A rare film from Fred Halsted (known for LA Plays Itself). This encode is based on chef’s upload of the Alpha Blue Archives release.

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Part pseudo-documentary, it switches from group stroking, mutual masturbation, oral sex and a bit of anal intercourse with historic images and art photo set.

Dirty.Books.1981.DVDRip.FLAC.BULMA.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	56 min 41 s
Size: 	1.11 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	706x480 ~> 706x529
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 376 kb/s
BPP: 	0.292
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch FLAC @ 430 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/2D8A9CB2F30D427/Dirty.Books.1981.DVDRip.FLAC.BULMA.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Fred Halsted – Dirty Books (1981) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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Fred Halsted’s last worthwhile film! Shot at his own “stand-up fuck club.”

This film features a great punk/new wave soundtrack featuring the following songs:

I Die You Die — Gary Numan
Look Back in Anger — David Bowie
Lucky Number — Lene Lovich
Writing on the Wall — Hazel O’Connor
Set the House Ablaze — The Jam
A Day Without Me — U2
Gates of Steel — DEVO
Prisoners — Vapors
Wild — Nuns
This Beat Goes On/Switchin to Glide — The Kings
Satisfaction — Devo
Panic In Detroit — David Bowie
What I Like About You — The Romantics
Chapel of Love — Holly and the Italians
I Didn’t have the Nerve to say No — Blondie
How Much More — The Go Go’s
Gidget Goes to Hell — Suburban Lawns
Your Phone’s Off the Hook — X
Pumping (My Heart) — Patti Smith
Amoeba — The Adolescents ——– last song identified 7/15/01!
Anarchy in the UK — Sex Pistols
Wild in the Streets — Circle Jerks
Holiday in Cambodia — Dead Kennedys
Gluttony — The Bags
Oh Bondage, Up Yours — X-Ray Spex
We’re desperate — X

HIS - A Night at Halsteds.avi

General
Container:  	AVI
Runtime: 	1h 15mn
Size: 	590 MiB
Video
Codec: 	XviD
Resolution: 	640x480 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	29.970 fps
Bit rate: 	994 Kbps
BPP: 	0.108
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch MP3 @ 32.0 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/70743739BB4FF76/HIS_-_A_Night_at_Halsteds.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Fred Halsted – A Night at Halsted’s (1982) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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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.

Fred Halsted - (1973) Truck It VHS.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	52 min 17 s
Size: 	1.17 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	764x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	29.970 fps
Bit rate: 	3 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.227
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Stereo)

Bonus film: Truck It: 8mm Loops
Video interview with Halsted Plays Himself author William E. Jones
Sanitizing Halsted - a video essay by Whitney Strub
Gallery of promotional art and ephemera

https://nitro.download/view/74D8771C477B894/Fred_Halsted_-_(1973)_Truck_It_VHS.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/E64BDE262DFB6AC/Fred_Halsted_-_(1973)_Truck_It_8mm_Loops.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/BEC461E81BA2643/Gallery_of_promotional_art_and_ephemera.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/C9454BB6035F423/Sanitizing_Halsted_-_a_video_essay_by_Whitney_Strub.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/28FABD300E09A46/Video_interview_with_Halsted_Plays_Himself_author_William_E._Jones.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Fred Halsted – Truck It (1973) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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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.

Fred Halsted - (1975) Sextool.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 1 min
Size: 	1.51 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	790x576 
Aspect ratio:  	1.372
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 086 kb/s
BPP: 	0.283
Audio
#1:  	English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Mono)
#2:  	English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Commentary by Elizabeth Purchell, K.J. Shepherd and Tyler Thomas)

https://nitro.download/view/F1C378B85AF77A0/Fred_Halsted_-_(1975)_Sextool.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, French, Spanish

The post Fred Halsted – Sextool (1975) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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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.

The black-and-white Sex Garage, released the same year, is a marginally more focused work, though by conventional standards it’s far from a classical narrative. It opens with a hardcore hetero scene — a sexy young guy getting head from an enthusiastic woman. Surrounded by cars and car paraphernalia, they fuck furiously on the concrete floor of the title space. But the guy turns out to be bisexual, and graciously accepts the services of a knob-polishing queen who serendipitously moseys in. As in other Halsted films — and recalling the entropic atmosphere of early Warhol movies — here the characters come and go at random. There’s no attempt to create characterizations — in the demimonde of the “sex garage” there are no “people,” just random fetishes, body parts, and desires enacted and forgotten.

Sex Garage has its share of lurid encounters, but the most prescient one is reminiscent of — and surely outstrips — both Kenneth Anger’s bike fetish and the car-fuck crazies of Cronenberg’s Crash. A bored hunk arrives; tired of getting head from the wandering suckboy, he goes for some real action and “mates” with the exhaust pipe of his motorcycle in clinical close-up. This film was banned in New York at the time because the police believed it was “promoting obscenity.” Apparently they didn’t appreciate the peculiar modernity of this scene as a parable of humankind, so often overwhelmed by technology, connecting with cold steel in a way hitherto unimagined.

Conceived as a supporting short for its theatrical release and forever since screened together with the same director’s legendary L.A. PLAYS ITSELF, the barely over half an hour SEX GARAGE can rightfully be considered an unofficial third movement to that film, even elaborating on themes touched upon therein. If that film cruelly juxtaposed the evil that men are capable of inflicting with the purity and innocence of nature which the human race has carelessly squandered and destroyed, this astonishing black & white featurette – amazingly shot over a single day – takes matters yet another step further with an implied as much desired immersion with modern technology as one character attempts to make love to his motorcycle, inserting his rigid member into the exhaust pipe and tenderly rubbing his copious ejaculate into the upholstery ! Both the freewheeling cinematic style – frequently favoring extreme close-ups of both machinery and genitalia – and the iconography of high speed vehicles and their leather-attired drivers, not to mention its kick ass soundtrack alternating girl groups with classical music and appropriately soulless synthesizer bleeps, align this featurette with Kenneth Anger’s revered cinematic patchwork SCORPIO RISING. Cast members are anonymous and unfamiliar. Both Bijouworld and John Rowberry (as editor of the 1991 Adam Film World Gay Video Directory) list Paul Barresi and the late Bob Blount, who died in an accident shortly after completing the Joe Gage classic L.A. TOOL & DIE, as participants – who copied from whom ? – but I can’t vouch for either one as even repeated viewings have kept me from anything resembling a positive i.d.

Opening on the (literally) titular garage, a cherubic young mechanic receives oral favors from his hippie chick girlfriend (who, at least according to IMDb, just might be carnal cult cutie Eve Orlon) who subsequently spreads for what amounts to a good ten minutes of straight sex. Intercut with this is a gorgeous upper class brat – with a world-weary mien straight out of DEATH IN VENICE – sensuously soaping his hirsute torso and pleasingly packed nether regions in the shower, camera temporarily zooming in on a note (along with a casually displayed $100 bill) to take the car into the garage to have it “greased up”. Oh yeah ! As he drives up, the girl exits with a mix of fright and the existential realization perhaps that her presence is no longer needed – indeed, inopportune – in Halsted’s idiosyncratic private universe. Picking up where the lass left off, Richie Rich is casually humiliated and submitted, first by the mechanic and then by a long-haired, Jesus type biker boy stopping by. Apparently tiring of his human sex partners, for whom he displays but strained ennui, the biker ultimately prefers the company of his revered cycle instead, licking and kneading as he works himself into a fevered frenzy culminating in aforementioned penetration.

As with much underground cinema, this synopsis can’t even begin to do justice to the actual experience of viewing. While unversed in traditional cinematic technique, Halsted was rapidly developing a signature all his own through vibrant ‘n’ jittery hand-held camera work and wild zooms instilling significance into seemingly random objects that was ahead of its time. Though much of his subsequent directorial output proved dire and unimaginative, his last film BREAKER BLUE a dispiriting mess, his cinematography remained fresh ‘n’ exciting, especially when working on other people’s projects, usually his longtime lover Joey Yale’s film-making efforts like TRICK TIME.

By far the most distinctive dirty movie director to hail from California, Halsted had drifted through a variety of odd jobs before trying his hand at film-making. Popular rumor has it that he worked as a gardener to Vincent Price at some stage, the feverish fairy imagination expanding on Fred’s horticultural duties as to include play for pay bedroom antics with the fading horror icon ! The resulting resentment for the “ruling classes” may have inspired the rough treatment that befalls the rich kid here. Be that as it may, Fred’s life decidedly took a turn for the better when he met and fell in love with Joseph Yale in 1969. “Poisoning” his legitimate career by enthusiastically participating in his Svengali’s matching all male masterpieces L.A. and SEXTOOL, Yale remained Halsted’s partner in both life and labor as Cosco co-founder, established on Joey’s urging to gain more control over their work and its revenue, much of which had disappeared into the wrong pockets until then. Virtually unheard of in a pornographic milieu, without distinction between the straight and gay sides thereof, they proved inseparable until Yale’s passing, with Halsted electing to join him by his own hand shortly after in a gesture equal parts poetic and pathetic. Does it make me a sentimental sap when I admit to hoping that they really did rejoin forces in whatever constitutes an afterlife ? If so, color me corny !

Fred Halsted - (1972) The Sex Garage.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	35 min 9 s
Size: 	855 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	760x576 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.286
Audio
#1:  	English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Mono)
#2:  	English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Commentary by Elizabeth Purchell)

https://nitro.download/view/9FD04FD5AA4AB8C/Fred_Halsted_-_(1972)_The_Sex_Garage.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, French, Spanish

The post Fred Halsted – The Sex Garage (1972) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Fred Halsted plays himself in his notorious autobiographical portrait of Los Angeles. Two men have a fleetingly idyllic meeting outside of town while Halsted shows a young pick-up the ropes within city limits.

Sally Jane Black wrote:
The first thing that needs to be said about this is that it’s funny. That’s not something that gets said enough about either experimental films or pornographic ones, as far as I can tell. Some of that sense of humor is crude sex humor, but deployed without mocking or humiliation. It’s just a silly pickup line from one man to another while sitting by a waterfall. Other humorous moments have undercurrent to them, especially the interruption of the queer love in the forest by bulldozers, what I hope is a snarky rejection of the idea of homosexuality as unnatural by contrast. That symbols of capitalist expansion are used as part of this metaphor associates one form of oppression with another, too.

Raucous noise soundtracks this as much as music or voiceover (and all the dialogue seems to be in voiceover), screaming through ejaculations, rattling over conversations, shattering the stillness. The camera focuses on the bodies, mostly, obviously, but oscillating between a violent surveillance and an intense, close up observation, between defiant and erotic. In contrast to the Internet era’s wide range of amateur pornography (so vast an ocean it’s unfair to classify it, but) with mostly amateur and uninspired cinematography, Halsted’s experimental piece has an understanding of attractiveness not in terms of bodies (though there’s that, too) but in terms of the screen. Nature, picnics, cityscapes, and bodyscapes are filmed with an eye toward focus and perspective, with color and light, not (just) with an interest in the smack of flesh upon flesh and the unending undulation of coitus. The sex is part of something more.

This film is known, apparently, for having inspired the film essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, which I’ve not seen. I’ve no idea if Thom Andersen or his essay are queer, but I have a feeling from descriptions that the film itself is not focused on queer-content. It would be unfair, though, (for me in my ignorance) to insist this is a form of queer erasure, if only because bias against pornography and experimental film also work against this, too. But it does irritate me a little bit that this isn’t more popular.

+Commentary with Elizabeth Purchell, K.J. Shepherd, and Tyler Thomas

1.60GB | 55m 17s | 770×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/1FE163FFC7AC81C/L.A.Plays.Itself.1972.Halsted.BR.576p.AAC.1.0.Commentary.x264.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English SDH, Spanish, French

The post Fred Halsted – LA Plays Itself [+Commentary] (1972) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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The second in director Gage’s masterful “working men” trilogy still stands to this day as one terrific gay porn. Think of this one as the Empire Strikes Back of gay porn. This classic is the second part of Gage’s legendary trilogy (Part 1 is Kansas City Trucking Co. and Part 3 is L.A. Tool & Die) and an essential addition to any gay porn aficionado’s library. The glory hole scene is a textbook classic example of deeply slobber-filled oral and facial cumshots galore. Again, some footage from it’s initial release is missing, as the trilogy passed through many hands over the years. It makes you want to reach out and smack someone – namely studio chiefs. Still, it’s a must-see and a must-own. May the heavy-duty tissues be with you.

“Joe Gage directed this pioneering gay adult feature, the sequel to his groundbreaking Kansas City Trucking Company. Picking up where the first film left off, El Paso Wrecking Corp. finds Gene (Fred Halsted) and Hank (Richard Locke) fired from their jobs after an alcohol-fueled altercation. Determined to find new employment, Gene and Hank set out in search of opportunities in the blue-collar workforce, but they frequently become distracted by other men along the way.” – Mark Deming, Allmovie

847MB | 1h 4mn | 600×458 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/D2BC5BCC77038A4/_apreder_XXX_El_Paso_Wrecking_Corp(1977)DVDRip.avi

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Tim Kincaid – El Paso Wrecking Corp. (1978) first appeared on Cinema of the World.