Honey Pie (Mel White and Howard Ziehm, 1976)
Porn and the musical are my favorite film genres because I have limited use for those well-proportioned wholes that uphold tired canons and itchy concepts (which I abuse, I admit!) like "genius" and "masterpiece." In oscillating between narrative and number, both genres traffic in a hybridity that weakens (and hence devalues) a firm sense of gestalt. Still, I discover deeper pleasures in one coordinate of the oscillation depending on the genre, e.g., I tend to privilege the number in the musical whereas the narratives of feature-length pornography fire me up more.
With Honey Pie, however, the sex scenes give off plenty of sssteam heat while the narrative stalls with a forced jokiness. Arlana Blue stars at Lois, a writer at the fictional Screw-like magazine Metro, the editor of which is played by Screw editor Al Goldstein. She's looking for something especially naughty to include in Metro and reads several letters to the magazine, each occasioning a dramatization in what amounts to an illustrated Penthouse Letters. The dramatizations run through a typically polymorphous array of options - intergenerational sex, lesbianism, DP, S&M, etc. In between, the ever-horny Lois camps it up with fellow journalist Dick (Bobby Astyr) at the Metro offices and eventually they get it on. These scenes are cute enough. But the real prize in Honey Pie is the hardcore activity which generates a quiet intensity that contrasts with the framing narrative. In short, yet another hybrid that is pornography's gift to humankind.
Also on board is Annie Sprinkle (billed here as Ann Sprinkle) in a cameo at the end. And check out Mel White's platforms before the S&M sequence!
Grade: B+
Labels: pornography
posted by Kevin John at 3:24 PM
2 Comments:
Kevin,
This has been nagging at me for a while so this post seems like the perfect time to ask: was it you who once wrote on the old Fred Camper message board about how you used to read John Willis Screen World books and the sprinkling of (usually chaste) stills from porn films among the mainstream and arthouse films caused you major cognitive dissonance as a kid? Because Jennifer Welles giving a come-hither look in Honeypie was definitely one of such stills that I remember from those books.
I'm also curious if you've seen Ziehm's and Benveniste's Mona a.k.a. the first full length narrative porn film (or so they claim). At times I swear the bitchy dialogue and loopy situations have intimations of George Kuchar, though of course it lacks Kuchar's eye for compositions or the sense of guilt that always seeps through his films.
Chris -
Yes, that was me! And that's where I've been getting my viewing list. I figured it was about time to see these titles after forty years of knowing about them.
The pic that really intrigued me at the time was for Metzger's The Image. I'll post it later.
I have seen Mona. But I never made the Kuchar connection. Intriguing! Perhaps a double feature with Hold Me While I'm Naked is in order.
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