have used more Clyde scenes — more “Right Turn Clyde,” more flipping the bird, more smashing cars, et cetera — and fewer scenes between Eastwood and his real-life partner at the time Sondra Locke. Locke generally became the weak link in Eastwood’s films of the period, and both EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE and ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN dramatically prove that as Eastwood demonstrates better chemistry with the orangutan than Locke.

Back to Clyde and Buddha and C.J. Buddha and C.J. assumed the Clyde role for the sequel since Manis — who alone played the role in EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE — apparently had grown too much between films. Manis returned to his act in Las Vegas.

Reports have it Buddha alone played the role in ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN and C.J. came on in publicity because Buddha was caught stealing doughnuts on the set near the end of filming and he was brought back to his training facility and beaten for 20 minutes, according to the book “Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People” by Jane Goodall and Dale Peterson.

Buddha then died soon after of a cerebral hemorrhage.

C.J. went on to star in Bo Derek’s TARZAN THE APE MAN and a NBC sitcom named MR. SMITH.

Executive producer Ed Weinberger said of C.J. in the Washington Post, “It’s a Buddha-like presence. He has wisdom about him. You have to know the animal; I’m in love with him. I’d have him in my house any time.”

MR. SMITH lasted all of 13 episodes from Sept. 22 through Dec. 16 in 1983 and finished a dismal 95th in the Nielsens.

So much for a talking orangutan and who knows if Weinberger had C.J. over at his house after the show flopped big time.

I remember loving ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN as a young child. It was an affinity for Clyde. He’s what I remembered about the movie for many years before I revisited it decades later.

Not every movie I loved in childhood holds up revisited in adulthood. For example, CANNONBALL RUN, an entertainment I found to be an endurance contest several years back. (For the record, I recently watched SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT, another childhood favorite, again and it held up. I enjoyed Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jerry Reed, and Jackie Gleason.)

ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN is not quite at the same high level as COMMANDO, LONE WOLF McQUADE, and ROAD HOUSE.

That’s because it’s a little flabby with a running time of 1 hour, 56 minutes. Granted, that concluding fight scene between Eastwood and William Smith eats up a good 10 percent of a nearly two-hour experience.

LONE WOLF McQUADE and ROAD HOUSE do have similar run times, but fewer bad scenes than ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN.

The great director Howard Hawks (1896-1977), born the same year as Ruth Gordon, said that a good movie is “three great scenes and no bad ones.” Not sure that he had movies like ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN in mind, which does have three great scenes but also some bad ones.

ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN, though, is one of those sequels better than the original.

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

DAY 99, INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS.jpg

INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS (1973) Three-and-a-half stars
Granted, you know yourself better than anybody else, but tell me if this tagline / synopsis just doesn’t hook you in right away: “A powerful cosmic force is turning Earth women into queen bees who kill men by wearing them out sexually.”

I mean, sign me up to watch that movie!

Did Valerie Solanas — author of the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto and famous for her attempted assassination of Andy Warhol — write INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS?

Not even close, because INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS gives us a Grade-A B-nudie flick and you know that when the most prudish character is played by a former Playmate of the Year (Victoria Vetri, when she went under the name Angela Dorian).

Anyway, future STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN and TIME AFTER TIME scribe and director Nicholas Meyer wrote this one and it’s something that he can be proud about. I mean, it’s something that I would be proud about writing.

Apparently not, since Meyer wanted to have his name removed from the credits before his manager talked the Hollywood newcomer down. Upon further research, Meyer’s script had been altered while he visited his family, hence that whole wanting his name stricken from the permanent record.

I bet folks ask him all the darn time about THE WRATH OF KHAN and TIME AFTER TIME, and understandably so, but how about INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS, a film that I believe rates with THE WRATH OF KHAN and TIME AFTER TIME on an entertainment level.

I don’t know, I enjoyed this film like I enjoyed Russ Meyer classics FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! and BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS and let’s face it that I’m amused by such a ridiculous premise and I’m turned on by the women in this film like I am the women in FASTER PUSSYCAT and BEYOND THE VALLEY.

In his IMDb profile, William Smith’s biography starts “Biker, bare-knuckle brawler, cowboy, Bee-Girl fighter, vampire hunter … William Smith has done it all.” Over a long career, you might remember him for being at odds with Joe Namath in the biker flick C.C. AND COMPANY (1970) or being Clint Eastwood’s fisticuffs opponent in ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN (1980), which could go 15 rounds with THEY LIVE’s fight scene between Roddy Piper and Keith David.

Obviously, William Smith’s government agent Neil Agar can hang with the bizarre world of INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS.

Ultimately, though, it’s not about him and the beautiful women, led by Anitra Ford’s Dr. Susan Harris and the Brandt Research Facility, and the dirty old men here make the horny scientists in TOWER OF EVIL (1972) chaste in comparison. Look up “horny scientist flick” and INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS should be depicted with the incredible bee girl transformation sequence filed Exhibit A.

I can’t go without mentioning the line “They’re dropping like flies.” I love it every single line, every single time. If I would have had the opportunity to meet late character actor Cliff Osmond (1937-2012), I would have made him read me that line.

Other taglines for INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS: “They’ll Love the Very Life Out of Your Body!”, “Ordinary housewives turn into ravishing creatures,” and “They’ll Turn You on from Dusk to Dawn.”

Other titles for INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS: “The Honey Factor” (working); “Alien Predators” (bootleg); “Graveyard Tramps” (reissue). On French TV, the movie plays as INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS.

You can find copies of INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS everywhere, since its D-cups are public domain.

I came across it on at least two different cheapie 50-movie horror packs from Mill Creek that stack up public domain titles ranging from classics like NOSFERATU and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD to less than classics, some of them so bad that I don’t want to even name them.

MGM packaged INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS with INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES during its epic “Midnite Movies Double Feature” DVD series.

There’s also INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS packaged with THE DEVIL’S 8, UNHOLY ROLLERS, and VICIOUS LIPS on the “4 Cult Movie Marathon Volume One” DVD … and the Bee Girls also have a Scream Factory solo Blu-Ray release.