Not gonna lie, I just plain enjoyed this. Parts were cringingly bad, but the costumes were so wild as to be engaging, the silliness was mostly bearable, and the songs were even catchy enough to stick in my head a bit. The fairy godmother was male in both versions, although in this one he was straight, and a fairy godfather instead. I genuinely liked Catharine Erhardt, the star, who is lovely and has some real presence in front of the camera, even though she can't lip-sync worth a damn.
I learned that this movie (as well as the Charles Band Cinderella and a bunch of others) followed on a very successful erotic musical version of Alice in Wonderland that came out the previous year. So this was part of a mini-trend. Of erotic musical fairytale remakes. Sure, okay.
One of the things that makes 1977 so special is finding out stuff like this.
Something that flagged my interest in this movie was the distinction made between "fornication," which is illegal on the Earth of 2046 in which this story takes place, and "making love," which Cinderella insists is necessary and beautiful and which is eventually made legal. For me, born in 1981, this is like the distinction between hookups to scratch an itch and sex when you really care about someone. I believed the former was in fashion in the late 70s, while the latter was what all that empty sex could never really achieve. But the movie seems to be condemning what I thought was in fashion, and what I thought these silly erotic movies were celebrating - the freedom to scratch the itch when you wanted to.
The movie is fuzzy about this at times, too, as one character humps a plant stand when she gets "the hornies," and the drive she's expressing doesn't seem to be about "making love." I wanted to write a little about this distinction in considering Happy Hooker and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, but the way it's drawn in this movie makes me question whether I understand what was going on with casual sex in the 70s the way I thought I did. Maybe the distinction is actually about shame, and the word "fornication" is calling on old religious ideas that "free love" was working against. I admit I'm not really sure.
A technical note: the DVD I acquired has a pretty bad version of the film, trimmed from widescreen without pan-and-scan and potentially edited (there was comparatively not a lot of sex, so perhaps butchered by someone for some reason). I do not think I missed much of the experience.
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