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.