Panopticist: Alice in Wonderland: The 1976 Musical-Comedy Porn Spoof

September 9, 2008

Alice in Wonderland: The 1976 Musical-Comedy Porn Spoof

Posted by Andrew Hearst

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People likey the porn spoofs, so here’s footage from an incredibly odd artifact I discovered during my search for Kubrick porn: an adult version of Alice in Wonderland from 1976. This ain’t no filmed-in-one-afternoon quickie—it’s a musical comedy that combines elaborate song-and-dance numbers with hardcore sex. Billed as “An X-Rated Musical Fantasy” and produced by the same man who brought the world Flesh Gordon, it’s one of the more artistically ambitious porn spoofs you’ll ever see. Judging from my quick scroll through the video—it’s all too weird for me to spend much time actually watching it—the singing and dancing is much more prominent than the hardcore sex. But there’s a fair amount of that, too. In the clip below, Alice, a once-virginal librarian whose libido has just been awakened, gives some help to an impotent Humpty-Dumpty, who closely resembles Stanford from Sex and the City. This footage is pretty tame, because I edited out a few minutes of lesbian action between the two nurses. But it still isn’t safe for work, so be careful.

Kristine De Bell, who played Alice, was a former Playboy playmate who went on to appear in Meatballs (with Chris Makepeace!) and various other mainstream films and TV shows. A restored version of Alice in Wonderland was released on DVD in December, and it’s available on Amazon. It apparently includes both an X-rated version and an XXX-rated version.

Alice in Wonderland apparently got a lot of attention upon its release. Roger Ebert even reviewed it. Here’s an excerpt from Ebert’s review:

This isn’t another X-rated potboiler but an adult movie with a certain charm. Even the way it avoids the explicitness of hard-core porn is sort of fun, as the camera suggests that the most amazing things are happening just offscreen. Kristine De Bell wanders through Wonderland with a blissful ignorance as the inhabitants give her a cram course in 50 ways to keep your lover. She’s just fine: Maybe it’s her perpetual look of total innocence and astonishment in the face of Wonderland’s jolly pastimes that makes her seem so sexy. She looks just like the healthy blond with wide-set eyes and Toni curls that sat across the aisle in high school — or should have.

And here’s an excerpt from a funnier (and more negative) review:

That’s when the rabbit shows up. Or at any rate, it’s supposed to be a rabbit. In point of fact, it’s just Jerry Spelman in makeup designed to the standard of an elementary school play, with a pair of rather forlorn-looking ears strapped to the sides of his head. Who can say why Alice doesn’t run shrieking from the library right then and there (that’s certainly what I’d do if a five-foot, talking bunny-monster ever showed up at my place of employment), but she strikes up a conversation with the odd creature and ends up following him through the full-length mirror that hangs inexplicably on one of the library’s walls. (I’ve worked in libraries since I was sixteen years old, and you know what none of them ever used as an element of their interior decor?)