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By Dan Leone

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WHAT WITH THE 9,000 annual Bay Area film festivals covering just about every conceivable demographic/artistic base, why don't we have one just for schlock? Well, maybe we do, given that this is year number two for the Pacific Film Archive's "Born to Be Bad" minifest, an incipient tradition that should be encouraged like heck. Purportedly celebrating celluloid "trash" from the drive-in epoch's last two great decades, this weekend's terse trip through six degrees of titillation in fact runs a wider gamut, from heavy-duty exploitation übercrap to items damn near approaching beauty, class, and socially redeeming value. Things commence on Friday with a double shot of vintage mid-'60s George Kuchar at his most kitsch-operatic (Color Me Shameless, Corruption of the Damned). This program is followed a tad incongruously with pioneering gore-gon Herschell Gordon Lewis's Color Me Blood Red, a tale of deadly artistic license that rips off Roger Corman's prior Bucket of Blood. The acting is by far the film's scariest element. Saturday brings a true obscurity in the form of William Rostler's '66 grind-house grappler The Agony of Love, wherein bored and busty housewife Barbara (Pat Barrington, an early siliconienne who also worked with Russ Meyer and Ed Wood) seeks the "attention" she doesn't get from her too busy executive husband by day-jobbing as prostitute "Brandy." It's a low-self-esteem thing to be sure, but Brandy, you're a fine girl! Adding to the agony of it all are endless scenes of panty-clad frottage with fat clients, badly post-synched dialogue, and the worst "dream sequences" you'll ever see. By contrast, Stephanie Rothman's 1970 Student Teachers is as refreshing as a long cool puff on an Eve cigarette. One of the best directors (alongside Jonathan Demme and Jack Hill) given more or less carte blanche by Corman's New World Pictures, Rothman delivers the requisite amount of T&A in this drive-in hit. But the film also makes room for not-dumb meditation on the ethics of violence por la revolución, prescription versus recreational drug usage, and abortion. Plus, there's a park love-in, an unusually subtle LSD-trip scene, radical street-theater performance, gratuitous Siddhartha reading, and much lovably lame soft rock. Last but so not least is 1975's Welcome Home Brother Charles, the first feature by exceptionally vivid blaxploitation director Jamaa Fanaka (of Black Sister's Revenge and the Penitentiary movies). Wouldn't want to spoil the big, big surprise at the end of this unforgettable urban drama; suffice it to say that the much abused hero wreaks vengeance on several evil whiteys in the most anatomically bizarre way possible. To lift a relevant advertising line from a slightly earlier '70s C flick (The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio), "It's not his nose that grows!" In conjunction with "Born to Be Bad" there will be a trash-cinema conference held at UC Berkeley; for the full schedule go to socrates.berkeley.edu/~tamao/Trash.htm. See Rep Clock for show times. (Dennis Harvey)