Back in the '30s, before the invention of dubbing, studios would sometimes produce sound films in multiple-language versions, with Spanish, French, German, and other-language remakes shot at night on the same sets as their English counterparts. Within a few years, a more economical solution was uncovered, but in the '70s, aspiring smut purveyors found this old trick similarly applicable to sex, with several XXX cineastes cranking out duplicate versions of their scripts to suit both hetero and gay markets. Foremost among these was Rik Taziner, who has at least five such pairs to his name, with more almost certainly waiting to be discovered. While the titles were usually similar, we get a bizarre exception with FINGER LICKEN GOOD, a strange gay take of the director's already-weird-enough hetero flick THE DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND.
Set-up and even whole scenes are exactly the same here, with Kelly Guthrie reprising his role as Lucifer ("Don't call me Lucy!"), an overseer of Hell who regales us with the story of how he got his latest pair of souls. As Lucifer and his assistant get serviced by the caged guys on a chintzy, cut-rate set, our hero guides us through the guys' confusing and arbitrary road to perdition.
LICKEN follows the same erratic structure as PLAYGROUND, showing the Devil and his henchman first spying on the boys as they hook up a party (a swinger's orgy in the original; a gay cruise party here). Next, the Devil dons various disguises to tempt the lads: in one, he dresses up as an old man playing with marionettes who so fascinates one of the boys he can lead him back to a nearby residence for some fun; in the other, he's a hippie guru, with the other guy a delivery boy hypnotized by Lucifer's assistant into getting tied to a St. Andrew's cross and servicing them both. Next scene has the young men coming home from school to find one of their uncles (a young Paul Thomas in the straight version; Just Some Guy here) looking at a stroke mag; intrigued, they end up putting what they see into practice. The final scene finds the lads as hustlers on Selma Avenue, brought to a nearby motel by Lucy and his henchman.
What any of this has to do with stealing the guys' souls is anyone's guess. If sinful (presumably non-marital - or perhaps in this case homosexual) sex is what damns you, Lucifer should be set after the first encounter; if it's something else, the film never bothers to explain the progression. It just presents one arbitrary, weird sex scene after another - and I do mean weird. In the first one, as Lucifer and his assistant watch the guys get it on, the Devil stimulates himself with a hand puppet; later, as the old man, he rides the guy's erection with his marionette.
The two young men at the center of this are attractive enough, both twinkish, uncut, and looking like mid-tier Hollywood hustlers; neither is quite ready for primetime, however, as both have to fake several of their ejaculations. Guthrie, largely confined to the sidelines in the straight version - aside from a bit of half-hearted humping and a three-finger near-fist toward the end - is much more involved here, taking a key role in the majority of the sex scenes against, presumably, most of the audience's will. Like its straight counterpart, LICKEN is full of age-bait, positing both young guys as in their mid-teens (though the actors, of course, look significantly older). It's a bizarre film, a bit more coherent than its straight counterpart, and consequently more of a middling effort than that film's outright disaster. Once again, good luck getting off to it, though!
Set-up and even whole scenes are exactly the same here, with Kelly Guthrie reprising his role as Lucifer ("Don't call me Lucy!"), an overseer of Hell who regales us with the story of how he got his latest pair of souls. As Lucifer and his assistant get serviced by the caged guys on a chintzy, cut-rate set, our hero guides us through the guys' confusing and arbitrary road to perdition.
LICKEN follows the same erratic structure as PLAYGROUND, showing the Devil and his henchman first spying on the boys as they hook up a party (a swinger's orgy in the original; a gay cruise party here). Next, the Devil dons various disguises to tempt the lads: in one, he dresses up as an old man playing with marionettes who so fascinates one of the boys he can lead him back to a nearby residence for some fun; in the other, he's a hippie guru, with the other guy a delivery boy hypnotized by Lucifer's assistant into getting tied to a St. Andrew's cross and servicing them both. Next scene has the young men coming home from school to find one of their uncles (a young Paul Thomas in the straight version; Just Some Guy here) looking at a stroke mag; intrigued, they end up putting what they see into practice. The final scene finds the lads as hustlers on Selma Avenue, brought to a nearby motel by Lucy and his henchman.
What any of this has to do with stealing the guys' souls is anyone's guess. If sinful (presumably non-marital - or perhaps in this case homosexual) sex is what damns you, Lucifer should be set after the first encounter; if it's something else, the film never bothers to explain the progression. It just presents one arbitrary, weird sex scene after another - and I do mean weird. In the first one, as Lucifer and his assistant watch the guys get it on, the Devil stimulates himself with a hand puppet; later, as the old man, he rides the guy's erection with his marionette.
The two young men at the center of this are attractive enough, both twinkish, uncut, and looking like mid-tier Hollywood hustlers; neither is quite ready for primetime, however, as both have to fake several of their ejaculations. Guthrie, largely confined to the sidelines in the straight version - aside from a bit of half-hearted humping and a three-finger near-fist toward the end - is much more involved here, taking a key role in the majority of the sex scenes against, presumably, most of the audience's will. Like its straight counterpart, LICKEN is full of age-bait, positing both young guys as in their mid-teens (though the actors, of course, look significantly older). It's a bizarre film, a bit more coherent than its straight counterpart, and consequently more of a middling effort than that film's outright disaster. Once again, good luck getting off to it, though!