My Tale Is Hot is a devilish 1964 American sexploitation movie, belonging firmly to the nudie-cutie sub-genre. It was written and directed by Peter Perry Jr.
Lucifer is feeling rather downhearted. Business has been slow in Hell. There don’t seem to be enough sinners any more. He’s particularly depressed that it’s been so long since he tempted a faithful husband into eternal perdition. Then he reads that the Ladies’ House Companion has just chosen its Man of the Year. The magazine has hailed Ben-Hur Ova as the world’s most faithful husband. Now this is a challenge worthy of any Devil. If can tempt Ben-Hur to stray from the path of faithfulness maybe his assistant Saturna (a devilish babe) will stop making fun of him.
Lucifer pops up out of the ground in Ben-Hur’s backyard. He has a plan that he considers to be fool-proof.
He suggests to Ben-Hur that confining himself to one woman is selfish. There are so many other women deserving of such a fine handsome man (in fact Ben-Hur is short overweight and ugly). What Ben-Hur needs is a swimming pool in his backyard. Lucifer can supply a pool, and the pool comes with girls included as a package deal.
Lucifer offers Ben-Hur lots of other feminine temptations. No man could resist this sort of temptation.
This movie was made on a budget of almost nothing, with sets that would be considered crude in a high school play and with painted backdrops. Apart from whatever they paid to the cast members it looks like the reminder of the budget amounted to maybe a couple of hundred bucks. The swimming pool that Lucifer offers Ben-Hur actually looks like a smallish backyard goldfish pond.
What was so great about the heyday of American sexploitation cinema is that if you could get hold of a camera then all you needed in order to make a movie was a few girls willing to take their clothes off. And in the 60s (even the early 60s) it was seemingly incredibly easy to find girls willing to disrobe for the camera. It was truly a golden age. And in this case a truly extraordinary number of young women were willing to shed their clothes in the name of art.
The movie is a kind of throwback to the days of burlesque, with a mixture of unclad girls and very obvious comedy routines. The main difference is that the comics in burlesque were usually painfully unfunny whereas this movie is fairly amusing. The extreme obviousness of the jokes adds to the charm.
There are lots of girls. All of them are pretty and all of them get naked. It’s all just T&A (in 1964 you weren’t going to get away with frontal nudity) but there is a huge amount of nudity.
You also get archive footage of legendary stripper Candy Barr. This footage is clumsily shoehorned in but since this is the great Candy Barr it would be churlish to complain.
My Tale Is Hot has a rather engaging innocence. The girls all seem rather sweet and give the impression that appearing in a nudie movie was a fun way to earn some pocket money. They didn’t have to do anything sexual, just take their clothes off.
This movie is basically a series of scenes of nude girls cavorting about, interspersed with comic sketches.
The two lead actors, Jack Little as Ben-Hur and Max Gardens (billed as Manny Goodtimes) as Lucifer are outrageously hammy but without being irritating. Max Gardens is actually quite funny.
There is a kind of plot twist at the end which explains why Lucifer has such a tough time trying to tempt Ben-Hur.
My Tale Is Hot was paired with another Peter Perry-directed feature, The Joys of Jezebel (1970), on one of the fabulous Something Weird double-header DVDs. There’s quite a bit of print damage – I imagine the source material was in very bad shape. The disc isn’t easy to get hold of these days but there are still copies around if you’re prepared to look hard enough. The extras include an entire feature film, Go Down Death, various trailers, a strange cartoon about Satan and a nudie loop featuring Candy Barr.
My Tale Is Hot is a silly good-natured rather goofy movie with very little in the way of plot. If you’re susceptible to the odd charm of the nudie-cutie genre then this is one of the more likeable examples. I do have that susceptibility so I enjoyed it. Recommended.