PLEASE DON’T TOUCH ME (1959, 1963) – BAD MOVIE REVIEW

PLEASE DON’T TOUCH ME (Filmed in 1959, released in 1963) – Buy this for the Lash La Rue fan in your life, but mostly for the Ron and June Ormond fan in your life. For people outside of us lovers of Bad Movies I’ll point out that Ron and June Ormond were the famous husband and wife team of low-low-low budget filmmakers.

The Ormonds dabbled in virtually all genres from mainstream movies to exploitation and roadshow flicks. More than a decade ago, Balladeer’s Blog reviewed the infamous Ron Ormond/ Estus Pirkle film If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (HERE), a full-color Cold War potboiler about a Communist invasion of the U.S. depicted with graphic violence, inane dialogue and hilariously bad acting. 

This earlier effort from their mind-bending body of work found them collaborating with former cowboy star Lash La Rue, with whom they had made several cheap, short and boring westerns. Lash portrays Dr. Williams, a psychiatrist who is treating a newlywed bride for frigidity.

Though Please Don’t Touch Me sounds like it would be a sexploitation flick, lurid assault film or Nudie Cutie, rest assured there’s nothing in this 67-minute oddity that your grandmother couldn’t handle. Well, maybe your mother, instead of grandma.

The film plays almost like a parody of Public Service Message shorts, educational videos, army training films about v.d., and tabloid psychiatry movies like Tomorrow’s Children, Glen or Glenda & Maniac. Paying customers who went in hoping for something sexy, explicit and tawdry would have learned that the joke was on them. 

Please Don’t Touch Me starts off with a scene in which a woman clearly in her mid to late twenties but carrying a baby doll is out for a walk around a campground and gets attacked by a predatory creep. She passes out, and the film cuts to the credits, which show us that Ron Ormond used his real name – Vittorio Di Naro – to direct this movie.

Also credited is Ormond McGill, “the Dean of American Hypnotism” and from whom Vittorio took part of his pseudonym “Ron Ormond.” Forgetting all about the woman who was assaulted for the moment, the flick tells us viewers that it is based on the real story of a marriage that was saved from the wife’s frigidity by the use of hypnotism.

Ron Ormond plays the one and only Anton Mesmer, founder of mesmerism, as a series of flashbacks explain the history of all things related to hypnotism. This joyously tasteless section includes exploitative, Mondo Cane style footage of people being hypnotized into feeling no pain as a huge needle is threaded through body parts, they roll around in broken glass, wash their faces with broken glass and have people stand on them as they lie shirtless atop a bed of spikes.

The use of hypnotism as a substitute for anesthesia during surgery is dealt with next. This part features a picture of a man with a 103-pound (yes) tumor in his painfully swollen scrotum who supposedly had it removed but felt nothing thanks to hypnotism.

Graphic surgery footage like something from a medical school training film shows up next, as the increasingly queasy viewers are once again assured that no pain was felt by the patient thanks to hypnotism.

By this point you’re ready for anything from this very strange little movie, but it picks now of all times to get bland on us. Still weird, in fact overwhelmingly weird, but bland in spite of the suggestive storyline.

The young woman who was attacked before passing out earlier is Vicky Edwards (Viki Caron), and we are told that the attack happened when she was 15 years old (yet she was still carrying around a baby doll). Vicky recently married Bill, a scrawny dullard of a man played by Dick Crane, but despite what IMDb says, this is NOT the Richard Crane who played Rocky Jones, Space Ranger during the 1950s. (At least they credited Al “Lash” La Rue properly.)

This film is littered with bizarre bedroom scenes in which the undeniably shapely Vicky wears all kinds of revealing outfits as she and her hubby exchange dialogue that’s about as romantic as anything from an educational short about swimming safety. Inevitably, Vicky feels uncomfortable and rebuffs her husband with the excuse that she has a headache.

On one such occasion, Vicky sends her horny, denied hubby out to buy headache pills, and while he’s gone she slips over to her mother’s place. Mom is played by Ruth Blair and is the hilarious highlight of Please Don’t Touch Me.

Ruth is chillingly callous toward Vicky and in a seemingly sinister way, tends to passive-aggressively put down her daughter and her choice of a husband. Ruth also turns every conversation about her daughter’s troubled marriage to herself!

Seriously, Vicky’s fear of a failed marriage serves as endless fodder for dear old Mom to reminisce to her troubled daughter about incidents when people mistook the two of them for sisters instead of mother and daughter. She also uses these moments to vent to Vicky about what brutes men are, and how awful her father was. (We’re never told what became of Dad but Ruth’s behavior can’t help but make one wonder if there’s an Alfred Hitchcock secret lurking in Mom’s past.)

In a rare moment of resistance to Ruth’s emotional manipulation of her, Vicky wisely asks Mom if she doesn’t just keep encouraging her to withhold sex from Bill just because Ruth’s vanity won’t let her entertain the possibility of becoming a grandmother.

Bullseye, but with fake concern, the villainous Mom convinces Vicky that her frigidity is caused by trauma from the assault when she was 15 and that her husband is beastly for expecting sex from her after what she went through. 

Ever helpful, Mom slips Vicky some knockout drops (!) to get her to spend the night with her instead of her erect husband. Horny Bill calls Ruth to ask if Vicky is over at her house since she slipped out while he was getting the headache pills.

As if Mama Ruth wasn’t already loathsome enough, she tells Bill all about her daughter’s rape when she was 15 WITHOUT EVEN GETTING HER DAUGHTER’S PERMISSION TO TELL HIM! When Bill remains stubbornly sympathetic and understanding toward his wife through all of Mom’s machinations, Ruth resorts to pressuring Vicky to get an annulment.

At long last, Vicky goes to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Williams (the aforementioned Lash La Rue) and this oddball piece of celluloid suddenly seems like it’s going to turn into a tale of Doc Williams seducing her. ESPECIALLY when he recommends hypnotism.

(Seriously, it plays like Ron Ormond was intentionally teasing the audience over and over with repeated hints at sleazier material, only to withhold it every time like Vicky withholds sex from her husband.)

The possibility of subjecting Vicky to hypnotism prompts a meeting at Dr. Williams’s office among himself, Bill, Vicky … AND VICKY’S DAMN MOTHER! I’m serious! Comically enough, Lash as Dr. Williams eventually gets wise to what a nutjob Ruth is and makes her leave the room.

Obviously, Vicky and Bill agree to the use of hypnotism to try saving their marriage. Dr. Williams uncovers memories from the hypnotized Vicky that she has suppressed for years. We all learn that her assailant didn’t actually do anything to her because other men at the picnic grounds drove him off!

Yes, Vicky’s man-hating, clearly screwed-up mother Ruth spent years evilly intimidating her daughter into believing she had been raped and instilled Vicky with her own neuroses regarding men and sex. (We still don’t learn what happened to Vicky’s father, but I wouldn’t put anything past Ruth.)

At any rate, Vicky is now cured, yet we never see her express any anger toward her mother for the rotten manipulation she subjected her to. Bill and Vicky oink and boink regularly and wifey is even pregnant by the happy ending. And Mama Ruth is being treated by Dr. Williams.

That made me long for a sequel in which, under hypnosis, Ruth confesses to a series of “Norma” Bates slayings of men, but no such luck. Please Don’t Touch Me can’t help but leave viewers puzzled about who this movie was made for. Actual loving couples would probably find it abhorrent, the sleaze crowd would be frustrated with it, and there are certainly no beneficial therapeutic aspects to this weird, weird little tale.

And did I mention the musical accompaniment by a married pair of harmonica players named Jimmy and Mildred Mulcay, including their masterpiece Love Me Forever? Or the scene where the sexually frustrated Bill tears apart a pair of Vicky’s panties with his teeth? And, for a closing laugh I’ll point out that this movie was also released under the title Secrets of a Teenage Bride. (LMAO)

At any rate, the Ormonds are Bad Movie legends with a following nearly as large as Ed Wood’s and deservedly so. 

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