Pornonomy Reviews: Satisfactions

Satisfactions (1982)

Directed by:
Robert McCallum

Starring:
Cara Lott
Carmel
Chrissie Beauchamp
Honey Wilder
Kay Parker
Laura Lazare
Rhonda Jo Petty
Danny Weirdman
Eric Edwards
Hershel Savage
John Leslie
Jon Martin
R. Bolla
Ron Jeremy

I'd imagine that in the world of film analysis and criticism, there exists a word or phrase for following one character into a scene, and then another character into the next, and so on (the way Linklater did in Slacker). Whatever that term is, Satisfactions is built around it.

While the scenes are tied together formally through the Slacker technique, narratively, the individual scenes follow a pattern: one (or more) characters express some sort of dissatisfaction (tepid sex life, boredom with life in general, dating "boys" instead of "men," etc.), which is then countered through sex with one or more other characters, "curing" the dissatisfaction, at least temporarily.

While none of the scenes stand out as atypically excellent, none of the scenes stand out as atypically poor, either. The individual performances are, pretty much across the board, adequate or better. B

Pornonomy Reviews: Memphis Cathouse Blues

Memphis Cathouse Blues (1982)

Directed by:
Louis Lewis

Starring:
Annette Haven
Danielle
Dorothy Lemay
K.C. Valentine
Kay Parker
Lisa De Leeuw
Rhonda Jo Petty
Billy Dee
Eric Stein
Hershel Savage
Joey Silvera
Jon Martin
Michael Morrison
Mike Horner

The Feline Farm, Memphis's oldest whorehouse, is in jeopardy of being shutdown by a fiery reverend. Madame Mavis (Haven) is racing against the clock to find a way to save her house.

In theory, there's room for a great deal of dramatic tension. In practice, the story is just a flimsy pretext to support a series of solid sex scenes, a third of which are flashbacks. Without exception, the scenes are well shot and well acted (the scene between Lemay, Valentine, Parker, Savage, and Martin, in particular, is an example of keeping in character throughout). It helps that the cast is great and everyone is at the top of their game.

A greater focus on the actual story would have bumped the final rating up by a half letter, but as it stands, Memphis Cathouse Blues is a solid B+.

Pornonomy Reviews: Beauty

Beauty (1983)

Directed by:
Warren Evans

Starring:
Nicole Black
Kathy Harcourt
Laurien Dominique
Loni Sanders
Mai Lin
Patty Boyd
Vanessa del Rio
Veronica Hart
Bill McKean
Blair Harris
George Payne
Hershel Savage
Jamie Gillis
Michael Morrison
Paul Thomas
Ron Hudd

Beauty is a fairy tale-by-way-of-soap opera type porn. Beauty (Sanders) is the kindest of three sisters - the other two, Hope and Faith (Black and Dominique) seem to live only to indulge in carnal pleasures, including, but not limited to, having their man-toy (Savage) at their beck and call. After the girls' gambling addict father's debts make him face the prospect of losing his business to Martin Gross (Gillis in a prototypically awesome Gillis-esque role) - the sort of charming dirtbag that would be the result of putting Bob Guccione in a Grand Theft Auto game - Beauty volunteers to live with Gross for a year (a solution offered by Gross after seeing a picture of the girl in her father's briefcase). Gross attempts to shock Beauty with his exploits but, as the narrator mentions numerous times, Gross's lifestyle just causes Beauty to pity him.

The sex scenes present an interesting dilemma to reviewing the film. On the one hand, while the characters are in character, the scenes don't seem particularly tied to the narrative. On the other hand, they're spectacularly well shot - the cinematography of the entire film is excellent - and the soundtrack rules. Seriously, the music may be the star of the show. While the film is set to a score that you'd expect from a mid-'50s Disney film, the sex scenes are all highlighted by a new wave/psych rock/drone soundtrack that could easily be sampled by a chillwave band now. In fact, pretend you didn't read that, so I can sample that shit! Another plus is that Evans eschewed the idea of sex sound effects or (shudder) overdubs by having the only audio during the hardcore scenes the music. (An approach I mostly associate with much, much later films; The Story of J or Teagan: All-American Girl, for instance.)

While the sex scenes could have been better integrated, the fact that the craft with which they're treated is so high (more than any other film I've seen recently, the scenes here could be pulled from the narrative and offered as just straight up hot fucking) more than makes up for it. I was really, pleasantly surprised by Beauty. A-

Pornonomy Reviews: All the Way In

All the Way In (1984)

Directed by:
Bob Chinn

Starring:
Annette Linder
Candy Samples
Mai Lin
Martina
Shanna McCullough
Tanya Lawson
David Morris
Eric Edwards
Francois
Mike Horner
Pat Romano
Ron Jeremy

There is a surprising amount going on in this film for how boring it is. Well, I suppose one's interest in the film is directly tied to how intrigued you are by Candy Samples, which for me is "little to none."

The main story is that Ultra Flesh magazine has just been sold to P.J. Corona, a man with a reputation of cleaning house after buying magazines. Justifiably, Ultra Flesh's staff is concerned for their jobs. The card up their sleeves is sex advice columnist Candy Keen (Samples), but unfortunately she'd been down in the dumps since falling in love with a man while on a burlesque club tour and just didn't have it in her to try to charm the new owner.

The sex scenes are pretty well-integrated. One in particular is impressive in its editing. Magazine head Mr. Dicker (Edwards) reads one of the fantasy letter's Candy received to her over the office intercom. While he's reading the fantasy - a story about a dom man with a sub "Oriental mistress" who is, in turn, dominated by Candy Keen herself - the film cuts between the fantasy (in which Edwards and Mai Lin are in the roles), Mr. Dicker and Chrissy, the magazine's adult film reviewer (Lin), in his office, and Candy masturbating in her office while listening to the letter being read. While all of the sex scenes are handled with Chinn's normal craft, none are all that noteworthy for their sexual "heat." Although maybe it's just the fact that I couldn't get into Samples, who is a participant in half the film's sex scenes.

It's too bad that the film focuses so much on love - both Keen's seeming star-crossedness and managing editor Martina's (Martina) longing for art director Jeff (Morris) - because the film could have been a magazine-based successor to Chinn's superior The Young Like it Hot. In fact, the film opens in a manner that seems like it's going to be quite a bit of fun. The opening credits are set over a montage following the magazine from the printer, to a newsstand, to the hands of a man (Horner) on an airplane. A woman (McCullough) sitting near him notices that a woman on the plane bears a striking resemblance to the picture in his magazine. The man explaining who Candy Keen is is a pretty clever way of introducing the viewer to the character. Add a cameo by Russ Meyer (a nod to Samples' earlier career) and a silly gag in which Samples' and Lisa De Leeuw's busts prevent them passing one another in the plane's aisle, and the first eight minutes make it seem like All the Way In will be quite a lark. After the story starts, though, it becomes kind of a drag.

I realize I'm probably being extra critical of this film because it's a Chinn, and I know how much better it could/should have been. All the Way In just didn't do it for me. C-

Pornonomy Reviews: All-American Girls

All-American Girls (1982)

Directed by:
Bill Eagle

Starring:
Brandy O'Shea
Copper Penny
Gina Gianetti
Jacqueline Lorians
Jade Leneer
Julienne Nichols
Joanna Storm
K.C. Valentine
Laura Lazare
Starr Wood
Lynx Canon
Alan Adrian
Billy Dee
Carl Lincoln
Charlie Hanover
George White
Jeff Conrad
Starbuck
Rock Steadie
Steve Douglas
Ferris Weal

I ask you, what film is better titled for a review on the Fawth of JOO-ly than All-American Girls? (Okay, that was a rhetorical question...moving along.)

The film is - if not the first, at least an early example of - the tried and true porn formula of a reunion of sorority sisters sharing stories of their erotic exploits. In this case, though, rather than allow things to flow more or less organically (you know, catching up...wine...), the intent is put on front street: Caroline (Gianetti) is hyper-wealthy and flies the rest of her "sisters" to England for her birthday. The only gift she asks is for each of the girls to share the "nastiest" thing they've done since graduation.

None of the tales are particularly noteworthy - with the possible exception of Caroline's, which was a tryst with a professor, technically occurring before graduation, thus breaking her own "post-graduation rule" - but they were all well enough considered and presented: Danielle (Nichols) has a literal roll in the hay with two Frenchmen (Lincoln and Hanover) while studying abroad; Maria (O'Shea), as a "kept woman," is the wager in a high stakes roulette game; Rebecca and Shannon (Penny and Valentine) seduce a violinist's apprentice (White) at a high class function. The only woman without a story to tell is Denna (Lorians) who (we're assured is not a virgin) just doesn't have an experience on par with her sorority sisters. That is, until she has sex with Caroline's weirdo musician brother Charles (Douglas), sporting a pencil mustache somehow creepier than John Waters's.

There are two things definitely worth noting about the film. The first, technically, was the rather clever use of establishing shots in and around San Francisco to give the feeling of foreign locales. The second, narrative in nature, is the odd disconnect between the overall tone of the film - sorority sisters gettin' sexxxy - and the final scene, between Denna and Charles. Their initial meeting - him strumming out some bullshitty singer/songwriter tune on an acoustic guitar, her telling him she was a music major (harp and piano!) at Berkley - sort of sets the tone for the end, but the viewer is never really given and indication that they have any other interactions. So when he stumbles upon her crying because she hasn't been railed by two French guys or offered up on a felt table in Vegas, and then they end up screwing - scored by super romantic music - and he's like, "I love you and want you to stay with me forever," it seems less "how romantic!" and more, "THAT DUDE WILL TAXIDERMY YOU TOMORROW!" It ends up feeling like a filmmaker decided to try to incorporate a nice, romantic undertone to an otherwise fairly juvenile idea (while I'll wager that so-called "girl talk" is as or more "blue" than the average man assumes, the idea that a woman would decide that all she wants for her birthday is her friends' dirty stories is pretty absurd), and ended up making a huge miscalculation.

That rant aside, overall the production values were really solid, the performances above average (with a shout out to Billy Dee, who impresses me more with each film I see him in), and the film moved along pretty well. On a side note, Starr Wood had this sort of Carrie Brownstein thing going on - which was awesome - and Joanna Storm looked unnervingly like Loni Sanders (I think it was the darker hair). B

Pornonomy Reviews: 1001 Erotic Nights

1001 Erotic Nights (1982)

Directed by:
Edwin Durrell

Starring:
Annette Haven
Heather Fields
Jade Wong
Laura Lazare
Lisa De Leeuw
Lysa Thatcher
Mai Lin
Nicole Black
Tigr
Phaery I. Burd
Hershel Savage
Joey Silvera
John Leslie
Jon Martin
Paul Thomas

Anyone with a passing familiarity with the Middle Eastern/South Asian folktales-within-folktales "One Thousand and One Nights" will have a pretty good idea how this film is constructed. There are some artistic licenses taken, so here's a brief overview:

After discovering that he's being cuckolded by his wife (DeLeeuw) and his trusted advisors (Savage and Silvera), Sultan Chaka Khan* (Leslie) sours on women and, to avoid being duped again, decides to pick a woman from his harem at random to bed down with, having her strangled in the morning. Eventually, he ends up picking Scheherazade (Haven), who, in an effort to not get a morning strangling, spins a series of sexy stories, keeping the Sultan on the edge of his seat.

The idea of using "One Thousand and One Nights" as the framework for a porn is really smart. The commitment to the theme and the production values are top flight. Oddly, the film eschews using well-known stories (Aladdin, Ali Baba) for vignettes that are either "deep cuts" or tales created for the flick. Unfortunately, that's the (relatively minor) shortcoming of the film; while everything around the sex is really solid, the hardcore scenes are kind of underwhelming.

By and large, 1001 Erotic Nights' strengths outweigh the sorta boring sex scenes, and - as opposed to 69 Park Avenue - is the type of film that makes it seem like a review every two and a half days is an achievable goal after all. B

* One oddity is that there are a few touches ("You are here" on the map at the beginning, the Sultan's name, Paul Thomas's "Oh, shit!"s...) that seem like the film may have been intended as a tongue-in-cheek Mel Brooks-like parody. Instead, though, everything is played pretty straight.

Pornonomy Reviews: 69 Park Avenue

69 Park Avenue (1985)

Directed by:
Mike Handley

Starring:
Colleen Brennan
Cherri Roberts
Erica Boyer
Little Oral Annie
Patti Petite
Tiffany Duponte
Chris Chase
Dan T. Mann
Mike Horner
Rocky Balboa
Tom Byron


The only thing worse than a film that is a lazy clip compilation is one that isn't but should be.

69 Park Avenue has a flimsy narrative pretext (Tom Byron is a reporter on his first assignment, interviewing Colleen Brennan, a San Francisco madame) framing a series of unrelated sex scenes without any stylistic consistency. While everything about them seems like they were from different movies, they appear to be filmed for this one.

The only parts barely worth noting: the first sex scene (Duponte and Horner) offers proof that "pearl necklace" was in the vernacular since at least 1985; a few of the scenes are virtual "how not to do vocal overdub" clinics; one of the scenes is underscored by a song that has a proto X-Files theme; Brennan and Byron - actors that seem to be two of the biggest nerds in the history of porn - have a pretty fun charisma together.

69 Park Avenue is the sort of film that seriously jeopardizes my ambition to hit the 100 review mark. On the flip side, it's also the sort of film that makes me grateful that I've got a system that can play back faster than actual speed. (I can generally guage the quality of a film by the playback speed I employ: a great one is 1.00x, an awful one 1.50 to 2.00x; this one, was, for the most part, set at 1.40....) D