Bob Mizer | Military School Initiation / 1963

military discipline

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bob Mizer (screenwriter and director) Military School Initiation / 1963

 

As an AMG documentary film observes, “if some long-forgotten fraternity jock with latent tendencies hadn’t dreamed up the idea of humiliating fraternity initiations, erotic cinema would have had to invent them.” Starring AMG studio regulars Ernie Matthews, Bob Jackson, Monte Hansen, and Chuck Steury, Military School Initiation (1963) entices us into the world of the military school boys which cinema has long promised us.

    The two senior fraternity members lounging around the house in—what else, given this is a Bob Mizer movie—their posing straps, encountering two new pledges and immediately demanding they strip to their own posing straps (didn’t everyone wear such under skimpy penis coverings in those days?). 

      The seniors pull out their boots and demand the pledges shine them to a black gleam. Of course, the finished shoes do not at all meet the demands of the seniors, who pulling out the ping-pong paddles spank the newbies.

 

     In the very next instance, the pledges eyes are covered with towels tied round their heads while the two seniors spray whip cream over their younger friends’ mouth and noses, resulting in a mass wrestling mass which soon becomes a pile of heaving flesh—the perfect outcome for their at-home viewers. A color promo suggests that before the final cuts there was also some towel slapping.

       Now they’re all friends and equals.

 

Los Angeles, September 20, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (2021).