Quote: Stars Playgirl discovery Roger Huckstex in his big screen/feature film debut. Hot voyeurism as we cruise around L.A. with Roger in his milk truck. Kinky happenings as he discovers new uses for dildoes fastened to his hanging jockstrap.Read More »
Although this is basically a WIP movie, it differs greatly from both the popular Corman produced US/Filipino versions and the much sicker European variant typified by the work of Jess Franco. It is a mid-70’s Italian film, so about half of it is a crime thriller with the usual car chases and violent Mafia intrigue involving a missing load of heroin. The WIP subplot comes in when the daughter of kidnapped Mafia boss (the not-even-remotely-Italian-looking Anita Strindberg)goes undercover in a woman’s prison to protect and get information from the “new fish” (Jenny Tamburi), whose dead boyfriend was transporting the heroin. However, this surprisingly complex plot still leads to the usual shower scenes, catfights, lesbian groping, and everything else audiences have come to expect from these type of films.Read More »
In How to Kill a Judge, Nero plays filmmaker Giacomo Solaris, whose latest film features a judge corrupted by the mafia and who is later found murdered. The real judge the character is based on seizes the footage, but is later killed in the same way. Feeling a degree of responsibility, Solaris investigates, but as the assassinations increase around him, will he reach the source of the conspiracy? Full of twists and a fascinating meta-commentary on cinema through the film-within-the-film, Damiani points the camera at himself and the genre as he investigates the social impact of mafia violence.Read More »
Quote: The last of this loose trilogy is Sextool. This is probably the most complex of Halsted’s films, with radical narrative shifts and some of the — still — raunchiest sex scenes in all of non-amteur gay porn. Sextool features the director’s trademark faceless machos: a pair of cops who shove their nightstick up a trick ‘s ass, and a group of sweaty gangbangers who whip, fuck, and fist a cornfed blonde sailor on a bunk bed without a mattress. This scene offers a distillation of Halsted’s world-view. The ruthless abuse of the neatly dressed, boyish, sweet-faced sailor is the director’s most pointed assault on everything wholesome that he hated in postwar American culture. The sailor-boy’s enthusiastic acceptance of his abuse is Halsted’s proof that the mindless “goodness” and optimism of the rising middle class deserved to be attacked, and he does it with gusto. Like the sailor, Joey Yale appears as a too-willing bottom, eagerly embracing the authentic abuse that the real Fred Halsted dishes out. Sadly, the culture wasn’t as accommodating as Yale; these films were censored and remain difficult, and in the case of Sextool, virtually impossible to see (much less own) even today outside rare cinematheque and museum screenings.Read More »
Quote: Fred Halsted, S&M aficionado and XXX film actor, emerged as a director rivaling Kenneth Anger in the genre of gay art-erotica. L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was his take on the same territory as Anger’s Scorpio Rising. When it opened at the 55th Street Playhouse, doubled billed with his Sex Garage, it was a case of see-it-now, or now you don’t. The police shut it down – not for the notorious fisting vignette that climaxes L.A. Plays Itself (which is cut from the video versions), but for a scene in which a guy gets it on with his motorcycle.Read More »
Charlie (Annette Haven) is a beautiful, but reserved young woman. When her husband Steve (Wade Nichols) arranges for them another couple to spend a romantic weekend together on a secluded section of California beach, it becomes clear to Charlie that in order for her to enjoy true pleasure, she will have to break free of her reserved shell.Read More »
Le Casse (US title: The Burglars) is a 1971 French-Italian neo noir crime film directed by director Henri Verneuil and starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Omar Sharif. It is based on the 1953 novel by David Goodis and revolves around a team of four burglars chased by a corrupt policeman in Athens. It’s a remake of the 1957 film The Burglar with Jayne Mansfield.
The movie is known for its spectacular car chase and Belmondo’s incredible fall from a construction truck down a steep, rocky hillside. The movie was shot twice, once in French and once in English, by the same cast.Read More »
On the anniversary of her father’s death, an Indian princess (Madhur Jaffrey) celebrates his memory in her London apartment by having tea and showing a selection of home movies to her guest, her father’s old tutor Cyril Sahib (James Mason). The princess would like him to write a book about her father and the rich, colourful lifestyle of royal privilege that has now all but disappeared and is likely to be soon forgotten if it is not recorded for posterity.Read More »