Geekscape After Dark presents This Ain’t The Partridge Family XXX!

Welcome to Geekscape After Dark, a series of articles devoted to an art form that was founded on skipping them.

Last week we looked at Not the Bradys XXX, an intriguing, but admittedly unfocused, satire about the quintessential suburban family weighing the pros and cons of selling their bodies for financial gain. This week we take a look at another of director Will Ryder’s hit TV satires, This Ain’t the Partridge Family XXX, which tells the tale of the quintessential celebrity family weighing the pros and cons of using date rape drugs for personal gain. The stories couldn’t be more different. Unlike the ambiguous ending of Not the Bradys XXX, which ended on a cliffhanger that failed to resolve the Brady’s moral and financial crisis (at least until the sequel), This Ain’t the Partridge Family XXX takes a strong moral stand at the conclusion of its tale: drugging members of the opposite sex in order to take advantage of them sexually is a beautiful thing… as long as Keith Partridge writes a hit song for the U.S. Music Awards about innocence and love, and everyone learns a valuable lesson afterwards.

Pornographic movies require a lot of head room.

 The backyard from Not the Bradys XXX cameos as itself. Maybe they lost the house after all…

This Ain’t the Partridge Family XXX has a fairly straightforward plotline, from which we can glean the essentials of the premise: The Partridge Family is the unusually large brood of a single mother, Shirley Partridge (Payton Leigh – Christina Noir is Relentless, Enticed by My Friend’s Mom), who has sufficiently trained each of her children in music that they are now celebrities.  Keith Partridge (the adorable Nick Manning – Barely Legal Ski Camp, Frosty the Snow Ho), clearly the eldest, writes all of their music and gets all of the girls. Danny Partridge (Jason Sinclair – Instigator, New Whores on the Block 2 (so I can only imagine that they must be slightly less new)) is younger than Keith and a charming smart aleck who always gets into harebrained schemes that are wont to result in mischief. The youngest son Chris (Scott Lyons – Rachel’s Choice, Your Mom) plays the drums and is sweet and innocent but never gets to do very much. Laurie Partridge (Tori Black – Fresh Flesh, 1 on 1 3) is a girl and also popular, apparently, while the youngest daughter Tracy (Faye Reagan – Bring Me the Head of Shawna Lenee, Imperfect Angels 1-5) makes with the malapropisms and sleeps with pizza boys. Despite their enormous success and popularity, The Partridge Family still sticks with their small town “Hustler” music producer/agent Ruben (James Bartholet – Exxxtra Exxxtra, Real Boogie Nights), who manages to keep them both famous and performing regularly, but who seems to rely solely on the Partridge Family for both financial and personal support.

In this alternate timeline, Hustler is now a small division of Ruben’s Records.

So far, I think we’re on solid ground. The Partridge Family was about a family of quirky pop stars and their mismatched manager. In Not the Bradys XXX director Will Ryder (Barely MILF, Mya Luanna’s Sexual Disorder) kept the foundation of his source material solid. At the start of the film, each member of The Brady Bunch behaved like their corresponding member of the original Brady Bunch, and afterwards they all had sex. So the set-up for Ryder’s version of the Partridge Family is probably fairly close to the original series in character and premise.

Looks like William Wyler’s going to have to ship out another spirit level.

But what justified the producer’s decision to film The Partridge Family like a sitcom version of Last House on the Left? Perhaps we can find our answers in the film’s plotline. The central plot of Not the Bradys XXX was a familiar one: “Oh no, we might lose the house” was iconic enough to even become the structure for the major Hollywood remake (creatively entitled “The Brady Bunch Movie” [if that’s the Brady Bunch movie, then what’s Not the Bradys XXX? Not the Bradys XXX was over half an hour longer!]). The plot takes off in This Ain’t the Partridge Family XXX when Keith has trouble finding a date, making him doubt his confidence which in turn keeps him from writing any more hit songs. The Partridge Family needs more hit songs to survive – the show probably pre-dates the legal concept of “residuals” – and so the family bands together, including Ruben, to get Keith out of his funk (which is ironic, since funk was so popular in the 1970’s).

A socially awkward intervention for the socially awkward.

Despite a well-intentioned and anachronistic intervention (The Partridge Family was clearly ahead of its time), Keith’s depressed and everyone at the intervention knows there’s no cure for that. “Did you know Napoleon was depressed his entire life? And Richard Nixon, every time he wakes up in the morning and sees his wife?” Despite the unnecessary rhyming, Danny doesn’t break into a song (which audiences are probably suspecting since if you’ve heard about the Partridge Family you probably at least know that they were a band). No, instead he breaks out a magazine featuring an ad for an “elixir” that is “guaranteed to make men and women fall in love with members of the opposite sex.” It also specifies that these men and women would have a specific tendency to “go ape over each other,” which doesn’t seem like a particularly attractive euphemism but seems to serve Danny’s purposes. Keith doubts the elixir’s efficacy, if only because possible side effects include hair loss, and if there’s one thing Keith Partridge apparently values more than his sex life, it’s his luscious, luscious hair (and, admittedly, it is very luscious.)

“Mortgage troubles hit record highs?” Another reference to the clearly doomed Brady Bunch.

Danny’s elixir arrives in the mail and works like gangbusters, who supposedly work very quickly and efficiently, which explains the ease with which he acquired the elixir. Before he knows it, he’s having various varieties of sex with an attractive groupie (Kristina Rose – 40 Inch Plus 9, Destination Tonsils 2) who would of course otherwise have been interested in Keith(interesting…). He informs Ruben of the elixir’s 100% success rate (he tried it once and it worked once, so there you go), and Ruben tries it out for himself, mercifully off-camera. Danny then hides the elixir in the last place anyone would look for a liquid to splash on their body: one of Shirley’s perfume bottles. Soon everyone is experiencing their desired quantity of intercourse, either accidentally or clandestinely, except for Keith, who is still afraid of losing his precious hair. Finally, Laurie convinces Keith to take one for the team, and invites several of her best friends (Shawna Lenee – Manaconda 3; Madison Scott – Not Three’s Company XXX; and Jaclyn Case – Female Gardener) over to Keith’s room (so sure, technically he’s taking several). Keith finally acquiesces at the thought of losing these attractive groupies to the suddenly-very-popular Danny. He splashes the elixir everywhere and proceeds to have extremely cathartic but highly carnal relations with intoxicated women who aren’t actually interested in him just in time to write a hit new song for the U.S. Music Awards.

Chris Partridge’s side career as the gangta rapper “P Treble” has been well-documented.

So the most iconic episode of The Partridge Family apparently featured a family of celebrities who experimented with date rape drugs. I buy that, and I buy that a heck of a lot more than the Brady Bunch’s descent into pornography because it feels like a plausible episode of the original series. Unlike the Bradys, who (probably) never explored the topic of pornography on-camera, the Partridge Family was a family of famous celebrities with groupies. Thanks to modern news reporting and reality TV shows, we know exactly what that’s like today, but in the 1970’s the only portrayal of the moral and social dissolution of a popular celebrity you could find on television was, apparently, The Partridge Family. Let’s take a look at these tragic icons in popular culture, whose weekly walk through the valley of the shadow of fame brought them directly into our hearts:

It’s easy to pity poor Keith Partridge. As the man of the house he’s responsible for earning all of their money with his hit music, but his fragile child celebrity psyche can barely hum a tune without constant sexual reassurance from attractive and apparently younger women. The only that keeps him from using date rape drugs to invigorate his sexual confidence is that fear that in doing so he will lose his hair. Without love, all he has is his image. Without hair, that image evaporates into what he suspects is a quivering and probably stinky pool of washed-out mediocrity. He cannot risk one to save the other. Without his superficial emotional crutches, Keith Partridge is nothing, except maybe an insufferable elitist.

Yes, Nick Manning’s sympathetic performance goes through an ugly transformation when he discovers that Laurie is dating a mere grocery store clerk. But then again, maybe it’s more than class warfare. Not the Bradys XXX mined the history of suppositions that Marcia and Greg Brady would end up in a romantic relationship – which was okay because technically, at least, they were never really related – allowing the filmmakers to portray the two characters having sex. Since Danny and Laurie Partridge are, apparently, blood relatives, this could never occur even within the pornographic narrative (I think), but the notion is definitely raised several times throughout the film (Keith’s hyper-protectiveness of his sister, for example, or Laurie’s only vague concern that the elixir will make Keith want to sleep with her). So there must have been something in the original text – subtext, if you will – to support this forbidden love for his own sister. The timing fits, so as a responsible film critic I’m going to have to call it: The Partridge Family was the inspiration for Brian DePalma’s Scarface.

To prevent her brother from accidentally sleeping with her, Laurie Partridge arranges for
Keith to drug and then take advantage of her three best friends.

Danny Partridge was apparently no less damaged. When Danny speaks of his brother Keith he barely seems able to contain his sarcasm: “He’s a shell of his once glorious self… A mere fraction of a heartthrob.” Thusly Danny Partridge expresses the two sides of his devious psyche – his hatred for his more attractive, talented and popular brother, and his Shakespearean need to appear trustworthy and loyal while parasitically leeching off of the very celebrity kin he despises. Note how Danny’s first instinct upon receiving the elixir was not to give any to his suffering brother. No, Danny’s first instinct was to use the date rape drug personally in order to steal the very groupies needed to restore his brother’s sanity. Likely, this uncontrollable urge manifested in the original Partridge Family as merely a lovable tendency to get into crazy schemes that wreak havoc amongst the family, but inside Danny Partridge was obviously a ticking time bomb waiting to go off in sociopathic alarm. Will Shirley Partridge hit the snooze in time…?!

Shirley’s parenting never comes into question in This Ain’t the Partridge Family XXX. In all fairness, she usually acts like a stern taskmaster, but that “Bad Cop” outer exterior turns to “Bad Lieutenant” if you look too closely. A single Mom with five kids trains each of them to be musicians, and then lives off of their talent? She even puts herself onstage, when any decent manager (I’m looking at you, Ruben) would know that putting someone old enough to be your young sex symbols’ Mom on stage doesn’t add to their appeal. Did it really work for Britney Spears (or Madonna for that matter)? No, her place in the band stems from hubris, pure and simple. Like Danny, her desperate need to leech off of Keith Partridge’s talent (on second thought, I reallly do feel kind of bad for the guy…) manifests in her sex scene, in which she date rapes a younger man played by Kris Slater (Camp Cuddly Pines Powertool Massacre, The Lick Clique), who earlier in the film dated her daughter Laurie off-camera. Shirley resorts to felonious assault in order to live vicariously through her children’s talent and sexual conquests (well, not vicariously through that last bit). The original Shirley Partridge must have been one sad and lonely woman, prone to lashing out at her outlandishly large family for succeeding in all the things she failed to do alone.

Laurie and Ruben are the most well-characterized other members of the Partridge brood, but they feel more like plot devices than active participants, so I’m guessing that was their original function. Laurie was pretty and popular, which as I understand it was pretty three-dimensional for a female sitcom character on TV in the early 70’s, and Ruben gets to be a self-deprecating sad sack, a “The Death of the Party,” if you will (will you?). He was the one who probably had to remind the family of their responsibilities and deadlines while they fed their relentless and pathetic need for sexual satisfaction backstage, so I imagine he was also the brunt of many jokes. Chris barely appears in the film, and he’s the only actual Partridge who apparently doesn’t deserve a complete sex scene, so I can only imagine that he barely appeared in the original show at all, and his extremely brief fling with a rather weak-willed groupie (Sarah Jessie – Dirty Over 30 2, Porn Fidelity 16) was probably a token nod out of respect for the character. Tracey’s role on the show was apparently to fling malapropisms and sleep with pizza boys (Dane Cross – Cougar Hunter, Invasion of the MILFs [and might I just add that it’s nice to see pizza boys finally represented in pornography]).

So you see, I’ve learned something today. I learned that The Partridge Family was a morbid series, shot in a gritty docudrama style that was ahead of its time but effectively conveyed the sense of despair and hopelessness found in child stars by starkly contrasting their pain with gallows humor, happy music (the original songs in the film are outstanding, incidentally – “Special Things” would have been my pick for Best Song over “Jai Ho”), and sadistic mind games masquerading as youthful escapades. And finally I learned a lot about date rape drugs, which frankly was unnecessary and undesired information.

Nick Manning serves man by recognizing the brilliant musical stylings
of Jeff Mullen & Drew Rose.

The original series inspired such beloved cultural milestones as Brian DePalma’s Scarface, The Wire and maybe even Pulp Fiction (maybe), while the much lighter (and coincidentally pornographic) version comes in a 2-disc DVD loaded with bonus features (like an optional laugh track, that for some reason never plays during the sex scenes) and a transfer that, while attractive, is probably not something you’re going to use to impress your girlfriend’s parents on your new 50 inch plasma screen. This Ain’t the Partridge Family XXX comes highly recommended from Geekscape (After Dark) as a powerful learning experience and catalogue of pop culture history, and also because there’s lots of attractive sex in it.

See you next Wednesday!