More Cult Classics

Sex Madness (1934)

Apparently down through the ages there has been a menace worse than the worst criminal, and that menace is...Syphilis. In this movie we will learn all about this evil, I presumed.
What we really learned was that New York leads to killing babies, or perhaps its being in burlesque anywhere that leads to babies dying.
This movies forward said the only way to save the youth from syphilis was through education, but the movie was really all about how their are lots of 'quack' doctors out there who claim they can cure syphilis but are really just stealing the money of their patients.
To be honest, I'm not really sure what this movie was saying. I don't they mentioned the word sex once, only that people needed to not be afraid of having the important talks. I guess that's an euphemism for sex.


Slaves in Bondage (1936)

Since all of the others movies of this Cult Classics collection have all been either anti something or pro something, so that I expected that this would be the same kind of film. But, it wasn't.
This film is about a couple of small time gangsters that in the start of the film at least are kidnapping girls to use as prostitutes. But they don't seem much like thugs, more like shysters. They do employ a bunch of thugs and at one point have a couple kill another one.
The premise is that Belle Harris runs a manicure salon, and puts ads in small town newspapers for jobs for pretty girls no experience necessary. The girls show up, Belle checks them out, if they're pretty they end up getting jobs as "entertainers" or are forced into prostitution.
Belle's partner Jim Harris does a bunch of other illegal things - like kidnapping the girl at the start. He's an all around bad guy. He ends up setting his sights on the heroine of the tale, Donna who has come to the city with her boyfriend Phil who wants to be a reporter.
Donna spurns Jim's advances, so Jim frames Phil to get him out of the picture and then tries to alternatively woo Donna or get her to work for him, and eventually decides to force himself on her, but by then Donna has talked to the local paper, and the editor called the police and they rescue her in a nick of time. All the bad guys go to jail, Phil gets the job and he Donna are to be married.
There was a point where I thought that there might be a message to the film, but it was a false alarm.
I can't believe I watched the whole thing. It helps that it was only 67 minutes long, but still. This was the best of the films so far, but that's not saying much. Interestingly, this film showed a dance number and 3 different vaudeville acts that were tangential to the story at best, but had they not been there, the movie would have only 50 minutes long.
These films were fun when I was younger, not this one in particular, as I've never seen it before, but these old cult classics that were so bad that they were good because you'd sit around with a bunch of friends at mock it while you watched, usually with some alcohol involved. But most of the films that I enjoyed were from the 50s, all of the flicks from earlier are down right depressing to watch. I'm sure watching them by myself sober is a mitigating factor as well. They just make me glad that I can exercise the right to make this one my last one.