Il porno shop della settima strada (1979) User Reviews

Classic Smut From Sleaze-King Joe D'Amato...

[EVOL666 · 6/10 · 24 November 2006]

PLEASURE SHOP ON 7TH AVENUE is a low-budget sleazy exploit entry from the King-Of-Sleaze,Mr. Joe D'Amato. Not as "powerful" as some of his stronger films, but a relatively fun piece of trash cinema for fans of 70s era crap-cinema...

Two dumb jerk-offs hold up a pharmacy in New York that just so happens to be under the protection of a local mob boss. The two light-weights go on the lam and end up at a porno store that is run by the mob bosses girlfriend. Realizing that they've f!cked up royally, the stick-up guys take the girl and go on the run from the mob. They meet up with the guy that set up the job - and the three guys and the girl run north to Canada to escape the wrath of the mobsters. Meanwhile, at a rest-stop, the mob-boss's girlfriend drops an "S.O.S." note in the bathroom at a gas-station. Unknowing of the girlfriend's efforts, the kidnappers stop off at a New-England residence and have a bit of "fun" there while the mob is on their tail...

Not as strong as D'Amato's other sleazy films, but still an OK bit of exploity fun. Not sure if the copy I got was chopped, but it seemed like there should have been some "hardcore" scenes and there weren't...but don't fret - even a sh!tty copy of this film has plenty of tits, ass, and 70s era bushes that should be of interest to fans of grindhouse cinema. Not a great or notable film by any means, but worth a look to exploit completists...

A not bad sleazefest from D'Amato.

[Corpus_Vile · 6/10 · 28 August 2010]

Two rather thick stick up artists rob the wrong pharmacy, which turns out to be mob owned. Fleeing La Cosa Nostra's wrath, they take refuge in a porn shop, which happens to be owned by the mob boss's squeeze. Fleeing again, this time taking the squeeze, they hook up with an associate before hightailing it to Canada.

En Route, they stop off for a spot of home invasion fun, unaware that da mob are hot on their trail, thanks to our intrepid porn shop owner leaving a note in the bathroom.

Joe D'Amato usually bores me to tears, and I find most of his films awful, and not the good kind of awful. However, this is one of his more entertaining efforts, with somewhat decent pacing, which is a rare thing indeed for a D'Amato film, for me anyways.

It's chock full of his usual sleaze, with hard core inserts, and also features an inventive way of playing pool, as well as having one of the villains being an effectively creepy sex offender style scumbag.

Not a great film, and more sleazy than exploitative as such, but still an adequate enough time filler, and for a D'Amato flick it's not bad at all, and worth a look for fans of grindhouse sleaze.

What Do You Expect?

[chow913 · 4/10 · 20 July 2013]

Well this film is pretty much what you expect from a sexploitation film. "Directed by Joe D'Amato" doesn't leave much room for doubt.

The plot: (just is case "Directed by Joe D'Amato" didn't sum it up enough) Two amateur armed robbers steal $5,000 from NY's red light district, only to discover it was an intended protection payment to the mob. Now, with Mafia hit men after them they seek shelter in a sex shop. Oddly nothing sexual actually happens with them there.

Instead they take the cashier girl and a token black guy hostage and head out to the countryside to lay low.

In a country cabin they find three new hostages. Two young lovers and a shy blonde virgin. Predictably everyone ends up in bed with everyone else, consensually, heterosexually, and not all at the same time.

When the hit men do eventually crash their love fest the cashier actually calls the Mafia to complain about their amateur hit men.

The robbers flee for Canada but for some unexplained reason leave the $5,000 with their young hostages.

That's the movie! If you think I've left out any detail I haven't.

The only actual nudity or sex is 2/3 of the way in and it's not worth the wait. The movie's good for a couple of laughs but nothing more.

"Porn Shop on 7th Avenue"

[lazarillo · 24 November 2009]

In New York City two small-time crooks rob a business, not realizing that it's protected by a powerful mobster. Although it hardly seems like it would improve the situation, they then decide to go to a nearby porn shop (despite the title only a few scenes actually take place here) and kidnap the girlfriend (Anna-Maria Clementi)of the mobster, who is working there. They then decide to flee for Canada bringing along the girlfriend and a black associate (for no good reason other than it will allow for titillating interracial sex scenes later in the movie). Of course, they don't make it to Canada, but instead hole up in an isolated upstate villa where a trio of sex-crazed college students (a virgin, a slut, and a guy) also happen to be staying for some reason. Naturally, this being a Joe D'Amato movie, the whole thing is a set-up for a lot of sleazy sex.

Technically, this is a "terror film"--a small cycle of Italian films, inspired by "Last House on the Left" and the more homegrown Italian sleaze classic "Late Night Trains", where a group of lower-class cretins or petty criminals terrorize and humiliate (usually sexually) a group of hedonistic bourgeois. A lot of people don't consider this a very effective "terror" film because there's just too much sex. Actually though, the cut I saw actually had less sex than some other sex-soaked sleaze-fest "terror" films like "Terror Express" or "Escape from a Woman's Prison" and really no more sex than the most effective (or at least the most harrowing) Italian "terror" film, Ruggiero Deodato's "House by the Edge of the Park". This isn't effective,not because of the sex,but because the acting is extremely weak, the motivations of the characters are unbelievably preposterous,and the three villains are completely un-intimidating (David Hess, the American star of "Last House on the Left" and a couple Italian "terror" entries like "Hitchike" and "House by the Edge of the Park" would have made mince-meat out of all three of these idiots without even working up a sweat).

Of course, there IS plenty of sleazy sex. And it's usually pretty gratuitous, such as when one of the creeps stops to watch a very graphic lesbian porn loop in the sex shop, or when the virgin (Bridget Petronnio) watches her friend having sex with her boyfriend and starts masturbating (cue the extreme, loving close-up "insert" footage of what is obviously a very hirsute and skanky body double for the waif-like Petronio). I actually would have liked to see MORE graphic sex scenes though involving the very sexy Anna-Maria Clementi. And while what Petronio really did best as an actress was play an endangered virgin, her horny, self-gratifying character here is totally unbelievable as a "virgin", and she comes nowhere NEAR being as endangered here as she was in "House by the Edge of the Park" in the scene where David Hess runs a straight razor over her naked body. One thing I HAVE always appreciated about D'Amato, unlike most softcore porn (and pretty much all hardcore porn) directors, is that he doesn't let the sex scenes, however ridiculously gratuitous they may be, go on so long that they bring the whole pace of the movie to a grinding halt. The problem here though is there just really isn't much of movie to bring to a grinding halt.

Last Porn Shop on the Avenue

[BandSAboutMovies · 4/10 · 17 December 2021]

A bunch of small time hoods rob a grocery store for five grand without realizing that it's a protected mob store. On the run, they hide in an adult bookstore, which by the fate of Italian exploitation movies is run by Lorna (Anna-Maria Clementi, Sister Angela from Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals) the girlfriend of the same mobster they've already screwed over. They kidnap her and head for Canada, but instead end up at the home of three college kids - Frank (Christian Borromeo, who was in another very similar movie, House on the Edge of the Park), Sue (Annj Goren, who was also in Hard Sensation and Porno Holocaust) and Faye (Brigitte Petronio, Cindy from House on the Edge of the Park) - and treat them exactly like you'd expect teenagers to be treated in a Joe D'Amato movie.

Written by George Eastman* and having softcore and hardcore versions, this is worth watching for the streets of Times Square in the late 70s, filled with several great marquees. D'Amato was also this film's cinematographer under his real name Aristide Massaccessi.

*IMDB lists Tito Carpi, who hundred-plus writing credits include Tentacles, Giovannona Long-Thigh, Escape from the Bronx and so many more, as the writer.

Boring and lethargic would-be thriller

[Leofwine_draca · 2/10 · 18 October 2016]

Joe D'Amato was an Italian jack-of-all-trades director who seemed to spend an inordinate amount of his career making pornography. This isn't one of his sex flicks, but it comes close at times to being so, given the director's obsession with female nudity and endless scenes of couples making out in various locations. Plot-wise, it's a low rent riff on LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, although it's careful to avoid any kind of nastiness whatsoever. There's barely any violence in the film – and the stuff which does exist is kept off-screen – and all of the sex taking place is consensual, so at least the sleaze factor is low. But the humdrum script and slow paced nature of the narrative make this a real chore to sit through.

Admittedly, D'Amato is careful to cast attractive actresses in the film, but their acting ability is something else. The guys are another story – what's with casting ugly or forgettable guys in these films all the time? When the smooth Ray Lovelock showed up in a role like this in LAST HOUSE ON THE BEACH, his innocent features made his violent acts all the more shocking. Here, the guys just look scummy.

Nothing happens at all, other than a lame twist ending, and I was twiddling my fingers for much of the production. The only thing that interested me were the authentic grindhouse street scenes in New York which are the background of the film's opening. We witness the pimps and prostitutes, heavy traffic, sex shops and cinemas, and run down store fronts that New York was well known for, all for real. It's a fun look back but it doesn't make this a good film. Instead it's a boring, lethargic, pointless would-be thriller.

With and By the Denizens of the Title Locale

[jaibo · 7/10 · 21 June 2009]

This Desperate Hours-type robbery/hostage number is D'Amato's spin on the Roughie genre – a crime and sex related genre piece with more than its fair share of gratuitous sexualised violence. Yet D'Amato's tale also stands as a critique of the kind of male fantasizing behind this kind of sex movie, always keeping itself self-conscious that this is some male inadequate's masturbation material.

A couple of two-bit hoods rob a convenience store on the eponymous 7th Avenue but, as with Charley Varrick's plunder, the loot turns out to be mob owned, and the felons find themselves on the run from a local gang Boss. They hide out in a nearby sex shop, and kidnap the proprietess, who happens to be the Boss' lady. In the sex shop, one of the goons – a total creep named Bob – takes a peek into a hand-held cine-viewer, salivating at a What the Butler Saw-type sexual performance by two ropey models. The rest of the film might be taken as the events which would ensue were they to be aimed at the men who shop at the 7th Street pleasure shop… The goons and the proprietess plus a black con crony of the men drive to the woman's country home, where a trio of students are enjoying a vacation romp. The students are held hostage and subjected to an amount of sexual exploitation and humiliation at the hands of the goons, but by the end of their forced sojourn together, the women have paired off with the men and some satisfactory coupling has taken place. This strand of the story reaches its fulfilment in the coupling of the black man, who has taken a great deal of racist abuse from his companions, with a virgin student who has spent the bulk of her screen time masturbating over the sexual shenanigans of others. He turns out to be a thoughtful lover, introducing the nervous girl to the delights of cunnilingus and she reciprocates by giving him a handjob, as he is concerned with keeping her hymen intact! This positive view of sexual sharing is rewarded as it takes him out of the house when the mob catch up with them, giving him the opportunity to sneak back into the house, overpower the mobsters and make his escape with his buddies. The students are also rewarded by ending up with the stolen loot, just like the paid sex performers in a porn film are rewarded by their bags of (also probably mob) cash… D'Amato arranges a psychologically suspect but nevertheless adept plot of sexual partnering whilst continually re-enforcing the idea that the sexual scenes are just that, sexual scene in a movie. The virgin is often seen touching herself at the sight of other couplings, yet even here the viewer is struck (unless he's an idiot, like the goons) with the knowledge that a woman masturbating over sex could be merely a male sexual fantasy (which is not to say women don't masturbate about the most un-PC scenarios, but the occasions it happens in this film remain self-consciously self-serving). It is no mistake that the virgin's sexual release in orgasm by cunnilingus is accompanied by a montage of scenes that she'd/we'd previously witnessed. It was often a plot device of 70s porn to see a woman inducted into sexual enjoyment within the story, but few directors made as much effort as D'Amato to show that the woman is a character in a male sexual fantasy. To back this up, we see the first man she saw having sex, the student Frank, reflected endlessly in a mirrored bathroom after his bout with his insatiable companion, the sexually voracious student Sue.

D'Amato's Pleasure Shop on 7th Avenue is an existential place in which fantasies can be enacted for and by the lonely men who walk the New York sidewalks. Some of the music score is eerily reminiscent of Herrmann's music for Taxi Driver, and the end credits show the movie houses and porno shops of Times Square, the market for the fantasies which D'Amato so self-consciously films in and for that Pleasure/Porno House on 7th Avenue.

Decent enough sleaze, but could have been better.

[The_Void · 6/10 · 2 January 2007]

I have to say I'm more than a little bit disappointed with this film. It's not that The Pleasure Shop on 7th Avenue is particularly bad for what it is, or that I was expecting it to be brilliant...but somehow, this just feels a bit too empty to be a film from the often proclaimed 'king of sleaze', Joe D'Amato. The film starts off well, with two would be robbers holding up a chemist, before finding out that it's under the protection of the local mob boss and scampering out the back door. The shenanigans continue when the bumbling thieves happen upon a porn shop being run by the mob boss' girlfriend! They then take her captive and make their way to Canada in order to escape the mob. The problem with this plot is that D'Amato doesn't take any advantage of the opportunities for a good thriller, or for humour and instead; we get a barrage of sleaze and nudity, which is OK, but the film could have had so much more if D'Amato had been thinking outside the box. The sleaze on display isn't the most shocking Joe D'Amato fans will have seen from him, but there's a lot of stuff that is bound to please anyone with a mind to see this film. The Pleasure Shop on 7th Avenue isn't easy to track down, and I can't really recommend going out of your way as there are better trashy exploitation films out there….but of course, there's also a lot worse.

An uncut view of the complete film (spoilers)

[Cinetastic · 31 October 2003]

Joe D'Amato's Porno/Pleasure Shop On 7th Avenue is a great film that even scored the high box office position of #24 in 1980 on its release in Hong Kong, grossing $HK 1,870,469.00 between 06/03/80- 02/04/80. It even beat films like #31 Blues Brothers; #35 Star Trek The Motion Picture and even surprisingly #41 Last Tango In Paris.

The Plot (spoilers). Two low rent hoodlums hold up a pharmacy in New York - unfortunately for them it is under the protection of the local mob boss, and they flee with $5,000 and hide out briefly in a Porno Shop run by the good looking girlfriend of the local gang boss. She offers and performs oral sex on one of them to let her escape, but they take her hostage anyway, and drive off in her car to meet the black hustler who had set up the job. The three criminals decide their only option to escape the mob is to drive to Canada and hide out, and they plan to spend one night of the journey indoors by breaking in to an empty country villa near the border.

After suffering the indignity of having to pee in front of one the hoods in a gas station toilet, the kidnapped lady secretly drops a $20 note in the trash can with a message to her mob boss boyfriend written on it. A cleaner finds it and calls the number on the note, and the mob are now on their trail!

Meanwhile a young couple and another girl (students) are enjoying themselves in a villa, having broken in. Whilst the young couple are making love, the other girl secretly watches and starts touching herself until climaxing. Their idyllic peace is shattered when the three criminals and their female hostage burst in and take control of the villa. The atmosphere is then vaguely similar to Ruggero Deodato's 'House At The Edge Of The Park', with various sexual encounters (including the gang boss's girlfriend being sodomised), a card game and the psycho hood threatening the hostages with a knife. The fact that two younger members of the cast from that film pretty much reprise their roles here is no disadvantage to this film.

A couple of gun toting mobsters finally arrive, and after a struggle are knocked out. The three criminals then safely leave to cross the border, the boss's girlfriend calls him and waits to be picked up, and the three students manage to 'inherit' the stolen money, much to their glee.

It has taken a while to track down all the elements of this film, and they have been put together to make a full uncut english language widescreen NTSC all region DVD.

Pleasure Shop on 7th Avenue

[Michael_Elliott · 15 March 2010]

Pleasure Shop on 7th Avenue, The (1979)

** (out of 4)

Euro-crime has a couple small time hoods robbing a store not knowing that it's under Mafia protection. They end up in a porn shop where they kidnap the worker and wouldn't you know it, she just happens to be the mob's girl. The three soon head off and end up in a house with a couple college girls, their dorky male friend and a black pal and sex is bound to follow. Trying to put any sort of logic in a D'Amato movie is a mistake and it'll be a very big one with this thing. At times it seems like the entire Mafia plot gets thrown out because the characters seem to forget that they're running for their lives. Everything slows down just enough to get countless sex scenes in but the movie just isn't sleazy enough to really work. There was apparently a hardcore version of this shot as it's clear that the sex scenes are all shot in a way where inserts could be added. The softcore scenes are all rather tame with just a bunch of nudity and silly moaning. I wouldn't call any of them erotic but some of them are downright hilarious including a sequence where the black man tries to teach the white virgin how to do things. The dialogue in this scene is so incredibly stupid that you're bound to be laughing. I think the film actually got off to a pretty good start with some great locations in NYC being used and I think the movie was moving at a great pace early on. Sadly things start to water down once the sex stuff comes in as George Eastman's screenplay just doesn't have enough going for it to keeps things entertaining. I did wonder how much of the original screenplay was perhaps a crime drama but it got cut out in order for the softcore scenes. Anne Marie Clementi and Brigitte Petronio are easy on the eyes, which is a plus.