Kansas Bowling transforms a forgotten sexploitation subgenre into a brutal examination of violence against women.
Sorry cinephiles, Kansas Bowling is cooler than you.
At 17 years old, while most of us were going to the multiplex to check out the latest blockbuster, Bowling was writing and directing her first feature film, B.C. Butcher, shooting it on 16mm in her parent’s backyard and financing it by bussing tables. Two years later, that scrappy little backyard production found its way into the hands of Troma and got a proper release. That kind of DIY spirit has remained at the heart of Bowling’s work ever since. After directing a slew of music videos, she’s finally returned to feature filmmaking with Cuddly Toys, a provocative throwback that feels right at home in her oeuvre. The film was recently released by Vinegar Syndrome, and September 7th at 7:30pm Bowling is taking it back to the big screen, presenting a new 35mm print at Quentin Tarantino’s legendary Los Angeles repertory theater, the New Beverly Cinema.
For a filmmaker who started by making movies in her backyard, that’s one hell of a badge of honor.
Cuddly Toys presents itself as a “white coater,” a strange little corner of sexploitation that emerged in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when filmmakers disguised adult material as supposedly educational “marriage manual” films. The genre delivered its sleaze with a straight face, wrapping titillation in the thin veneer of social instruction and warnings about the dangers of sex and immorality. Here, the director herself steps into the role of Professor Kansas Bowling, white coat and all, guiding us through a series of vignettes and “case studies” exploring the everyday dangers and problems faced by teenage girls.
But Bowling has something much more pointed in mind than simply resurrecting an obscure exploitation format. She pulls an ingenious cinematic Uno reverse, using the genre’s own language against it. What begins as a cheeky recreation of the white-coater gradually reveals itself as a brutally clear-eyed feminist examination of sexual abuse, rape, molestation, and murder. Most importantly, Bowling refuses the genre’s historical tendency to place responsibility—or even blame—on the women and girls who are typically victimized. Instead, she turns that gaze outward, delivering an unflinching portrait of the violence inflicted upon women and making damn sure the blame lands where it belongs: on the people who perpetrate it and the society that refuses to change.
It’s not an easy watch, but that’s kind of the point. Cuddly Toys gradually mutates from something resembling Teenage Mother into something much closer to Faces of Death, shedding its cheeky educational-film veneer as Bowling dives headfirst into darker, full-on mondo territory. And the further she goes, the more apparent her real target becomes: the systemic patriarchy that creates, enables, and perpetuates the conditions in which these women are victimized. Bowling isn’t interested in simply depicting violence against women; she’s interrogating the systems that allow that violence to happen in the first place—and refuses to let the audience look away.
I think that’s where Cuddly Toys really earns its stripes: it doesn’t just wear its influences on its sleeve—it takes the language of those films and weaponizes it, managing to be every bit as shocking and deeply unsettling as the movies that inspired it. But Bowling isn’t simply recreating a subgenre; she’s reclaiming it. Cuddly Toys is more than a film—it’s a cinematic reclamation of a subgenre built on the exploitation of women, turning that same machinery of exploitation back on itself. The result is something genuinely impressive, confrontational, and, perhaps most importantly, still painfully relevant.
