The Animal in Me (1985)

While writing up the review for Kirdy Stevens's Taboo IV, I learned that the majority of the films he made were written and produced by his wife, Helen Terrie, so it was no surprise when I saw, during the opening credits, that The Animal in Me was written and produced by her, too. It turns out Taboo IV and The Animal in Me were released in the same year, although in terms of quality, they're worlds apart. Maybe the Taboo series had more clout, because Stevens got to shoot that one on film and was stuck with video for Animal. The former had a much more substantial cast (Karen Summer was in both, for what that's worth).



The Animal in Me stars Colleen Brennan as Maggie, a divorced romance novelist who has soured on the idea of romance, if she ever believed in it in the first place. Her daughter, Pepper (Summer), on the other hand, is still infatuated by the idea of infatuation. She's fully smitten with a new doctor at the hospital she works at - she's a nurse - Dr. Morgan (Jerry Butler).



Pepper has a rough go of it romantically. She has to contend with the unwelcome advances of her mother's boyfriend, Travis (played convincingly skeevily by Craig Roberts), then she's set up with Warren (Peter North), her friend Stacy's (Gina Valentino) boyfriend Bobby's (Tom Byron) visiting buddy, who doesn't bother to engage with her while the foursome are out in the park or hanging by a pool. When Pepper calls a cab to go home from Stacy's rather than get into Bobby's proposed "swingin' and swappin'" Warren complains that it looks like he struck out. A real "F" for effort, bud.



When she finally gets a chance to date Dr. Morgan, after creepily peeping on the young couple Maggie seduces him, ostensibly to prove to Maggie that knights in shining armor don't exist.



Ultimately, the nail in the coffin of Pepper's belief in romance isn't finding out that Dr. Morgan got it on with her mother, but when Travis - initially tender and caring when Pepper discovers her mother's and Dr. Morgan's dirty deed - wears her down and has sex with her.



The only thing that prevents it from being sexual assault is that she does technically consent: after repeated tearful "No"s, she finally says, "Okay, Travis. Give it to me, dammit, give it to me."

Battle of the Stars 2: East Versus West (1985)

There were sixteen reasons I moved down one spot from Battle of the Stars to Battle of the Stars 2 when the former came up in my random movie picker. Based on the scene breakdowns, the formula looks pretty consistent: two female stars (Kristara Barrington and Heather Wayne) are pitted against one another by pairing them with the same guy (Tom Byron), with each other, and then in two separate small group scenes (Barrigton with Gail Sterling, Don Fernando, and Jonathan Younger; Wayne with Nina Hartley, Fernando, and Jessie Adams).

On paper, that's fine. "Getting to know" movies were nothing new, from the OG Inside Jennifer Welles to Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, Inside Little Oral Annie, and Centerfold Celebrities and its sequels. And the interest in these productions didn't go away as evidenced by Evil Angel's I Am... movies. In practice, Battle of the Stars 2 is fucking exhausting. Both the sax and piano-heavy jazz background music and Kristara Barrington's incessant porn moaning is non-stop and mixed too loud.

Much of the movie - which, like Centerfold Celebrities was shot on video, so looks pretty shitty - was edited like a trailer, cutting between the two women in flagrante and Tom Byron's talking head answering questions and comparing/contrasting the women. Early on, it feels like a novel choice, when, for instance, he was discussing the differences on how the women liked their nipples treated (which was basically a microcosm of the two women's sex styles: Barrington rough and ready, Wayne demure and seductive). After a bit of that, I kept waiting for the bounce-around editing to mellow out and just focus on the sex, and that just never happened.

House of Strange Desires (1985)

If there's something strange in Jason (Mike Horner) and Terry's (Tamara Longley) new house, who are they gonna call? Gina (Cindy Carver), Krensky (John Seeman), and Abigail (Jill Ferari)! Unfortunately for the haunted homeowners in House of Strange Desires, the ghosts decidedly do not get busted.

While there are some "first draft" shortcomings of the script (mostly that there's no clear origin, reason, or motivation for the malevolent spirits, almost certainly misidentified as paranormal/occult expert Krensky as a succubus), to the movie's benefit, (co)writer, director, producer Lawrence T Cole resisted the urge to lean on camp or comedy and kept the tone earnest, which made for some charming laugh-out-loud moments that can only come from movies like The Room or Miami Connection that don't come at the viewer with any winks or nods. There were also a few great details, like the spirit(s) only manifesting in physical form after being drawn by Jason's semi-possessed hand and the use of sheer fabric to denote the barrier between the tangible and spectral realms.

About halfway through the movie, something about the setting and interaction between Jason and Terry reminded me of Dangerous Desires which, turns out, was also a Cole picture. [Writing this now also brought to attention Cole's apparent passion for putting "desire" in titles: Challenge of Desire (1982), Forbidden Desire (1983), House of Strange Desires (1985), and Dangerous Desires (1982).] Both films have an undercurrent of melodrama (though in Dangerous Desires, that shit's turned up to 11). I wonder if Cole started making more serious porn explicitly or implicitly to atone for his early, much sleazier career. Either way, movies like this sort of explain how he segued into the writer's room on the final season of Dynasty.

Between the Cheeks (1985)

I would love to know which came first: Between the Cheeks the movie, or "Between the Cheeks" the theme song? Logically, the song would be written to the flick, at least a one page (or in this case, face it, one paragraph) treatment, but I'd easily believe it was the other way around. The song mentions two guys: a “crazy guy…[who] says he’s from another planet” and “doesn’t know the difference between a pussy and a cat” and “another fellow...who...talks about his bitches all day long in school.” The former is played by Tony Martino, wearing a shower cap, bathrobe, and neck tie, and doing a Dollar Store Carl Spackler.

The latter is played by Marc Wallice and/or Steve Powers, in blazers, sunglasses, and fedoras, channeling Anthony Michael Hall’s character from the bar scene in Weird Science.

The three guys are in some sort of class taught by Jack Baker, explaining the difference between human women (or, “bitches” as Baker says women are referred to “in this society”) and cats and extolling the virtues of anal sex. The first five sex scenes are flashback vignettes, the last takes place in the classroom when Baker brings in Sheri St. Clair for an in-class demonstration.

On paper, I expected the Ginger Lynn scene (with Wallice, Tom Byron, and Martino) to be the standout. It was fine, but my favorite was the Laurie Smith/Steve Alexander scene, at least in part due the scene’s music, which is a mashup of a Kraftwerk pastiche and Alan Silvestri's Summer Rental theme. The costuming, spartan set, and music would fit right into Suze Randall’s Miss Passion.

One thing I can is that everybody involved in the movie commits to the material. Martino, Wallice, and Powers give everything they have to the absurdity of the material. Jack Baker has an undeniable charisma, and he was probably great at the Dozens, but he should have probably stuck to nonsex roles. I can’t recall him in a hardcore scene (this film included) that he proved himself as a moderately capable woodsman.

Gregory Dark was an undeniably important figure in the direction of pornography. A comment on the post accompanying The Rialto Report’s interview with Dark sums it up pretty succinctly (if not a touch hyperbolic):

Greg Dark is hands down the MOST innovative and interesting director to come out of the industry in the 1980s. He ripped up the rule book, and whether you like his films or not, the industry was never the same again. There aren’t many that can say that.

Just look at what came before… Talk Dirty To Me, which was good but it aped regular films.

Afterwards? Buttman, gonzo, alt porn, and so on. All as a direct result of the Dark Bros.

Since time is a flat circle, Between the Cheeks reminded me of Eon McKai’s Art School Sluts, which was directly related to me starting this blog in the first place:

Fleshbot's coverage of the production of Art School Sluts inspired me to get an online porn rental subscription; while Art School Sluts was in the first round of rentals (along with other early cracks at movies like The Masseuse, Stuntgirl, Marie and Jack: A Love Story, and Kill Girl Kill), it was rewatching the films of my adolescence - Filthy Rich and Stiff Competition - and discovering others from the same era - Barbara Broadcast and Sex World - that piqued my interest.

At Adult DVD Talk, Violet Blue said of Art School Sluts:

Finally, finally someone made an authentic, unselfconscious, intentionally ironic porn film.

I know all these people. They're at the record store counter, at the lame bar I go to with all the hipsters. But here they have hot sex. If you're under 30, see this video. The old middle-aged white guys in porn aren't going to know what hit them.

The same words could have applied to Dark’s early work. If not Between the Cheeks, exactly, then New Wave Hookers, certainly. In a sort of moneyshot ouroboros, in 2006 McKai made Neu Wave Hookers, a “re-envisioning” of the Dark classic.

Anyway, let’s see what Rimmer says:

I’ve given this one a CC rating only because it’s a classic in anal-sex video, which was the big seller on cassettes in 1985.

That is a fucking wack reason to rate something a Collector’s Choice! I did laugh out loud, though, I read:

The connection between the sequences involves a group of morons who are being taught the joys of anal sex by a black dude.

Dark’s early work is unashamedly sleazy and not really my cup of tea, but for historical importance - and the fact that Between the Cheeks and it’s ilk set the groundwork for Devils in Miss Jones 3 & 4 - I’ll rate Cheeks a CC100.

RANDOM THOUGHTS
° Gregory Dark's fascination with black street culture and slang has always reminded me of Quentin Tarantino's and I wonder if on some level - conscious or subconscious - Dark cast Jack Baker the way Tarantino did/does Samuel L. Jackson to potentially ward off criticisms of racism.

° Sheri St. Clair's picture at IAFD has always looked to me like a Upright Citizen's Brigade Comedy Central show-era Amy Poehler dressed up as a porn performer:

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On deck:

Corporate Assets (1985)

Paul Verhoeven would love Corporate Assets. There is high drama, wide swings in tone, and a wilder final six-ish minutes than about any adult film I've ever seen.

Tish Ambrose stars as Jill, an employee of the Beutel company. Jill is in charge of a small group of women offered as prizes to top-performing employees and influential men in business and politics at the whim of Beutel bigwig J.W. Sieverson (R. Bolla). While Lisa's the madame, of sorts, she's also expected to be available to men, as dictated by J.W. The harem are jaded, only-out-for-number-one Morgana (Rachel Ashley), sweet, romantic Tanya (Amber Lynn), and brash newcomer Babette (Sheri St. Clair), whose inability to fall in line ultimately has her broken - mentally and physically - by Louis (Herschel Savage), J.W.'s strong-arm thug.

For 12 years, Jill has had a penpal relationship with Winston (Eric Edwards), who was a POW in Vietnam alongside Lisa's brother, who was killed trying to escape. After the war, Winston wrote Jill to tell her what happened to her brother, and over the years, through their letters, they fell in love. With the urging of his "ol' country shrink" (Nick Random in a non-sex role), Winston travels to Los Angeles to meet Jill at long last, in an effort to get him past the visions of war that have plagued him.

We're given a glimpse of his recurring nightmare, which is revealed - during an argument with Jill, later - to be way darker than it initially seemed.

Jill never told Winston what she did for a living, so things are complicated when he shows up at Beutel asking after her. She's ready to move on from her role as madame and make a life with Winston, but J.W. is unwilling to let her out from under his thumb and has Louis keep tabs on her.

The cast is really great. R. Bolla plays J.W. with a cold ruthlessness. While he seems to express a degree of humanity, expressing admiration and affection for Jill during a poolside scene, his later actions left me wondering if he was genuine, or whether it was just the manipulation and gaslighting employed by an abuser....

Eric Edwards's Winston has a vulnerable sincerity. The worldweariness of Jill is palpable even while Ambrose portrays her as a consumate professional. Sheri St. Clair won some awards (1986 AVN Best Acress, 1985 CAFA Best Supporting Actress; I'd say the latter was more deserving than the former. Tish Ambrose or even Rachel Ashely would have been more deserving of Best Actress) as Babette. I'd posit that of all the actors, while Babette's fractured character may have experienced the biggest change (a statement debatable itself), her performance was the slightest. Many surprisingly deep characters were played with better care and nuance.

At 105 minutes (the Vinegar Syndrome release), Corporate Assets is well over my preferred 75-80 minute length, but I didn't feel there was a lot of fat to be cut. In fact, I did a quick comparison against the ~88 minute Vidco release, and what was left out of the shorter version were non-sex elements that would have weakened the story, for sure. I think there were a few of the hardcore scenes that could have been trimmed, but I felt most of the scenes were in service of the story.

Rimmer's take:

This one is so superior to many adult films that you may keep thinking it could have been better, especially if the character J.W. Sieverson...had been better developed.

If all the unrelated sex had been eliminated and the time devoted to a real tug of war between J.W.- not as a totally nasty man but a man who discovers belatedly his need for a loving woman - and Jill and Winston, this would have been a better film.

I don't disagree, necessarily, but I find it interesting that for all of the time Rimmer spends focusing on what women watching the films he reviews will respond to, he advises changing what is essentially a female-focused character piece into a film about J.W.

As for errors, Rimmer misinterpreted an early scene in which Bill Saunders (Harry Reems) has a heart attack during sex with Morgana and Tanya as an assassination orchestrated by J.W. rather than an accident during his "reward" for strong sales.

Corporate Assets also has the distinction of being an AVN 500 pick. They say:

Writer/director Thomas Paine uses common sense to incorporate veteran post-war trauma, the coupling of big business and government, and the sacrifice of emotional morals for material secruity, without drastically burdening the film or creating a grossly contrived product. The situations appear realistic and the dialogue natural; the plot's realism is the film's greatest asset.

High praise to which I agree, so: CC10.

RANDOM THOUGHTS
° Another film where Eric Edwards is cured of impotence (see: Center Spread Girls).

° And another film with an Edwards-featured simulated sex scene (see: Virgin and the Lover).

° Tish Ambrose is in the same face family as Jane Pauley and Brie Larson.

° The romantic sex scene between Jill and Winston in Winston's mountain cabin was cut as a montage and bordered on self-parody. I wouldn't be surprised if it was an inspiration for the sex scene in Team America: World Police.

° Rachel Ashley is a smokeshow.

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Up next:

Ah, oui, oui! Back to France.

Pornonomy Reviews: Campus Cuties

Campus Cuties (1985)

Directed by:
Paul G. Vatelli

Starring:
Mauvais DeNoir
Nikki Charm
Summer Rose
Taija Rae
Tracey Adams
Buck Adams
Jesse Eastern
Kevin James
Rick Savage
Shone Taylor
Tom Byron


Per Gore-Gore Girl's suggestion, I decided to check out Revenge of the Petites*. Ten minutes into it, though, it just seemed too new for my first review in so long. There must be a back-to-school feeling in the air, because I dusted off Campus Cuties. Holy smokes, what a turd. It's been well over a month since I've watched a full adult film, and nearly 10 (!) since I've reviewed one, and somehow this is what I chose to re-start with. Yikes.

Briefly, the film is about a country girl (Charm) that leaves her family and boyfriend to attend college in the Big City. She makes friends quickly enough, and then...nothing really happens. There are about a half-dozen times that it seems like a plot is going to develop, and about forty ways off the top of my head that it could have been a pretty decent movie. Instead, you get dialog and acting that would be at home in a local used furniture store commercial, multiple examples of "how to give an uninspired blowjob", some of the worst and least necessary slow motion I've ever seen (limited to the final sex scene: Taylor/Adams/Byron), and - the only moderately interesting sex - Nikki Charm's somewhat impressive reverse cowgirl technique.

"Avoid at all costs" is a little harsh, so I guess I'll say "avoid at most costs." Unless you're really itching for college porn that feels like it was conceived, written, and half-filmed in about an hour by people whose ideas of college were gleaned from a handful of movies they didn't really pay attention to. D

* I will return to Revenge at some point. Soon, probably, to wash the taste of Campus Cuties out of my brain.

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

Pornonomy Reviews: Taboo American Style Parts 1-4

Taboo American Style (1985)
Directed by:
Henri Pachard

Starring:
Carol Cross
Gloria Leonard
Kelly Nichols
Raven
Sarah Bernard
Taija Rae
Frank Serrone
Joey Silvera
Paul Thomas
R. Bolla
Steve Lockwood
Tom Byron

Holy cow. This mini-series was a lot to digest.

It seems strange to say that a film (for simplicity's sake, and since I watched this series as a whole instead of by the parts, I'm going to refer to Parts 1 to 4 as "the film") that features acts of incest and has the word "taboo"* in the title isn't about incest, but Taboo American Style really isn't about incest: it's about a teenage girl shrewdly and mercilessly manipulating everyone around her in order to achieve her goals of power and, later, film stardom.

The scope of the film is far to great to provide a scene by scene account, and although some might scoff at the idea of worrying about "spoilers" in a porn, there are enough startling moments that it'd be a disservice to lay them out here.

The film primarily involves the well-to-do Sutherland family: father Harding (Paul Thomas), mother Emily (Gloria Leonard), soon to leave for college son Tom (Tom Byron), and daughter Nina (Raven, who, throughout the film, sports a cavalcade of absurd hair styles). Tom is interested in Lisa Chinaski (Taija Rae), the daughter of the family's handy man Jack (R. Bolla). In order to keep up appearances, Emily forbids Tom from seeing the girl, a decision that ultimately backfires when Nina orchestrates a liason between Tom and Lisa later that night. Not only are we introduced to Nina's penchant for sneakiness, but to the fact that the Sutherland household needs to enact a "close your bedroom door!" policy.

After subsequently undermining her mother by sleeping with Lisa's brother, Clete...yes, Clete (Frank Serrone), Nina strikes her mother a definitive blow by leading Harding to the location of an elicit tryst between Jack Chinaski and Emily. Nina is then able to capitalize on her father's vulnerability by coaxing him into a sexual relationship. Now that I think about it, that's the definitive blow.

From this point forward, she is able to orchestrate about every inappropriate pairing you can imagine - shy of any male/male contact, of course - without seeming to derive any physical pleasure from these encounters; merely the psychological satisfaction of controlling others. Ironic considering the first time Nina is shown in a sexual situation it's while she's guiding Lisa through the theory and practice of achieving orgasm.

In a recent post, The Gore-Gore Girl wrote that she frequently finds herself watching a non-pornographic films with "structure, style, or some other intangible element that makes you continually think you're watching porn." Conversely, I find myself often watching a porn and thinking how it's story could be adapted for a "normal" rating. I kept thinking that in TAS, if Nina was an au pair, or friend-of-the-family's daughter visiting over summer vacation (basically anything that wouldn't make her fucking the father figure unmarketable) it easily could have been grouped with Poison Ivy or The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. There were multiple times during the span of the film that I actually expected someone to get murdered! A lot of the ambient score, um, underscored that feeling since it wouldn't have been out of place in a psycho-sexual thriller. (To beat this idea into the ground, the tension that builds during the scenes between Emily and her therapist, Dr. Berman - played by director Henri Pachard** - is very Basic Instinct-y.) Additionally, there's a point at the height of the "Nina runs the house" phase of the film, that almost has paranormal undertones, like the kid that can control people in that Twilight Zone episode (and part of The Movie, of course).

Ultimately, Nina's able to use her powers of manipulation to realize her dreams of movie stardom. I'll leave it to you to guess if she ever gets a sort of comeuppance to pay for her actions, which you may get right, however perhaps not in the way you think you'd get it right.... Ooh, cryptic!

Overall, the film is very well realized and acted. I found myself noting on multiple occasions the quality of the camera work and scene staging (although it was a little disappointing that, in Part IV, after a bunch of great production, the boom mic had to make an appearance; ah, well, I guess it is porn, after all). If there was one knock against the film, technically, it would have been in some of the editing. There were a few occasions when there was pretty great tension building - as in the aforementioned therapist scenes - but the scenes suffered from a bit too much repetition, cuts between a character and a door you expected to open, for instance. Still, that's a pretty small demerit in the scope of the overall film.

Lastly, I've said before that I consider whether or not I'd recommend a film to one of my less porn-versed friends. Taboo American Style suffers a sort of double-whammy (it's not a comedy - the easiest films to recommend to a newbie - and it deals with a bunch of incest), but in terms of it's pretty great direction and cast and it's unique structure (a true four part mini-series, as opposed to a few films that are sequels), I'd willingly recommend to anyone I thought could handle it. B+


* Taboo American Style appears in the Wikipedia entry for the Taboo film series, but while I may be wrong, I don't think that's accurate. Granted, I'm not familiar enough with the Taboo series to know how related #3-23 are - I've seen 1 and 2, and 2 was tangentially related to the first - but it seems to me TAS is its own entity. I'd wager that it was titled "taboo" because the word, in the wake of the first few films, became synonymous with incest. And it probably didn't hurt that the first few films were pretty successful. To that end, it's kind of funny that "American Style" was included, too, given the supposed "snowclone (xxx), (nationality) Style" as a "minor cultural meme...". As a weak analogy, it'd be like naming a movie about the revenge of a super hero "Super Man Strikes Back."

** While it's probably more common than I realize, I though Pachard making a cameo in his film was great. Like, I really enjoy the work of Paul Vatelli, but I wouldn't know him if we sat next to one another on an airplane. Unless, I guess, Stiff Competition was the in-flight movie and the topic came up....

Pornonomy Reviews: She's So Fine

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