Get Soft With Dr Snuggles

Dr. Snuggles and friends return for episode 62 of your guide to the truly astonishing world of softcore films, and the world’s number one podcast on that subject!

Vampire-mania continues at Get Soft, which actually seems appropriate now that we’re into October. Last episode, we looked at Kelley Cauthen’s 1999 erotic horror Embrace the Darkness. This episode, it’s Robert Kubilos’ 2002 sequel, Embrace the Darkness II! You can probably guess what we’re doing on episode 63. None of the original cast return for this sequel - in fact, the story only sort of lines up with what happened in the first one. But, it’s written by the incomparable duo of Ed Gorsuch and April White, and it swaps gothic warehouse loft chic for sci-fi sex rooms, goth clubs and Matrix-inspired fashion. Not to spoil our feelings on the matter, but these things are very hard to resist for much of the cast, with the exception of our guest Jimmy Ether, who is frankly as hard to please as he is easy to love.

Softcore Spotlight-wise, we look at Catalina Larrañaga, who plays the vampire Lizzie. She had a short but impactful career in softcore, starring in stuff like Corporate Fantasy - which she also co-wrote! - and Loveblind. But she stopped acting in 2006, and became a Certified Holistic Health Practitioner, a Certified Holistic Nutritionist, and a Master Herbalist. None of those are real things, but it hasn’t stopped her from having a very successful career as Kitty Martone, the Healthy Gut Girl, battling leaky gut syndrome (also not a real thing) and vaccine-induced autism (definitely not a real thing). So, uh, our general veneer of congenial and encouraging politeness slips briefly on this one, shall we say.

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Dr. Snuggles and friends return for episode 61 of your guide to the truly astonishing world of softcore films, and the world’s number one podcast on that subject!

As we inch closer to October, how better to celebrate the spookiest of months than with a trio of vampire films? So, we’re looking at Playboy’s Embrace the Darkness series, back to back! We start, logically, with the first film, directed by the great Kelley Cauthen, in which a “performance artist” named Jennifer falls for a vampire who lives across the street from her named Galen. Bad idea? Sure, probably. But that’s not the big news - the big news is this episode’s guests. Many of you would know that Alistair, Siobhan and Drew all got their start in podcasting on the legendary Movies About Girls Show. Well, we’re joined this episode by Ken and Stacey, one time king and queen of podcasting, now the brains (and many other body organs) behind Boston public access superhits Heavy Leather Topless Dance Party and Heavy Leather Music Video! It’s just like the good old days!

Plus, we also more or less get around to talking about the life and career of Kevin Spirtas, who plays the vampire Galen! You might know him as Kevin Blair, one of the stars of Friday the 13th Part VII. Or maybe you know him from his six years as Dr. Craig Wesley on Days of Our Lives. Or, from his webseries After Forever, which just won an astonishing six Daytime Emmys. Or, heck, even it’s possible you know him from his one man, all singing, all dancing stage show Night and Days!

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Dr. Snuggles and friends return for episode 60 of your guide to the truly astonishing world of softcore films, and the world’s number one podcast on that subject!

Sometimes, when we do slightly odder fare on the show, we like to start recording a little later, have a few drinks and get a bit loose. We’ve done a few like that before (New York Nights, The Naked Detective, Tina and the Professor). Joined by drunkcasting hero Matt, from our sister podcasts Songs on Trial and Movie Melt, we decided to do it again this episode, because Peter Kay’s 1987 British sort-of-comedy breast-fetishising shot-on-video epic Miss-Adventures at Mega Boob Manor (aka Action Video Presents Mega Manor) is certainly one of the odder movies we’ve done. Something happened though, and the next thing we knew our other guest Tim had left and it was 7 and a half hours later, and we were unbelievably drunk. To top it off, then we had audio issues with the last half hour of the show, so we had to re-record that. The result is almost 4 hours of Get Soft, which is a ridiculous runtime for a podcast. It’s either our best episode or our worst - at this point we have no ability to know, but please give us a call and tell us.

The Softcore Spotlight focuses on Stacey Owen, one of only three actors credited in the film. Owen was a Scottish model who’d recently won (or come second in, depends on the source) 1986 Miss Wet T-Shirt World Competition, and was in her first film with Miss-Adventures at Mega Boob Manor, and was on the verge of superstardom. Though she only modelled between 1986 (maybe 1985, depends on the source) and 1991, she’s still remembered very fondly by Brits and Scots of a certain age. We go through her story, aided by clips from the ‘documentary’ The Stacey Owen Story!

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Dr. Snuggles and friends return for episode 59 of your guide to the truly astonishing world of softcore films, and the world’s number one podcast on that subject!

Well, here it is. The big finale. This is how it all ends! We’re done, and there’s no more. No more Hot Springs Hotel, that is - not Get Soft. Still, as we check out the last three episodes (Layout, Girls in the Band, and Fantasy) of everyone’s favourite softcore sitcom from 1997, it feels like we’ve really come to the end of quite a journey. We’ve grown to more or less love the characters, the actors, and even the creators of this weird little footnote in softcore history. Honestly, we get a little misty eyed this episode, but who can blame us? Bye Randy. Bye Kat. So long Lacey, Theo, Minnie, Vicky, Donna, and the rest of the staff!

We also sort of take things full circle, by looking at the life and career of the first actor we saw on the series - the woman who delivered that fateful telegram, Deanna Merryman! She played a bunch of other characters on the show too, often changing character names from episode to episode, as we discover in these last three. And she also made national news twice: once in 1992, and again in 2002!

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Dr. Snuggles and friends return for episode 58 of your guide to the truly astonishing world of softcore films, and the world’s number one podcast on that subject!

Drew declared it Dan Golden and Maria Ford month, so having looked over 1994’s Saturday Night Special last episode, this time we go for one of their most famous collaborations: 1995’s Stripteaser. A psychopathic madman - played by the astounding Rick Dean, in his most incredible performance ever - takes the staff and customers of a strip club named Zipper’s Clown Palace hostage, and then proceeds to alternate between forcing them to act out his whims, and monologuing at them. Seriously, Dean has like a 15 minute monologue in this one. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen on film before.

And of course, given it’s his magnum opus, how could we not look at the life and times of Rick Dean? He was a trained stage actor, and a favourite of a number of LA avant garde playwrights. Unfortunately, he never got the chance to show his skills in A movies, but that’s their loss, right? The B movie world got some seriously unforgettable work from him.

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Dr. Snuggles and friends return for episode 57 of your guide to the truly astonishing world of softcore films, and the world’s number one podcast on that subject!

Drew has declared it Dan Golden and Maria Ford month, and who are we to argue with Drew now that he’s been promoted? The next two episodes are films directed by Dan Golden, starring his regular collaborator Maria Ford (and also both star his other regular collaborator, Rick Dean, as it happens). The first is Golden’s 1994 country music and murder softcore romance Saturday Night Special, and Get Soft’s regular collaborator, Jaymz from the NBA Straya podcast, comes along for the ride! Ford and Dean are joined in the movie by country/rockabilly superstar Billy Burnette in his first acting role, and also briefly joined by ol’ crazy eyes, Mick Fleetwood. So that’s unexpected.

And, even though it’s Dan Golden and Maria Ford month, we’re actually turning the Softcore Spotlight on some of the male leads for this episode and the next one. There’s plenty of time to get to Golden and Ford later, but when else will we get to talk about Billy Burnette? Never, that’s when! So we talk about his life and career in both music and film. He was in Fleetwood Mac in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, you know. Also, he started his singing career when he was just seven years old! We sample a bunch of hits from throughout his career (and maybe one or two misses, to be honest - sorry Billy).

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Dr. Snuggles and friends return for episode 56 of your guide to the truly astonishing world of softcore films, and the world’s number one podcast on that subject!

It’s our fourth run at Showtime softcore sitcom Hot Springs Hotel, as we check out episodes 10, 11, and 12: To Your Health, Hole in One, and AWOL. Maybe you’ve heard of this show? It’s about two siblings named Kat and Randy. They’d been living together - just the two of them - in a very small lodging, until they were informed about the passing of their great aunt (via telegram). Well, their great aunt was a hotelier. She owned one place in a town called Desert Hot Springs. And so the siblings took over the running of this hotel - this Hot Springs Hotel. Fascinating tale. Things were really slowing down in this show for a while, but turns out AWOL is one of the weirdest pieces of television any of the cast have ever seen, particularly for something that bills itself as ‘erotic’. It’s very, very odd stuff.

Plus, we finally take the time to talk about the life and times of the show’s creator, James Glenn Dudelson. It’s a story that involves James, his brother Robert, his father Stanley, a writer-director-producer-editor named Ava Cadell, actor-writer Lanny Horn, and actor-writer-director Clark Brandon, and also the Nightmare on Elm Street, Day of the Dead, and Creepshow franchises!

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Dr. Snuggles and friends return for episode 55 of your guide to the truly astonishing world of softcore films, and the world’s number one podcast on that subject!

How else could we follow last episode’s look at Paul Thomas’ 1992 erotic drama The Pamela Principle but with a look at Edward Holzman’s 1994 sequel Seduce Me: Pamela Principle 2? It’s the only thing that would make sense, although sequel is probably not the right term for it, really - it’s more a reboot, to use the modern parlance. It takes the general plot of the first movie - guy having middle-life crisis has affair with younger woman named Pamela - and tries to improve the execution. Weirdly, it even has cameos from the guy who played the best friend in the first movie, and the guy who was Pamela’s ex-boyfriend.

And, if that’s not enough excitement, Drew gets a promotion, and we’re joined by Heather from Songs on Trial and Movie Melt, and also our good friend Paul C. Miller, director of Get Soft favourite Maximum Thrust! His call drops out mere seconds from the end of the show. Also the show is over three hours this week for some reason that I really can’t work out. Sorry or not sorry, depending on whether ridiculously long podcasts are your thing.

Plus, we look at the life and career of the writer of Pamela Principle 2, Gerard Maguire! Maguire only has a few writing credits, but he’s probably very well known to Australians as an actor - he was Deputy Governor Jim Fletcher in Prisoner (aka Prisoner: Cell Block H), and he’s also done around 40 years worth of voice over work. We got the chance to chat to him, amazingly, and were almost certainly the first people to ever ask him about being on The Bradys, and definitely the first to ask about Pamela Principle 2.

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Dr. Snuggles and friends return for episode 54 of your guide to the truly astonishing world of softcore films, and the world’s number one podcast on that subject!

We finally dipped our toes into the vast Axis Entertainment catalogue just a few weeks ago with Gregory Dark’s Night Rhythms, and now we’re back at it again with Paul Thomas’ 1992 erotic drama The Pamela Principle! It answers that age old question: if you dump your wife for a younger woman and then demand that the younger woman does things exactly the way you’ve always done things, will everything work out okay? Spoilers: no. It’s a weird cast in this one, too - the philandering husband and the younger woman are both relative unknowns, but then you’ve got people like the great Tamara Landry, Frank Pesce, '90s pron sensation K.C. Williams, and ‘60s heartthrob Troy Donahue in secondary (if not tertiary) roles.

Plus, we take a look at the life and times of Troy Donahue, even though he really only has two scenes. Why? Because he had a hell of a life, and there’s a lot to talk about! He went from a high-riding teen heartthrob - complete with his own single! - to being drug and alcohol dependent, living in a bush in Central Park. And, amazingly, he got help and turned things around, and there’s a happy ending (more or less, anyway)!

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Dr. Snuggles and friends return for episode 53 of your guide to the truly astonishing world of softcore films, and the world’s number one podcast on that subject!

We’re heading back to that familiar old story, of a hotel, in a town called Desert Hot Springs, run by two siblings named Randy and Kat. See, they were living by themselves in a flat, when they got a telegram telling them that their rich Aunt Betty had died, and left them a hotel. A Hot Springs Hotel. What a tale! What a concept for a softcore comedy TV show! This time, we check out episodes 7, 8 and 9: Rock Star, Bachelorette Party, and Theo and the Model. Yes, finally Theo gets his time in the sun! And as a bonus: the rock star in episode 7 plays a 1983 Casio DG-20 Digital Guitar. Just like Brett in that one episode of Flight of the Conchords!

Plus, we talk about the life and career of episode 7’s titular rock star, guest star Phillip Rhys. After Hot Springs Hotel, his career went from strength to strength: he was intergalactic pop star Proto Zoa in the Disney Channel movie Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century (still the role he’s most recognised for apparently), was in season 2 of 24 (one of the better seasons, for what it’s worth), and was just recently in George R.R. Martin sci-fi series Nightflyers (unclear if anyone has watched the entire series though). Also, he went to school with Jamie Oliver, and was on an episode of Heston’s Feasts.

Hey, why not call us on our hotline? (724) 246-4669!

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