Surely you didn’t think you were rid of me just because the Scare of the Day feature had wrapped up. Wait ’til you get a load of November’s feature: Doc of the Day. It’s not like horror flicks are the only kind of DVDs that pile up around here, you know; we’ve also got a ton of documentaries sitting around, too, and since we managed to clear quite a lot of space last month, we might as well keep the ball rolling.

I figured I’d start with the easiest one in the pile, and what makes it the easiest is that it’s the only one I’ve actually seen before: “Heavy Petting,” which was originally released back in 1989. I remember seeing the trailer for it at the beginning of some VHS tape or other, and the concept immediately struck my fancy: get a bunch of hipster icons, sit them in front of a camera, have them reminisce about their introduction to the concept of sexuality, then get them to discuss their early experiences with dating, romance, and gettin’ it onnnnnnnnnnnnnn…

Okay, maybe it sounds a little creepy when I describe it that way, but the mood is lightened considerably by the interspersing of clips from ’50s instructional films about the aforementioned topics, which range from naively quaint to laughably ridiculous, and the whole thing is set to a soundtrack of ’50s rock n’ roll, including “Dedicated to the One I Love,” “Rockin’ Robin,” and “Ready Teddy,” among others. It’s not strictly instructional films, though; also incorporated into the mix is footage from the films of Marlon Brando, James Dean, Elvis Presley, and other icons of the ’50s. Plus, the roll call of contributors is decidedly impressive. David Byrne, Sandra Bernhard, Abbie Hoffman, Spalding Gray, Ann Magnuson, and Laurie Anderson all pop up, as do more unlikely contributors such as Josh Mostel and John Oates, but the most entertaining appearances come from the side-by-side duo of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who come off like the alt-lit version of Matthau and Lemmon.

It’s a bit unnerving to hear Byrne discuss how he used to think that masturbating too much could lead to an inability to get it up when with an actual girl, or to have Gray suggest a connection between the comforting touch of animal fur on one’s member and the huge sales figures for Davy Crockett coonskin caps in the 1950s, but the reality is this: at least one of the stories in “Heavy Petting” – probably more than one, truth be told – will make you blush not because you’re embarrassed at the frankness of it but, rather, because you went through the exact same thing yourself. It probably won’t happen during Hoffman’s reminiscences of the night he and some pals attempted to perform a circle jerk until they’d filled a milk bottle, but trust me, it’ll happen eventually.

If it happens during this clip, though, I don’t need to know about it:

The biggest complaint about the film is that the various talking heads are only identified at the very beginning of the film, in a “appearing, in order” list of credits, and at the very end, in an admittedly cute segment which offers up photos of each of them in their younger days. This means, though, that if you don’t recognize who’s talking, you’ll either have to wait ’til the end to figure out who they were, or you’ll have to count backwards through that list of credits from the beginning…and unless you’ve got a photographic memory, you’re gonna need a score card to pull that off successfully. (“Let’s see, the last person was Laurie Anderson, and this person here is Frances Farmer, and we’ve already seen Ann Magnuson, so…that means that the woman we saw three people ago must’ve been Zoe Tamerlis!”)

Disc 1 includes an interview with director Obie Benz and extended cuts of the sexual confessions of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gray, Hoffman, et al, but it’s the bonus second disc that’ll really impress the cool kids, as it offers up ten original sex ed, anti-pornography and VD scare films from the 1930s through the 1950s. This is classic stuff that’s laugh out loud hilarious, which makes it perfect to have running on the DVD player during your next party…particularly this one:

(And if you really must watch Pt. 2, it’s right here.)