User Reviews

This is the epitome of a drive-in smoker. Back in the day, when I was a teen we used to go to drive-in movies just for a place to hang out. Others went for some family entertainment where they could save money by charging by the carload rather than by the individuals. You usually got to see three movies. Depending on what night you went, you either got some G- rated family movies (one first run movie and two less than mediocre throw-aways), three horror or action movies (same deal) or you got the sexploitation movies that were often one step away from a hard "R" or soft porn flick. Sometimes they were sex comedies but often they were low-budget hippie chick flicks where the actors seemed to take themselves too seriously. Cindy and Donna kind of falls in to the latter. This is more than just some flirtatious fun. This really is nothing short of some classic softcore.

Cindy and Donna Weeks are two teenage half sisters who live with their dysfunctional parents ( a booze hound mother and a lecherous, infidelity-prone father). While Donna is an "experienced" girl marching toward woman-hood with a boyfriend, younger red-haired sis, Cindy is conflicted and hesitant but still curious about sex. She spies on her sister and listens to her best friend, Karen talk about sex. She also spies on her drunken father as one night he falls into bed with her half sister, his stepdaughter, Donna.

Basically there's no real plot that's worth following. It's just these three girls falling into sexual situations to the soundtrack of some "groovy" music (it's hilarious how the script has them drop these hip soundbites of the day like 'far out', 'can you dig it?' and 'I'm hip' every five or ten minutes). The editing is what you'd expect for a low-budget movie from 1970. It's choppy and the film is a little grainy in spots. But this isn't the type of movie you watch for the craftsmanship of filmmaking.

In fact, every female featured in the movie seems to be involved in the liberation of the sexual revolution with even Mrs. Weeks throwing herself at her husband's friends. The younger girls are all gorgeous and have no problem disrobing and one girl dances almost nude for a full 30-40 seconds with the camera ogling her naked body. This reminds me why this is one of my favorite periods. The mini-skirts and dresses these girls wear are so short, they can't even lift their arms without giving a show. And the drug use is in full effect. The girls all smoke pot and mom and dad are drunk-a-holics.

I bought this as part of a set of four exploitation movies. It's ironic that I watched this one last and it turned out to be the best of the set.

If all you're looking for out of a movie is sex, sex, and more sex, then you might want to give the Crown International exploitation flick "Cindy and Donna" a try. It's not for people who want a really good, meaty story or lots of character development. However, it *is* for those who want to see a plethora of bare breasts, close-ups of bottoms and crotches, and a number of erotic sex scenes.

Aptly described as the saga of one teenagers' sexual awakening, it stars Debbie Osborne as the Cindy of the title, a 17 year old who doesn't have much interest in sex yet, despite the fact that her horny older sister Donna (Nancy Ison) and equally horny friend Karen (Cheryl Powell) are having it all the time. Their mother Harriet (Sue Allen) is a drunk who's saddled with a husband, Ted (Max Manning) who continuously lusts after a topless dancer named Alice (Alice Friedland). And Donna has a boyfriend, Greg (Tom Benko) who's more than a little sleazy.

While this isn't much good as a film, it's just so damn trashy that it's likely to keep a good many voyeurs watching, despite the rather slow pace. None of the acting is exactly award worthy, but it gets the job done. Osborne is reasonably appealing as Cindy. Manning is an entertaining shameless horndog and Allen chews a little scenery as the drunken mother, whose own attempt to engage in some extramarital activity doesn't go too well. Adding to the enjoyment factor are an assortment of truly cheesy pop tunes and a variable soundtrack ranging from bluegrass to rock sounds.

Overall, some devotees of 70s drive-in cult cinema should be fairly satisfied with this one.

Six out of 10.

For the information of your readers - I am the person who played the mother in Cindy and Donna. My stage name was: Suzy Allen. I never used the name Susy Allen and any information shown for Susy Allen does not apply to me. I don't know why I was not credited properly. I agree that Cindy and Donna was a terrible movie, but the stagehands and crew said I was the best actor in the movie! We spent an entire day filming one scene, with me and my "husband" driving on a freeway, with me nagging him about not taking me out often enough !! I had a lot of fun trying to be the whining, miserable wife for the movie, even though in real life I am nothing like that character. It was also very interesting for me to have to dub in some of my lines after the movie was finished. Quite a challenge to get everything right on cue.

A teenage virgin, Cindy, is curious about SEX. She watches her older half-sister Donna have SEX with her boyfriend in his car, and then she has SEX with herself afterwards. Meanwhile her father is busy having a lot of SEX with a nubile stripper/prostitute, which doesn't stop him from staggering home in a drunken stupor and having SEX with Donna (his own step-daughter)while Cindy spies on them. Cindy responds to this by going to the beach with her more experienced best friend where they pick up two boys. Her friend has SEX with one of the boys, while Cindy almost has SEX with the other. Later they return back to her house (her parents have gone away to Vegas) where they smoke a joint and end up having lesbian SEX with each other. Meanwhile, sister Donna poses for nude photographs for her boyfriend's friends and has SEX with all three of them. And then finally Cindy at long last has SEX with a guy.

You get the idea that this movie has a lot of sex in it. In fact, it kind of suffers the "curse of too much sex", a problem afflicting almost all hardcore sex films and many softcore films like this: There is so much sex in this movie that it pretty much crowds out anything else of interest (i.e. plot, character development, basic production values). So unless you are a young, heterosexual male who is planning to spend 90 some minutes masturbating, I really can't recommend this. It does have some sicko 70's elements (for instance, the quasi-incest), which will probably offend the sensibilities of some, but for me there is not nearly enough of this since it at least makes the movie less boring. There is also some attempted "comedy relief" by the two drunken parents, but they are mostly just annoying.

The only possible saving grace of this movie is that the four actresses who play the young people (the two sisters, the friend, and the father's mistress) are all very attractive, which isn't always a given in 70's films (70's porn actresses were often pimply and corpulent and generally looked like they'd been picked up in a Times Square vice dragnet). The four girls are obviously all somewhat older than the "teenage" characters they play, but they all have a nubile girl-next-door freshness without the freakishly huge breasts or the unnatural Russ Meyeresque proportions (not to metion the silicone Frankenstein look so common in these kind of movies today). This is still no reason for anybody but a hairy-palmed sex fiend to watch this movie, of course, but it should make it a little more fun at least for those who fall into that category.

... actually, come to think of it, the gummy panties would probably be better, since there's the possibility of things like variety in flavors and kinds of underwear - maybe a nifty little thong too. Off track though, down to brass tax, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, deviants of all ages, this is Cindy and Donna, by far the most pornographic of the 2-disc 8-movie set of "Drive-in Cult Classics" released thanks to Crown Entertainment. It might have been better for those expecting something of an actual movie if they had kept this out, but the good news is for anyone who bought the discs expecting to get their fair share of soft-core masturbation material, it's here on a silver pseudo-psychedelic platter. Groovy s***, man? Not really.

There is no story. All it is is that Cindy and Donna are sisters, half-sisters in fact, who have a father (well one is the real father, we know this because the one who's the non-biological daughter gets a sex scene with the guy - that's right, near-incest, yum to that) that goes around to various whores and gets addicted to one that's her daughters' ages, and a mother who is drunk 24/7 and complains about her husband without doing much about it. They're obsessed with sex, see, or at least Donna has a bunch of it, from one guy, maybe two or three more. Oh, and there's pot too- that spurs on sex, you see, not like it doesn't actually make you, you know, totally mellow or laugh a lot or munchies or whatever. Cindy- who gets her own gorram theme song- is curious, a voyeur, peering in on any sex scene she can get her grubby little eyes on... and wonders, what is it "like"?

Well, the director, master craftsman Robert Anderson, who also has credits The Young Graduates and The Hoax (not the Richard Gere one, remember that for the exam), movies no one but his wife has probably seen, and so with Cindy and Donna, his first film, he puts everything he knows into his art... which means, basically, we get a scene like when Donna is totally 'doing it' with her pot dealer in the car at night, and Cindy is looking on but, you know, the angle of the car is so radical so that there's no way Cindy is looking in on the car that the angle of the camera is and... Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, this is, after all, Grade-X trash that has basically no value; a Cinemax late-night flick probably has better production value, and maybe slightly worse music than the repetitive garage rock here.

Acting also goes along with story, there is nearly none that does anything to further whatever point the filmmakers are making - which, of course, is none. It's sexploitation that has one or two moments of sexiness (the stripper/Ted's prostitute's dancing scene is hot, I'll give the film that), but also many, many dull patches throughout: any time Anderson actually tries to tell the story, or advance any characters, it's like a snowplow running full speed at high-tide on a beach, it just is flat-out s***. But hey, if hippie chicks who go through many, er, changes rocks your boat- not to mention one of the most abrupt "tragedy" endings ever horribly filmed- have at it. Out of the lot of 8 movies in the collection, it's by far the least redeeming, which says a LOT.

Cindy is a very curious girl. Her big sister Donna can get all the men she desires, in fact she has a new one every night of the week. Even her good ol' dad is having an affair with a stripper he met at a bar. (Looking at his screechy shrew of a wife, I'm not surprised..) Why can't she get that kind of passion in her life? So follows two hours of tedious 'coming of age' drama which basically is film-speak for "lets convince our young starlets to deprive themselves of their tops every two minutes".I have to admit I was shocked not to discover Russ Meyer's name among the credits. Mind you, the women in this movie are probably not quite busty enough for him, and there's no sign of the underlying humour here that you see in his best work. Yep, this is serious stuff all the way, and all the softcore sex, lesbian, massage and shower scenes seem to be building up towards making a firm point about the futility of a hedonistic lifestyle. Personally I'm not buying it for a minute.. this is a skin flick with a moralistic ending thrown in an afterthought just to satisfy the censors so it could get a mainstream release. In the matter of whether you should watch it or not, I would say: If you want mild porn, go to one of the many specialist shops that cater to your particular needs. If you want a quality movie about growing up, I would suggest The Breakfast Club or Flirting. Under no accounts should you sit through this nonsense. Unless you want to be put off sex for life.. 0/10

CINDY AND DONNA is a dull and plot less sex film about the sexual awakening of a pair of sisters. It's a showcase for a pair of actresses willing to show as much topless nudity as is possible in a film, and the whole running time consists of one or the other going to bed with variously ugly middle-aged actors.

There's no story, no characterisation, no narrative, other than a ludicrously dumb twist ending that'll have you laughing out loud. The film strives to court controversy by having one of the girls be underage and the other making out with her own stepfather, but instead of being sleazy, this just comes across as laughably poor. No surprise that poverty row studio Crown International Pictures were behind it...

The reviews stating that this film is void of plot, acting, and merit are, for the most part, right on target. Cindy and Donna is nothing more than a soft-core exercise so prevalent in the 70s with a pseudo-story about two half-sisters sexually awakening - certainly peaking at different times as Donna is having a relationship - witnessed by Cindy - with Cindy's father(I think?). The material is spartan when it comes to plot development and really is just one sleazy scenario after another. There is essentially no acting in the movie except a rather mediocre performance coming from Susy Allen as the harried, booze-filled mother. Her performance was at least interesting if not definitely over-the-top. There is some weird moral the director and scriptwriter try to squeeze into all their soft-core nudity scenes, near-incest scenes, and masturbation scenes, but I wasn't buying. This film above all was a lesson in tedium and how one must sometimes endure even the most trying of films to get through to the end. Cindy and Donna is one of those films.

Who's the "hooker" dancing naked in the bar near the beginning of the movie, the one the father has an affair with? She's not in the credits on the movie, and not on IMDb either. She is smoking hot, and it's a shame there's no credit of her! We just saw this movie and it's pretty okay, i think the story and morals are about on point for today, although they slightly play up that pot makes girls explore each other. Is that really so bad of a thing? Anyway, the girl dancing who has the romps with the father is definitely a highlight of the film, for 1970, she really has it going on! Anyone know who she is, or can recognize her from any other early, or later, movie? The compilation we bought has 8 films on it, and this is one of them.

I just bought Drive-in Cult Classics at Best Buy today and quickly put in Cindy and Donna after reading what this movie was about, hey I'm a guy and it sounded great!!! After watching this appalling heap of 70's garbage I realized that this T&A movie needed something else.........to be buried and NEVER watched again!!!!! I thought all I needed in a movie was an ample supply of booze, boobs and drugs but I was SO wrong!!! I do have to say that I loved the ending!!! It was so sudden and unexpected. I hope that the rest of the flicks on this set are better than this one. I am giving this 70's sexploitation flick a two for 2 BIG obvious reasons.

Cindy Donna: The story of two horny half-sisters suffering suburban ennui in the 1970s. Virginal,15-year-old Cindy idolizes her older, sexually promiscuous half-sister, Donna. When she spies Donna banging her father (Donna's stepfather), Cindy decides that she's ready to experiment with her body and her sexuality, too. More sex (and tragedy) ensues. The staff that worked on this flick knew it was smarmy when they made it. It's good fun to watch, primarily because Cindy, played by Debbie Osborne, is insanely cute and spends a lot of her time in various stages of undress. The film also has a ridiculous, schmaltzy soundtrack that's half awe-filled, horn-ball sleaze and half after-school special. A highlight of the Drive-In Cult Classics collection.

"Cindy Weeks" (Debbie Osborne) and "Donna Weeks" (Nancy Ison) are half-sisters living together with their alcoholic parents. "Ted Weeks" (Max Manning) is Cindy's father who stays out late getting drunk and sleeping around with younger women. "Harriet" (Sue Allen), the mother of both Cindy and Donna, complains about everything while getting completely drunk as well. Needless to say, neither Cindy nor Donna have role models worth emulating and their values suffer as a result. Donna spends most of her time with her boyfriend, "Greg" (Tom Benko) smoking pot and having sex. Cindy happens to see them one night and is revolted by it. Not long afterward she catches Ted coming home extremely drunk and having sex with Donna as well. Noticing that Donna doesn't seem too perturbed about it the next morning, Cindy decides to smoke pot with her best-friend "Karen" (Cheryl Powell). One thing leads to another and soon Cindy starts becoming more interested in sex and turns to Karen, who happens to be sexually liberated, for advice. Anyway, I bought this in a 2-set DVD under the title of "Drive-In Cult Classics" which features 8 little-known films made specifically for a period in time when the drive-ins were in desperate shape. Although they were quite popular in the 50's, drive-ins began to steadily recede through the 60's and reached a critical time in the 70's. One of the reasons for this was due to the fact that drive-ins operated only at night and during the summer. As a result they had a limited number of times they could show a movie. Indoor theaters, on the other hand, could show a movie 5 or 6 times a day. So the major studios began to send their first-run films to indoor theaters since it was more profitable. That left the drive-ins having to settle for B-movies and eventually X-rated films. This particular film is an example. While it isn't quite X-rated, it does have quite a few scenes featuring nudity and sex. Surprisingly, although a movie of this sort usually doesn't have any actors worth mentioning, I thought both Debbie Osborne and Nancy Ison performed fairly well. But the dialogue, plot and supporting cast left much to be desired. So much so that I think it's safe to say that this film was definitely not so "groovy". I have rated it accordingly.

The Crown-International sexploitation movie "Cindy and Donna" seems to have drifted into obscurity immediately after its theatrical release, not getting a release on VHS and only receiving a quiet DVD release a few years ago (as one movie in a pack of several.) This may have been because there are no famous stars in the cast, or it may have been because the movie was rated "X" - though it's a soft core "X" and not a hard core "X", "X" rated movies have had a hard time being released in the home video market. But there's a real obvious reason why the movie has remained obscure, and that's because it's an incredibly awful movie. There is no real plot on display here - it's just one soft core sex sequence after another with just flimsy connections with each other. While I know this may sound appealing to some horny viewers, I think even they will be quickly bored, because these sequences are not erotic and are instead incredibly boring. The only interesting thing about the sex scenes is that they carefully avoid showing lower frontal nudity - if the filmmakers wanted an "X" rating, why not show everything? Anyway, this is one obscurity that deserves its status.

Innocent Cindy Weeks lives with her promiscuous half-sister Donna, their drunkard mother and Donna's lascivious father Ted. Cindy spies on Donna with boys including when a drunken Ted sneaks into Donna's room. While her parents are away, she and her friend Karen goes to the beach and hook up with a couple of guys. She smokes some pot with Karen and they make out. Cindy hooks up with Donna's guy and Donna is thrown out of his house only to be run over by a car.

This is exploitation pure and simple. There is no downplaying that fact. Debbie Osborne is very cute and also has a bit of spark in her. She's slightly more than the vacant stares from most girls of that era. Other than that, this is simple softcore porn.

This was a great period movie. My mom and dad took me to the drive inn movies at Paintsville KY in 1971 and this was playing. They had no idea it was an adult film. When the first nude scene played we left and they were red faced. When I turned 18 the movie was playing at the Trail Drive Inn in Flatwoods KY and I went to see it. I really liked it. I wish they made more movies like this today. The acting was very good and I often wonder what happened to the stars of the film and if I can buy it on DVD. If anyone out there knows of where to buy this film on DVD please put up a post as I would really like to have this film in my collection.

This is a fascinating film that goes well beyond typical sexploitation. I have so many questions...

I want to know what happened to the actress that played Cindy. I think she is/was (?) uniquely beautiful and was great in this budgetless film.

Did the director (or anyone else) notice that Sue Allen (the mom) was strung out, had at least one black eye, and had sex bruises all over her thighs? If so, was this an example of excellent casting or of irresponsible film making?

Why was Alice Friedland uncredited? This was a big role. The director was obviously obsessed with her, as evidenced by her large role and the lengthy dance routine at the bar. And, why was she so sweaty/oily in the dance scene? The scene was so long, and she was so oily...

How was it ever acceptable, in a theatrical release, to depict 15 and 17 year old girls stripping in bars, smoking weed, and hookin'? This was a drive-in feature. Other reviewers talked about their parents taking them to see this film by mistake. Can you imagine that? Holy ****. I'm not complaining - I think this movie is awesome. I'm just sayin'...

As for the ending, my question is wtf? Seriously... wtf? Brilliant. Amazing.

This film will hold your attention for 90 minutes. A unique and shocking sexploitation film that is worth watching.

RealReview Posting Scoring Criteria: Acting - 1/1; Casting - 1/1; Directing - 0.5/1; Story - 1/1; Writing/Screenplay - 1/1;

Total Base Score = 4.5

Modifiers (+ or -): Originality: 1;

Music Score/Soundtrack: 0.5 (After finishing the film, watch the intro credits again and think about the lyrics to that song. Awesome.);

Gratuitous Female Nudity: 1 (I just love awarding a full point in this category. Plenty of interesting female nudity in this film, about every 10 minutes or so.);

Distractingly Poor Editing: -1 (Multiple sex scenes turn into a naked woman rolling around on top of a man wearing shorts. None of the camera angles produced anything that resembled intercourse. Eventually, softcore directors learned how to better fake the sex scenes.);

Total RealReview Rating: 6 (This is a very high rating for a sexploitation film. Kudos to the creators and all of the missing actresses.)