Ballot Stuffing: “Linda Lovelace for President” (1975)

           “Linda Lovelace for President”  (1975)

    Chances are that if a movie announces upfront that it intends to offend every member of the audience, the results will be fairly pedestrian, as a truly provocative feature would let the material speak for itself. “Linda Lovelace for President” does manage to offend, but only in that ho-hum way of the truly awful. As a comedy, the film manages to be uniformly unfunny, certainly not a unique accomplishment what with dozens of competitive examples unleashed upon the public every year; though with its rapid fire Hellzapopin’– style of anything for a laugh jokiness, this film may qualify for some sort of quantitative honorarium for negative achievement simply the sheer number of witless swings and misses it mistakenly presents as humor.

    The film’s premise suggests that celebrity alone is enough to propel a person to the White House, and with that in mind, the early 70’s Porno Chic princess Linda Lovelace is offered the presidential nomination by a convention of what is meant to be a cross-section of America (including a Saudi prince, a Chinese Communist and a Nazi) and begins what might be referred to as a grass roots campaign to ascend to national office. The nature of Ms. Lovelace’s public reputation being entirely due to her sword swallowing abilities (her subsequent efforts to publicize herself as the incarnation of the Sexual Revolution’s Mother Courage would emerge five year later), one might suppose that the direction of the film would take would somehow put a comedic spin on how sex and politics make for strange (if not unfamiliar) bedfellows. However, the extremely scattershot nature of the film is a prolonged and agonizing stream of consciousness of aimless, tired crudity resulting in an experience that is the cinematic version of Tourette syndrome.

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