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THIS MUCH FUN CAN'T POSSIBLY BE INTENTIONAL!

the masked reviewer | Boston, MA | 09/02/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

""You've seen too many motorcycle movies!" cries fashion designer Ann-Margret to some lust-crazed bikers at one point in the irresistibly awful 1970 biker flick C.C. AND COMPANY. Well, somebody has. Our guess is that it was Ann-Margret's husband, Roger Smith, who penned this laughable compendium of chopper cliches about five seconds after EASY RIDER became the number-one box-office smash all over the world.

Football hero Joe Namath, making a (thankfully) brief stab at screen stardom, plays a thieving, lowlife biker who, while cruising the desert with two fellow gang members, comes across mini-skirted, maxi-haired Manhattanite Ann-Margret stranded in a broken-down limo. "You guys gonna sit there like 'The Wild Ones' or you gonna give a girl a hand?" A-M vamps, as only a half-clad sex kitten stranded in the middle of nowhere might think to do.

When Namath's pals predictably move in on A-M and one threatens to strike her, Namath nobly intervenes with this bit of roadside rape etiquette: "Man, you don't hit something that looks that good. I mean, laying her is one thing, but bruising her--that's something else again." After the two ill-mannered bikers ride off, A-M realizes that Namath was only saving her for himself, but before she gets a chance to show him how much she doesn't mind, a tow truck shows up and he takes off.

Fortunately, the star-crossed lovers meet again soon, this time at a dirt-bike track where A-M is overseeing a fashion magazine shoot of models wearing her latest couture designs while bikers race around them. When Namath appears in the background of the pictures, A-M has to ask him to sign a photo release, for which she promises him what sounds suspiciously like what the studio must have offered him to star in this movie: "Your name in a magazine, fan mail from oversexed housewives, a year's subscription to Popular Mechanics -- anything but money."

But Namath balks at signing, whereupon A-M utters the fateful words, "I need a release!" With that, Namath puts the comely fashionista on the back of his Harley for a long, hard ride, then takes her go-go dancing, and then gets naked with her. After a happy-lovers montage to the sound of A-M's own voice crooning, "When you smile that special smile/As you listen to whatever I say/You've given me such tenderness/You satisfy me in every way," Namath abandons his biker pals to move into A-M's digs.

Alas, the resentful roughnecks, believing Namath has made off with the group's cash, kidnap A-M and unleash their own skanky motorcycle mamas on her. One Harley hussy buries her face in A-M's bountiful boobage and exclaims, "Oh, fragrance divine!" Then she grabs A-M's titian tresses and snarls, "A natural redhead, you suppose? Only her hairdresser knows for sure." When Namath rides to the rescue, he's told that if he doesn't come up with the missing moolah, "Little Orphan Annie here gets a royal gang bang." Namath proposes instead a tough-guy bikes competition -- a hog-off -- so everyone heads to a deserted university track to watch the race. A campus security guard threatens to break things up, but one of the chopper chicks talks him out of it by explaining that they're actually students making a movie: "It's a cross between Antonioni and A.I.P."

Naturally Namath wins and takes off with A-M on his motorcycle, which leads to the portended Antonioni homage. Stopping at a meaningfully empty intersection where a red light blinks "Don't Walk," A-M asks, with ineffable ennui, "Where are we going?" Namath replies, "I gotta split for awhile." Full of angst, A-M growls, "Remember when we talked about looking for something? I'd like to look with you. For a while, anyway." With that, a green light blinks "Walk" and the two roar off into the night, searching, presumably, for better scripts.
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