WTF Watch: Kissin' Cousins (1964)

Watched:  11/15/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Gene Nelson

In this movie, Elvis comes down hard on the side of @#$%ing one's cousin(s). 

This is not me inferring something.  This is what happens in this movie from a few different angles. 

To be sure, one is hard pressed to find a more problematic movie than Kissin' Cousins (1964), the movie I watched last night.  And when people say they want to go back to a better America - I want to say "this America?  Cousin @#$%ing America?"  The contemporary reviews of this movie sure weren't great, but they also don't seem overly concerned with how this movie is about two things:  putting ICBM siloes on US soil and normalizing gettin' with yer kin.

It also features suggestions that the best way to win a woman is to pursue her relentlessly and a little bit violently, despite her express wishes.  It goes in hard for sexualizing the infantilization of women.  And probably a dozen other things, but those are some of the eye-poppers.

Like a lot of Elvis movies, it's not so much a musical as an excuse to roll out a new Elvis record.  There's some plot, but it's a framework to stop the eight minutes' worth of story for Elvis to sing a song.  In this way, it's not so much a musical - which uses songs to carry the story and have characters express themselves - as a series of music videos interspersed between goofily delivered plot points.

Elvis plays an Air Force pilot who is called in because the military wants to talk some Tennessee hillbillies into letting them put missiles on their land.  Those hillbillies don't take kindly to Gubmint Revenuers, but Elvis is from the area -and, it turns out, directly related to the folks who own the land.

It turns out Elvis's cousins are Pamela Austin and Yvonne Craig*, because having sex with your cousins is maybe more understandable if this is the case.  He also plays his own identical cousin, Jody - who is Elvis is worse clothes and a blonde wig.  It also features a roving horde of very horned up hillbilly women all looking for men.  

In this movie, Elvis sings a couple of songs about cousin @#$%ing, specifically.  He also sings about the fact he is definitely going to bang both of his cousins (who are sisters).  And his overpowering foot fetish (less controversial, I think).

Some fun things in this movie:  

Elvis will not stop groping Yvonne Craig.  Once the two are paired up, he will not stop rubbing her, and she even does the thing where the girl takes the guy's hand to say "ha ha... I like you, please stop using your full hand."  

There are no second takes.  There are a few scenes that are clearly not okay - like, someone falls over or they trip over each other's lines.  But they use those shots.  

Every once in a while you watch a movie and it feels a bit like maybe you took crazy pills before hitting play.  And this was that movie.  I selected this movie because I'd been watching the entertaining YouTube videos of This Aged Great!.  And they covered it, by going down a Patty Duke Show rabbit hole, and I had to salute that.  

I was a little bit afraid the video spoiled the movie and it wouldn't be much fun.  But.  My friends.  

As best as I can guess, one of two things happened.  

1. Someone became concerned only girls and/ or women wanted to see Elvis movies.  Guys might listen to Elvis records, but did they want to see him in Roustabout?  Maybe not.  So what has the appeal of one Elvis, but inverted?  Apparently - like 50 horned-up women in shorts and tight jeans.
2. Elvis sobered up, looked at a list of things he wanted to do in a movie and they just made that movie.  And that list included
1. Do twins
2. Be a jet pilot
3. Rescue a guy hanging off a cliff
4. Bang his way through 40 female extras.

I suspect he didn't realize Patty Duke was just one girl and someone misunderstood his request to "Do Twins" as playing two characters.

There's also an angle here which is that folks my age and younger aren't going to be familiar with Lil' Abner.  But in the days of popular newspaper comic strips, Lil' Abner was a strip about hillbillies living somewhere called Dogpatch.  The strip was a big enough deal to have inspired a huge Broadway show and two feature films - one in 1940 and one in 1959.  The strip ran from 1934 to 1977.  

And a whole lot of Lil' Abner's appeal as a strip, play and movie was that it's about Abner being surrounded by an array of hot hillbilly women.  The comic was already very horny, and then was drawn in the 1950's by Frank Frazetta, and that art is *bananas*.  

Anyway, I have to think the idea of "hordes of hot hillbilly women" was around before they cashed in on it with this movie.  And I suspect it died out with Hee-Haw.  Or enough people going to the Smokey Mountains hoping for Dolly Partons to fall out of trees and being just deeply disillusioned.

Josh!

*you will know Craig from several roles, not least of which was Barbara Gordon/ Batgirl on Batman and as the Orion they showed in the end credits on Star Trek