Taboo IV: The Younger Generation (1985)

Some Pornonomy reviews have an obvious and natural jumping off point. Others require two or three false starts to find the way in. Sometimes, if I take the time to recap the plot, some aspect of the movie - story or otherwise - will jump out.

And then there's Taboo IV: The Younger Generation. For some reason, none of my normal approaches bore fruit. So instead, I'm going to cop out and use the copy Vinegar Syndrome wrote for their release and take it from there:

In the fourth installment of Kirdy Stevens’ popular TABOO series, the focus shifts to Dr. Jeremy Lodge (Jamie Gillis), a prominent psychologist who deals with clients who have been traumatized by incest. Unknown to him, his wife Alice (Cyndee Summers) has been having an affair with his brother (John Leslie). After their teenage daughters Robin and Naomi (Ginger Lynn and Karen Summer respectively) are expelled from boarding school, things come to a head when Jeremy discovers the affair and he and Alice split up, each taking one girl. Soon erotic tensions build as Naomi begins to lust after her uncle and Robin becomes more and more fascinated by the concept of incest…



The last TABOO film to receive a theatrical release, TABOO 4 features writer/producer Helene Terrie’s most accomplished and daring script along side exceptional performances from Karen Summer, Lynn, Leslie, and Gillis, as well as Honey Wilder reprising her role of Joyce McBride. Easily among the greatest erotic features of the 1980s.

The only statement I'd question is when it says Dr. Lodge's clients are "traumatized by incest." While the therapy sessions look like they're of the support group ilk, in practice they're basically salons for the patients to share their taboo stories to the seeming titillation of everyone else. When Joanne (Robin Cannes) tells how she and her brother peeping on each other masturbating progressed to them having sex, it felt like it was leading to fellow patients Betty (Ami Rogers), Jeffrey (Klaus Multia), and Joyce (Wilder) having a threesome on the office couch. Frankly, I'm shocked that wasn't worked into the story somewhere. Rogers and Multia both had non-sex roles, so maybe it was planned, but at 106 minutes, their pairing may have been a casualty of time. (Worth noting that Rogers and Multia never did perform together.)



(Taboo 4 was the second longest of Kirdy Stevens's Taboos - 1-5 and 7, although apparently, Taboo 7 is a repackaged version of a movie called Woman's Dream from 1980. Taboo 6 was directed by Robert McCallum, for what it's worth.)

For being as long as it is and having a dozen sex scenes, the film is pretty well-paced. The performances are solid across the board, unsurprising considering the strength of the cast. It doesn't take a particularly savvy viewer to figure out what the final (sex) scene of the film will be based on how the movie starts, but when it finally comes (so to speak) at the conclusion, it results in a bit of an abrupt ending. Since it appears that Gillis returns as Dr. Lodge in Taboo 5Taboo 5, maybe Stevens wanted to leave some room for a film-starting resolution in the next entry.

Let's see what Robert Rimmer thinks of ol' Taboo the Fourth:

The sex is continuous, but amazingly, there is no bisexuality or kinkiness.

Rimmer's entry is 80% broad plot explanation, 15% differentiating the Taboo series from the Taboo American Style series, and then that one sentence above that overlooks the fact that Karen Summer goes down on Ginger Lynn in the first goddam sex scene and, apparently, doesn't consider incest play as kinky.

In my last post, I said, regarding Expose Me, Lovely, that "[m]y initial thought was to rate this one a CC50, and damned if looking at the caliber of other CC50s and comparing/contrasting with CC25s and CC100sCC100s didn't bring me back to my go-to philosophy: first thought, best thought! So CC50 it is!" Well, the same damn thing applies to Taboo 4.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

° All of Kirdy Stevens's Taboos (and, in fact, pretty much all the rest of the movies he directed) were written by his wife, Helene Terrie. They were married for 60 years, from 1952 until his death in 2012.

° There were some shots of Robin Cannes's face that reminded me of Anya Taylor-Joy:

° I wish there was a porn actor name pronunciation guide. Like, I assume "Cannes" is like the French city, but it could also be "cans." And "Klaus Multia": is that "MULL-sha"..."MOOL-tee-uh..."Mewl-TEE-uh"? Who knows?

° John Leslie and Cyndee Summers are paired up in Taboo 4. I was immediately reminded of their pairing in all-time classic Stiff Competition where Leslie's Jake the Snake managed Summers's Cynthia Silkthroat. They have great chemistry so I was shocked to see the were only in these two features together.

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