), but back nonetheless are my admittedly personal, (and biased 
) reviews of fembot-related efforts in the visual arts; big screen, small screen - hey, this time around, I might even add the odd Webfilm, provided it's worthy of notice (or deserving of ridicule)............This installment will be a "blast from the past," with suitable current additions and notations. Seeing as how we're just about one month away from the "rebirth" of Stepford for "today's" audience, there's no better way to get started than with a fond look at the way Stepford WAS............
The Stepford Wives (9 October 2000)
A cult favorite of gynophiles everywhere! Katherine Ross stars in this one as Joanna, a woman
searching for liberation, who moves with her husband and kids to the quaint town of Stepford.
At first, Stepford appears idyllic - lots of trees, large well-maintained houses, peace and quiet.
Joanna meets up with another recent transplant, Bobbie (Paula Prentiss). The two of them discover
that most of the other wives in Stepford seem a little strange. They dress in ankle length dresses.
They are obsessed with housework. They want to always please their husbands. They have no
ambition to do anything else.
An exception to this rule is Charmaine (Tina Louise), a lusty, outspoken hell-raiser, who thinks
nothing about noisily bedding her tennis companion while her husband is away. The three become a
team, and start nosing around.......
Until the Stepford Men's Association steps in. It seems that the Men's Association sponsors
romantic "second honeymoons" for various couples who would like a change. Charmaine and her
hubby go off on one, and upon their return, the change is noticeable: Charmaine is suddenly devoted
to housework, her hubby, etc., and she now is dressed like all the others. Joanna's questions are
starting to turn apprehensive, even more so when Bobbie announces a breif "vacation", causing
Joanna to seek out professional advice outside Stepford.
When she gets back, her hubby suggests a "vacation" of their own. Panicked, Joanna flees to
Bobbie's house, where she discovers that Bobbie has been replaced by a robot duplicate, as have all
the other wives. And now it's her turn.
She runs but she can't hide: she eventually finds herself inside the Men's Association, face to face
with her own robot double, who slowly approaches with a knotted scarf.......
As noted by the screenwriter Richard Goldman, the finished movie was compromised all the way through. In
Ira Levin's original book, the wives were replaced with incredibly sexy (and horny) robots, not the
"Sexy Victorian Style" dupes of the film. Only Tina Louise (pre-transformation), and the brief
glimpse of the negligeed (and mammarily enhanced) robo-Joanna have any remote connection to the
book.
The piece is noteworthy for the famous "Bobbie breakdown" sequence, and to a much lesser extent,
the scenes with a malfunctioning Carol (Nanette Newman, aka Mrs. Bryan Forbes). Toni Reid
briefly appears (as Marie), as does a 7 year old Mary Stuart Masterson, one of the kids. Two notes:
Paula Prentiss is married to Richard Benjamin (Westworld), and Tina Louise did an earlier turn as a
hypnotized "robot" on an ep of "Gilligan's Island."
This film has (so far) spawned three made for TV sequels: "Revenge of the Stepford Wives" (no
gynoid content), "The Stepford Children" (more later), and "The Stepford Husbands."
If you stumble across this gem on basic cable (the "general" channels, as opposed to the premium (subscription) ones), you'll miss the two admittedly brief full boob shots of Katherine Ross's robo-Joanna; even AMC shows the edited version nowadays. TSW seems to have become a darling of the "female" networks - it turns up regularly on Lifetime and Oxygen. Bizarre? Maybe, but it gets even more ironic; the genius who snipped the boob shots (for whatever reason), somehow failed to spot Nannette Newman's screen hubby walking up behind her for a blatant GROPE of her own "equipment!!" You can play, but you can't look?
I love these types of "messages!!!" 
Whether or not the new TSW will establish the same niche as the original remains to be seen - the original played against the real-life "women's movement." 29 years down the road, that undercurrent is long dead - women can "have it all" nowadays - and more and more of them are "discovering" what we men already knew - "having it all" is hardly worth the price that is paid in exchange.........(which is the REAL message Ira Levin was trying to convey, in 1972 when he wrote the original novel).
Unless of course, the women WILLINGLY step into Diz's "parlor".........
