Pornonomy Reviews: Lips

Lips (1981)

Directed by:
Paul G. Vatelli

Starring:
Brook West
Pipi Anderson
Kathy Harcourt
Lily Rodgers
Lisa DeLeeuw
Tigr
Vanessa del Rio
Billy Dee
Herschel Savage
Paul Thomas
Reggie Gunn
Ron Jeremy

I suppose it's not a bad idea for couples with unsatisfying sex lives, like John and Kathy (Ron Jeremy and Kathy Harcourt) and Neil and Linda (Herschel Savage and Brook West), to seek counseling. I am surprised, though, at the efficacy of Dr. Jim Matlock's (Paul Thomas) sex therapy resort/clinic, considering it seems all that's required to fix a sex life is for the partners to have a brief, unfaithful tryst.

The main problem with Lips (other than the fact that the name seems to have been picked out of a hat*; there's hardly the oral fixation such a title would suggest. In fact, Neckerchief Bonanza would have been far more appropriate since literally every actress wears one....) is that there's no narrative cohesion. While the scenes aren't completely disconnected (you at least know how the characters got in the situations...well, for the most part, anyway) the idea of a film taking place in a couples' sex therapy lends itself to far better execution than what was put on film.

I don't mean to say the film was bad necessarily, just kind of underwhelming. Oddly, the most interesting sex scene was one that wasn't: after assistant carpenter Arlene (Tigr) gets busy with John and Kathy, she decides to let her boss Skip (Reggie Gunn) finally score after repeated advances. Only when finally presented with Arlene's body, Skip's unable to perform. Either Tigr is the best ad lib actress in the history of porn, or that was a scripted soft scene, which seems like a really bizarre thing to write in.

I wouldn't actively steer anyone away from Lips, but it wouldn't be the first (or fifth) Vatelli film I'd recommend. C+

* And the box cover has even less to do with the film than the title does.

Pornonomy Reviews: Roommates

Roommates (1981)

Directed by:
Chuck Vincent

Starring:
Kelly Nichols
Samantha Fox
Veronica Hart
Bobby Astyr
Don Peterson
Jack Wrangler
Jamie Gillis
Jerry Butler
Ron Hudd
Ron Jeremy
(and a bunch of others)

While perhaps not as hard to get my brain around as Taboo American Style, I've had a hard time coming to grips with exactly what I was going to write about Roommates. First, the objective facts: Roommates is a film about three women sharing an apartment in New York City, embarking on new or different career trajectories, and is directed by Chuck Vincent, one of the few openly gay directors of straight hardcore films (the only I can think of off the top of my head, truth be told). The scope of the effect of Vincent's sexual preference on the end product can be debated, but that there is some effect, is likely a given.

Billie (Samantha Fox) is a high class call girl looking to leave the profession: turning her back on lying on her back, you could say. (Good one, Rog!) In order to keep her apartment on a lowly production assistant's salary, she places an ad for roommates which is answered by Joan (Veronica Hart), a drama student moving to New York to follow her dreams of acting on Broadway, and Sherry (Kelly Nichols) an LA model - with an epic substance abuse problem - looking to check out the New York scene for awhile.

From the top to the bottom the cast is excellent, the writing quite good, the direction and cinematography top-notch - including a non-sex scene as tense and scary and a sex scene as gripping and squirm inducing (both on the strength of Jamie Gillis acting as only Jamie Gillis could) as you'll find in any film, porn or mainstream. And yet the reason I kept waffling on how to review and grade the film is that the sex scenes, by and large, aren't particularly "sexy," though primarily by design. Only two (Fox/Wrangler* and Hart/Butler) are completely consensual and playful or sweet. The others are either preying on the delusions of a mistress (Hart) fueled by the threat of blackmail (Fox) or show the perils of drug abuse (Nichols).

On a tangent, one thing that stood out to me was the scarcity of pop shots. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not like I clamor for them, but even in a less facial-oriented era, they were the norm and a film that had two (I think), one of which was strictly, uh, manual (Gillis) stands out. It's tempting to attribute the quirk to Vincent's sexual orientation, but I don't recall the few other Vincent pictures I've seen holding to this "low pop" formula.

So, after much musing and chin stroking, I'm giving Roommates a B+.

* Samantha Fox and Jack Wrangler have such great chemistry that it's a travesty they only acted together three times: The Filthy Rich and Jack and Jill (another Vincent picture) besides Roommates. I'm really interested in checking out Jack and Jill, now, to complete the set.

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....

Updates and California Gigolo: A Quickie Review

I know that one of the great cliches of blogging is the post either apologizing for not blogging or a promise to post content "soon," both of which I've been guilty. That said, I promise a review of Taboo, American Style (all four parts!) will go up "soon." Since it's a mini-series, I figured better to review the full arc than to write about it bit by bit. Accordingly, I had the foolish/ambitious idea to watch them all consecutively, but, alas, nearly five hours of pornography is a lot to endure. (I've got the final 20 minutes of Part 3 and all of Part 4 to finish.)

In the meantime, I'll steal a page from The Gore-Gore Girl and whip up a quickie. (Eesh, does that sound kinda dirty....)

California Gigolo (1979)

Directed by:
Bob Chinn

Starring:
Kitty Shayne
Liza Dwyer
Vanessa Tibbs (as Vannessa Tibbs)
Veri Knotty
Don Fernando
John Holmes

In the film, John Holmes is a gigolo. In California. We know he's in California because, under the opening theme song (which is likely to at least partially stick in your brain: "Gigo-gigo-gigo-gigo-gigolo") and between scenes are montages of "Southern California Scenes" like beaches, boardwalks, Rodeo Drive, and on and on and on. Possibly filmed for the movie, they're just as likely to be stock footage compiled for a tourism film. Regardless, shots like these always make me wonder if any of the bystanders in these scenes ever found out they made an unwitting cameo in a porno....

The scenes "between" montages play out as a day in the life of Our Gigolo, aided by his assistant(?), Gomez (Don Fernando). Two scenes that are noteworthy are the pairings of Holmes and Veri Knotty and Holmes and Vanessa Tibbs. The former because Veri Knotty (per usual) demonstrates the ability from which she took her name: tying her labia in a knot. It always cracks me up because unlike a talent like, say, Ron Jeremy's auto-fellatio, Knotty's quirk isn't even attempted to be worked into a narrative (RJ always seems to be told off by a woman and take solace in his "ability"), she just, at some point, stretches out her labia and ties them into a knot. The other scene (Tibbs) is worth mentioning because the set-up is almost a classic cliche (Tibbs picks up Holmes, finds out he's a "sex educator," bets him he can't show her anything she hasn't already seen, "loses" the bet when he whips out his massive dong), and while she doesn't seem uncomfortable during the scene, you have to wonder if something set her on edge since it appears to have been her only performance. (Although it appears a little more mileage was gotten from the scene due to its inclusion on The Best of Gail Palmer, although I'm not sure what - if anything - Palmer had to do with Gigolo....)

Finally, while Holmes's disastrous off-screen life is well-known and chronicled, I never viewed his films through the prism of what would have been going on after the films wrapped. After Gore-Gore Girl's comment in an earlier post, though, while I didn't necessarily have a hard time watching Holmes, I found my view slightly altered.

Anyway, Gigolo wasn't a classic, but it wasn't a dog. And it gets bonus points for Don Fernando's nutty charisma. C+

Pornonomy Reviews: She's So Fine

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Cupid's Arrow Review Follow Up, or, a Porn Reviewer's Conundrum

You could rightly ask why bother writing a review of a movie I obviously hated. The answer is partially because I hated it so much I had to write about it, but it's also partially because I felt the need to get some content on the blog. (Beyond the stereotypical "I'll write something soon" post, which I swore off and assure you that this post isn't. Completely, anyway.)

I've actually found myself wanting to write here lately but coming up against a familiar problem: Do I rewatch and review a film that I've seen and know is good (Amanda By Night, for instance), rewatch and review a film I think I've seen but don't really remember (Deep Rub), watch and review a film I haven't seen but sounds interesting because of the cast (Outlaw Ladies), or just watch and review whichever comes up next in the queue? And then secondarily, if I choose to rewatch and review a film, is it pointless to write about a film (Behind the Green Door, say) that's been written about a million times already?

I find that beyond that list of questions, I almost always fall into a Grass Is Greener trap: perhaps I'll start watching A Place Beyond Shame (which I've seen) to finally get the review done and then, five minutes into it, start thinking "Maybe I'm in the mood for California Gigolo (which I haven't seen) instead...."

Finally, three notes, in descending order of relatedness to this post:

1. How do you pick which movies you watch? (Primarily directed to Gore-Gore Girl and X-Ray Specs)

2. Though I know it's never, ever, ever going to happen, I still find myself wishing the online rental service I use allowed subscribers to dvd rental to stream VOD films as a part of their subscription charge (the way Netflix does).

3. I saw a picture of John Holmes (clothed) ages before I saw any of his films. I assumed he had an Andre the Giant-like deep voice, for some reason, and was shocked when I first heard him speak. To say nothing of how surprised I was that he was such a goofball.

Pornonomy Reviews: Cupid's Arrow

Cupid's Arrow (1984)

Directed by:
...Presumably porn's "Alan Smithee"

Starring:
Karen Summer
Lisa De Leeuw
Rosemarie
Dino Alexander
Jerry Davis
Robert Bullock

Consider, for one second, the box cover up there. With the exception of looking like she might be slightly congested, Lisa De Leeuw (on my short list of Best Adult Actresses of All Time) looks pretty damn good. Seeing that cover might make someone pretty excited to see the movie. Now, take that possible excitement to Cupid's Arrow and the idea that Lisa De Leeuw looks anything like that picture in Cupid's Arrow and blow them out of your head. Like, with a shotgun.

Some time ago, I wrote that I had "one unholy turd of a movie that I'm going to review eventually just to show a little range" in my grading. Well, brace yourselves, because this is that unholy turd. Fact is, though, this "review" is going to be pretty brief because my brain has done its damnedest to erase everything I saw those many months ago. If my hazy recollection is correct, the movie opens with a narrator telling Cupid's origin story over a guy dressed in red (Cupid, apparently) creeping into a house and lacing a bowl of fruit and/or some glasses or a carafe of some sort with Love Powder.

After Cupid sneaks out, Husband (Robert Bullock), Wife (Rosemarie), and Friend (Dino Alexander) are in the living room. Husband and Friend are talking about going to a hockey game, I think, and Wife is giving Husband the business. Then, Wife and Friend end up consuming something with the Love Powder and leave the room to have sex, unbeknownst to Husband. While they're absent, Husband's Ex-Wife (Lisa De Leeuw) shows up (looking kind of like she hasn't slept or eaten anything with nutritional value in a couple of weeks; if I didn't know better, I'd have guessed this was one of the last movies she was in, not shot the same year as Miss Passion or two years before her Traci-Lords-Was-Never-In-This-Movie scenes for Talk Dirty to Me 3) for some reason. Husband and/or Ex-Wife end up consuming something with the Love Powder and they go at it.

Or attempt to, anyway. This was the first time I saw Robert Bullock, and given his difficulty getting and inability maintaining an erection, I assumed it was the only movie he'd ever been in. Nope. In fairness, I've seen a few of his other movies since and found that he's capable of competent performances. Given the era and medium, I'll assume he was chock full of cocaine and alcohol. In fact, I'm going to assume everyone associated with this train wreck was loaded.

After Friend, Wife ends up having sex with an Electrician (Jerry Davis) that's at their house, I'm assuming, to fix something. Husband is in the bathtub when he's surprised by Woman (Karen Summer), or, if IMDb is to be believed, Traveling Saleswoman, setting off Round 2 of Robert Bullock's Semi-Erect Penis Extravaganza! After that, Saleswoman has sex with Friend and then Husband has Sex with Wife. Given the fact that I can only barely remember the last scene, I'm pretty sure I either tuned it out or fast forwarded through it. If there's any rhyme or reason to the convention of a porn like this, there was narration over the end of the last scene and/or closing credits. Of course, expecting any sense from this movie is probably granting waaaay too much.

Thinking back on this movie has me typing with a grimace. While I've seen other movies that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend avoiding (B.Y.O.B. comes to mind...although Eastern-European-Burt-Reynolds Sasha Gabor is always a little amusing), none of the recommendations would come with the speed or vehemence of the one for Cupid's Arrow. (I think I'm still bitter about the cover art bait and switch, common in porn, sure, but this one may be the worst offender I've ever seen.)

Initially I was going to grade this movie F-, but instead I've decided to create a grade for it: CA. A grade I hope I'll never give out again.