The Divine Obsession (Lloyd Kaufman, 1976)

Helmed by Troma majordomo Lloyd Kaufman (under the pseudonym of Louis Su), The Divine Obsession is a solid-plus tale about the rise and fall of an adult film star. The wide-ranging time frame and locations bespeak commitment and Julia Franklin gives a terrific, principled performance as the doomed star. The narrative is even complex enough that I'm still confused about the (trick?) ending. It's far weightier and more compelling than the typical Troma fare to come. And yet I find it all a bit unexciting. Creators of adult film in the 1970s obviously had an incentive to ape more mainstream forms of entertainment. But as a viewer, I gravitate more towards pornography that carved out a unique category for itself. Valley of the Dolls with hardcore scenes can be fun; hardcore scenes leading to heretofore unknown structures are even more fun than that.

Grade: B+

The Awakening of Annie (Zygmunt Sulistrowski, 1976)

At times, I had The Awakening of Annie (known under many other titles including The Virgin of the Beaches and Annie - The Virgin of St. Tropez) at a solid D, other times a shaky A. So I'll wuss out here and give it a non-committal B+. But this one goes into the so-transcendently-boring-it's-fascinating category. Part travelogue (at one point it becomes a literal slide show on Brazilian farming!), part softcore porn (with barely hardcore inserts), part action film, part narrative-jettisoning art damage, The Awakening of Annie has more parts than Frankenstein's monster. It's a film for weaving in and out rather than watching, the kind of movie you wake up in the middle of (even if you haven't been sleeping!) and stare at for several moments before drifting back out. The last fifteen minutes are the best, a bargain-basement Aguirre coda that goes completely off the rails and achieves a baffling avant-garde stasis. The Awakening of Annie hails no discernible audience. But everyone should catch a chunk of it from the corner of their eye if ever beset with insomnia. 

Grade: B+

And look - it features Screech's dad.

Virgin Dreams (Zebedy Colt, 1977)

 The sole IMDb review (from the indefatigable lor_ who has reviewed 11,752 films [mostly het porn!] for the site) for this curio screams "Zebedy Colt goes Ken Russell!" Virgin Dreams isn't quite that phantasmagoric. Or if it is, then it's phantasmagoria on an extreme budget. Whatever the case, it works for this entry in the dreams-versus-reality porn subgenre. Story concerns frigid Nancy (Jean Jennings) whose parents are Gloria Leonard (!) and Zebedy Colt (!!). As you might imagine, they are far more sexually liberated than Nancy and long for her to succumb to the hunky charms of her fiancé Daniel. Nancy has several erotic nightmares, the wildest with Colt possessing the ability to change the sexual positions of orgy participants with the crack of a whip. She eventually thaws out which gives way to a coda that makes no sense (that I could discern). Good stuff!

But lo - who is this man playing Daniel? Wade Nichols? His face is sooooo familiar to me. Why, it's Dennis Parker, the name under which Nichols recorded an album for Casablanca in 1979 called Like an Eagle. Here's the title track:

Nichols/Parker and Colt were gay (Colt possibly bisexual) and their presence in (and behind) Virgin Dreams is testament to the queerness of heterosexual porn, if not of sexuality overall. For more on Colt, see these two blog posts from Whit Strub. For Nichols/Parker, see this typically thorough Rialto Report.

Grade: A-minus

Wade Nichols and an orgy of candles

Bible! (Wakefield Poole, 1974)

I greatly admire Wakefield Poole and his place in hardcore porn history. And I'm glad, nay, overjoyed a film as recondite as Bible! exists. But it's far more pleasurable to ponder than to actually sit through.

Poole is best known for Boys in the Sand (1971), the earliest gay hardcore feature success. According to Jeffrey Escoffier, it was the first porn film of any kind reviewed in Variety. Bible! is a softcore heterosexual feature consisting of three stories from the good book: Adam and Eve, David and Bathsheba, and Samson and Delilah. Why it received a X rating is beyond me. There are no meat or money shots and no tumescent penises that I could determine. Apart from one line uttered by Eve, there's no dialogue either. The soundtrack consists mostly of classical music. And the entire project was clearly an attempt to capture an even wider mainstream audience. 

But it comes off as a failed art movie instead, quite possibly American hardcore porn's first film maudit. The Adam and Eve section is punishingly dull, the comedic David and Bathsheba sequence painfully unfunny. Poole intended an Orson Welles homage in the latter story (at least in one shot). But the result is more Benny Hill than Citizen Kane. The Samson and Delilah chunk works best because it's the closest to pretentious art cinema, with Felliniesque creatures and abstract sets. But it's impossible to shake the feeling that all this posing is the end product of someone aiming way too high. 

Still, Bible! is one of cinema's most inconsumable objects - too soft for the hardcore crowd, too middlebrow for the art crowd, too dull for the camp queens. In fact, I'm not even sure it's camp at all except insofar as what I like is camp and what you like is kitsch (check out the screen grab below and judge for yourself). Needless to say, the film was a gargantuan flop which presumably taught Poole not to spend a reported $100,000 on location shooting and intriguing costumes. But any time someone hoists a flag for this impossible thing, I'll be there to salute it.

Grade: B-minus

Kathy's Graduation Present (Shaun Costello, 1975)

When I was a kid, I saw Kathy's Graduation Present advertised in the back of a video magazine as rated XXXX. Whoa! Fours Xs?!? I just *had* to see what promised to be new depths in naughtiness! Last night, my four-decades-long dream came true. And, as always, be careful what you wish for. Kathy's Graduation Present is 57 minutes of extreme indifference. There are some heavy hitters here: Annie Sprinkle, Jamie Gillis, Costello (of Water Power renown). But it's a bombed-out slog, best appreciated on the fly at your local adult theatre. Grade: C-minus.

 bratty Kathy smushing the hors d'oeuvres at her party

Little Sisters (Alex de Renzy, 1972)

More a demented home movie than a film conveying a diegetic reality, Little Sisters strikes one as sui generis. But it exemplifies a recognizable tendency in 1970s American pornography. As the great Whitney Strub has shown, where gay pornography tended to celebrate the spaces of exploration opened up by the urban crisis of the era, heterosexual pornography viewed the city as a repository for fear.* This situation obtains in Little Sisters even though the film is set entirely in the woods. There are several warnings about dangerous people and general clucking about "these times." And indeed, the film erupts in sexual violence at many points throughout. 

But the violence truly is the stuff of home movies with no-budget fight scenes and performers unable to stifle laughter. No one seems to be taking anything seriously, least of all de Renzy. The whole undertaking plays out like Flaming Creatures in the sunshine: roving drag queens singing "Stormy Weather," gay monks worshiping a man with a green penis, lesbians cavorting poolside in outrageous makeup, and Derek the Dwarf who delivers the stiffest line readings in cinema history. It looks the way John's Children's "A Midsummer Night's Scene" sounds and this is not to mention Little Sisters' own soundtrack comprised of snatches of creepy electronics, Johnny Mathis, a (Muzak?) version of Carole King's "You've Got a Friend," Pink Floyd, and a rendition of "America the Beautiful" sung by the entire cast (including a heretofore unseen nun) at the end of the film. A deliriously queer romp around the maypole. 

Grade: A

*Strub, Whitney. 2016. “From Porno Chic to Porno Bleak: Representing the Urban Crisis in 1970s American Pornography.” In Porno Chic and the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s, edited by Carolyn Bronstein and Whitney Strub, 27–52. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.