Describing the plot of Bob Chinn’s Candy Stripers pretty much boils down to its elevator pitch: “in the course of an eight-hour day shift, a bunch of horny doctors, nurses, and patients fuck the hospital thirty five degrees off its foundation. That’s it. That’s the movie.” But if that explanation sounds like some thin, porn-ready claptrap, the brilliantly realized Candy Stripers is a movie that proves Roger Ebert’s evergreen observation that sometimes “a movie is not what it’s about, but how it’s about it.” For it is EXACTLY the kind of film that would be in the inaugural class of blue movies inducted into our National Film Registry if America could ever find a way to get over itself and engage with adult films on a level that included due respect at its foundation.
Candy Stripers centers around Sharon (Nancy Hoffman), a sexually insatiable member of a four person squad of candy stripers, working her final shift at the local hospital. If Sharon isn’t making doctors late for surgery by slipping away with them in the janitor closet, she’s administering oral favors on desk nurses Reynolds and Allen (Mimi Morgan and Lauren Black) or assisting sex-starved patients. Throughout the day, each member of the candy striper team will break away from their core duties of pushing their magazines and snack carts and will get involved in some variety of sexual hijinks, all creating separate tributaries that will eventually flow into the operating room for Sharon’s shift-ending, flesh-pile of a going away party.
Candy striper Cindy (Chris Cassidy, credited here as Montana) gets sweetly entangled with Mrs. Rogers (Phaedra Grant), a patient with a penchant for bananas (which are key to a genuinely funny running gag that Chinn gets the exact right amount of mileage out of); while Pam (Amber Hunt) has a playful back and forth with Tom Marshall (Rock Steadie), the survivor of an unexplained accident which has left him with a broken arm and a light concussion. And, as mentioned above, Sharon mixes it up with damn near everybody including bumbling into a threesome with Frank Lane (Paul Thomas), convalescing while undergoing a battery of tests, and Kitty (Eileen Welles), the visiting girlfriend of Frank’s wife. All of these clandestine pairings occur under the nose and behind the back of the prudish and uptight Sarge (Sharon Thorpe), the ball-busting head of the candy striper team who is forever trying to locate her missing team members.
Made for the dubiously underwritten Pacific Coast Films, Chinn got the gig when planned director Anthony Spinelli balked at the five day shooting schedule. Figuring that he could double the space by shooting his hospital sets from different camera heights and positions while also getting maximum use of the French turnaround method to make it look like his one hallway setup was two, Chinn mapped out the script and figured that he could get it in the can within three days. He still got the allotted five but, even with a performance issue debacle involving Richard Pacheco (in his film debut, credited as Marc Gordon) that burned up a good number of hours, he finished under schedule and was even able to pad out the proceedings by including a couple of new scenes.
On repeat viewings, the playful structure of Candy Stripers, which is mostly dependent on geography and timing, reveals itself to be pretty clever and sophisticated. On balance, its humor is fresh and engaging and delivered without any shame or apology even if the occasional joke might draw a kindhearted groan if it was told from a dais at a comedy roast. This is a film that never stops to worry if a joke falls flat because there is likely another one that’s just around the corner that won’t.
Giving the revved up engine of Candy Stripers a LOT of smoke is its score by Jonathan Long. Aside from the raucous, rock-fused tunes that pepper the film, the the soulful, cascading instrumental used during Cassidy and Grant’s ecstatic coupling, captured from multiple angles (including Chinn’s trademark bird’s eye, Olympian camera position) by ace cinematographer Bob Maxwell, is likewise fantastic and elevates the eroticism of the scene. Additionally great are all of Bill Wolf’s sets which, aside from the convincing L-shaped hallway, includes a patient room that gets subtly redressed a couple of times over with small details that pop and really do help sell the illusion that the action is happening across an entire hospital wing.
Candy Stripers is great porn in the exact same way that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a great horror film. It’s a fantastic representation of its respective subgenre with every ounce of fat cut away from it. There is not one frame that is unnecessary, story avenue that’s superflous, nor one performance that isn’t totally game. And boy does it ever look like all are aware of what a unique time they’re inhabiting. Bob Chinn was good at capturing and presenting the most carefree and golden part of the Golden Age but never as much as he was here and then in Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls, another masterful spin of cotton candy that would be delivered the following year.
For example, in the film’s thoroughly cued-up climax, a going-away party for Sharon that’s held “in the operating room… for some reason,” Chinn delivers into the stratosphere as he masters an orgy scene for the ages at his very first crack at making one. With the film’s earworm theme song (and other tunes) blaring over the controlled chaos on-screen, Chinn orchestrates one of the greatest stylized cinematic saturnalia in history. This is just nothing but pure, healthy carnality and the mere smorgasbord of things to see becomes near overwhelming when Chris Cassidy and Eileen Welles take turns imitating the Flying Wallendas on some hospital traction bars above Paul Thomas, gliding in and out of frame at its top and bottom which is both disorienting and dizzying in the very best way possible.
Candy Stripers has de facto heroes and villains but the villainy is pretty benign as its entirely embodied by Sharon Thorpe who is an absolute scream in her role. But not only are none of the characters in the film unlikeable, they’re all entirely lovable. Her highlighted steaks and pink, heart-framed aviators makes Amber Hunt the natural representative face of the piece and she takes up about 95% of the real estate on the film’s one-sheet poster for a reason. Mimi Morgan and (especially) Lauren Black shine as the desk nurses who take turns receiving oral favors from Sharon and misdirecting the forever-harried Sarge; Richard Pacheco is a lot of fun in an early scene with Hoffman and gets to kick back and ham it up with an oxygen tank after a Phaedra Grant match-up late in the film; Joey Silvera, who had already worked with Chinn in a slightly more serious role in 1974’s For Love of Money, is hilarious as an intern casually sleeping with both Cindy and Pam; and Paul Thomas and Eileen Wells (who looks strikingly like Marylin Chambers crossed with Dee Wallace) have an enormously good time as was apparently also the case with Hunt and Steadie, who were the ones who brought the fisting to the party.
And, re: fisting; much like the voluminous, slow-motion golden shower unleashed in the final seconds of 1974’s The Married Woman, watching someone go wrist-deep into someone else may not be your particular cuppa tea but, in the film’s two sequences where this occurs, the technique is definitely employed in a spirit of lighthearted fun. The film takes a slower approach to build it out by warming the audience up with the first scene between Hunt and Steadie before advancing to the second where Nancy Hoffman gets both of her hands into Eileen Welles. Long disembodied from the film (they’re hidden bonus scenes in the current DVD release), there is a need for a royal restoration so they can find their way back to their rightful home and be enjoyed without editorial molestation or interruption. Cut from the film, the resolution to the Hunt/Steady scene is completely excised and the natural build up to the Welles/Thomas/Hoffman sequence is a much quicker burn. Integrated back into the film, those cut moments help support the slower-building tempo that makes the payoff to the threesome almost unbearably blistering.
On top everything else, in a career packed full of ‘em, Candy Stripers is one of Bob Chinn’s most pronounced women’s films and much of its appeal is sitting back and watching the nurses run the show which, as someone who has worked in a hospital can attest, is truly how things actually work. Virtually all of the sexual escapades in the film are the result of full-throated, all-in instigation by the women, and if you needed any further proof, the final orgy doesn’t end in a fountain of male pop shots like the majority of them do. Instead, it caps off in an all-girl team up on Sharon Thorpe who, in the course of being shown a good time by the female staff and patients, shows Eileen Welles a good time in return. Candy Stripers is a film that insists on everyone winning and even gives its bespectacled baddie an arc the audience can totally applaud.
But the most fascinating thing about Candy Stripers is that with two fisting scenes, a threesome with an anal finish, and a massive, extended orgy that ends with an all-girl gangbang, it’s both wholly filthy and fully wholesome. And if you can balance that seemingly unreconcilable juxtaposition in your head, you’re on your way to enlightenment you’re also one who probably knows how to let yer hair down and have some fun.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
Apollo Twin 