Inside the AGFA Laboratory: THINGS TO COME (1976) and THE DIRTY DOLLS (1973)

Austin, TX is one of those places where you can trace a certain strain of cult-ish movie-loving back to a discrete cadre of people and the institutions that trusted their particular visions of bizarre and fantastical niche creation. If you love(d?) going to the movie theater for group experiences and you’ve lived in Austin more than 5 years, there’s a 100% chance you ended up at The Ritz on a Terror Tuesday or Weird Wednesday for a $2 movie and a riotous, often one-of-a-kind print of some forgotten genre treasure. (It’s the Demon Wind and Vincent Price-led Masque of the Red Death for me!) More recently, that crate digger spirit got spread across a couple locations when the Drafthouse-led TT and WW moved over to Fantastic Fest headquarters at South Lamar and the fam kicked off first Deep End and then Lates at Austin Film Society. We’ve got our programmer patron saints to thank for initiating a whole slice of the movie-going public into these communal hallucinatory experiences — Lars Nilsen, Laird Jimenez, Jazmyne Moreno, Joe Ziemba, and most likely a handful of others whose names are unknown to a looky-loo like me.

The lore’s out there if you’re the type of completist conditioned to look for it — tales of ragtag Kinko’s and taxis and a young Tim League scouring talent in unlikely places — it’s a lore that feels pulled straight from a draft of Slacker, lore that makes you think Austin probably “was like that, once,” even when you’ve become too jaded by the Musk-relocations and the jet-setting COVID-flaunting mayors and the scab purchases of Beerlands to think that it ever really was. I mean, who knows? Nostalgia is a cruel filter, but sometimes you gotta pull down some slick shades to mellow out the desert of the real’s harsh glare. 

Anyhow, point being, American Genre Film Archive has grown in part out of pieces of that lore and passions of those peoples, and in the right frame of mind, watching these unearthed, precious-ly restored genre fantasias feels like mainlining a maybe-real, maybe-imagined Austin past. Both of the films presented here (especially The Dirty Dolls), restored by AGFA from the only known 35mm prints IN EXISTENCE, feature all the glorious imperfections and cigarette burns and crackles your heart could possibly desire. It feels like pulling into a sweaty grindhouse drive-in in the middle of summer, windows down, bottle of cheap wine in hand, pack of cigarettes going when you were young enough to casually unlink them from your imminent demise. Let’s go!

Both of the films reviewed here are AGFA’s Smut Without Smut cuts of the film. From what I can gather after reading some other reviews of the unaltered films, AGFA trims the fat (AKA soft-core, apparently mostly boring, titillation) from these versions, presenting a healthier helping for the benefit of your screen-saturated arteries. But don’t worry, the discs come with the uncut versions too for all you pervs! (Can’t wait, personally.)

THINGS TO COME

First up is Derek Todd’s 1976 Things to Come, a much hornier Westworld with a Shyamalan twist. We open on Julie, a therapist fielding castration fantasies at work and a benumbed, TV-addled idiot husband at home (men, amirite) in a world, tbh, much like this one but with some Flash Gordon fashion sense! Gen pop is brain-beat and kept in line by a constant drip of TV (at least they get Porn Operas, that sounds fun) and the promise of a lottery-selected Transcendental Orgy at the Pleasure Dome. It should be noted that, should you balk at the opportunity to engage in a coke-fueled hedonistic rampage of sex and robo-hunting, you’re apt to get tracked down and fucked to death by some hooded hotties. Buyer beware.

Full disclosure: I am quite new to this particular brand of low-budget genre exploitation flicks, shame on me I know. Working on it! So this might be obvious but here goes. To me, genre films generally serve one of two purposes. They either provide a complete, phantasmagorical escape from reality (James Bond writ large, Guardians of the Galaxy, Coming to America, Planet Terror) or they function to  thin out a layer of metaphor, allowing a story to cleave more closely to some social truth or message (The Manchurian Candidate, Arrival, The Producers). Sometimes, like here, those things overlap and we get both! There is such primordial pleasure in seeing these mostly unknown actors TAKE THEIR SHOT with on-the-nose speeches like “The government found out that sex and violence were what the people wanted, and the scientists found out that sex and violences wasn’t really harmful to viewers, rather was a great pacifier, eliminating tensions and anxieties. The only trouble is it turned people into voyeurs, passive, easy to manipulate, which was just fine with the government.” I mean, same. Another gem: “Isn’t that funny? Remember women’s lib?”

I’ll hit one more standout moment from this flick and then encourage you to watch the dang thing for pleasure and health. Some context: the pleasure dome where Julie gets sent for work (a secret underground mission of disruption) and pleasure (robo-fucking) is completely staffed by ultra life-like Pleasure Units, androids who are tailor-made to satisfy any desire dreamt up by the guests. At one point, after she’s shunted off several Pleasure Dome-initiated pleasure efforts and post zilch-helpful personality test, Julie is thrust into the arms of a slimy slimy greaser unit who takes her to a drive-in and fires off zingers like “Come on snake, let’s crawwwwl!” In an effort to buy time and distract the world’s pushiest, horniest robot, she sends him out on a mission for popcorn. While he’s waiting on snax from another pleasure unit worker, he strikes up a conversation basically complaining about his charge’s, uh, frigidity; the weird thing is, though, there are no humans around! We get this scene of two androids chatting with no human audience… filmic oversight or sly commentary/expectations adjustment around the interior life of ‘bots? Either way, it makes the various Most Dangerous Game With Robots sequences all the more sickly. (Ed. note: perhaps all is not as it seems, but still.) 

In the end, I feel like we all learned something here today: to bone in the back seat is divine, to bone in the trunk is pittsville. 

THE DIRTY DOLLS

At a lightning-fast 50 minutes, this groovy little diamond-stealing, Manson-family vibing, incest-touting number is a quick and dirty ride. Had one too many Summer-of-Love bubblies? Here’s your Pedialite.

After a couple of poorly executed robberies, one perpetrated by a tambourine-toting “God Squad” and one featuring a gleefully DIY crumpled-up-toilet-paper old lady face mask, most of the film takes place in the crew’s forest hideout with a couple of hostages in tow. We’ve got Johnny, the gang leader who’s “all man” and oozing cult leader charisma, we’ve got his sister Deedee, and we’ve got three other robber ladies plucked from exploitation central casting. They bop back and forth, fucking Johnny and porno-situation-ing the hostages and musing about where to find diamond fences after their first option buggers off. Cigarettes being a theme here, WOW did this movie make me want one. Is there any better prop than an effortless cig dangling from practiced fingers?

I’m a sucker for movies that make Choices, so I’ve gotta end with this big swing. After siblings Johnny and Deedee seal the deal in a Biblical sense, she gets asked by her hostage crush: “Are you alright?” Her answer: “For once in my life, yes.” “I’m your sister” indeed.

Product details:

SMUT WITHOUT SMUT: THINGS TO COME + THE DIRTY DOLLS (AGFA)

- New 2K preservations from the only known 35mm prints in existence

- “Smut Without Smut” and uncut versions included

- Commentary track on THINGS TO COME (“Smut Without Smut” version) with the AGFA team

Available to purchase here when the site is open.