This movie stayed with me because it was the first porn movie I saw--very much by accident, as it was apparently released in both a hardcore and softcore version, and the theater I saw it in put it on a bill with a terrible R-rated British sex comedy called "Not Now Darling," clearly unaware that they had been shipped the hardcore version by (I'm assuming) mistake. I wonder if before the week was out someone ratted out the movie's "adult" nature to the management. I sure didn't, although at age 15 I did feel like I was probably committing a crime just sitting there.
Anyway, my memory of it was that it was deliberately cheesy and silly and kind of likable, with the explicit parts not very potent (ahem) due to the general air of spoofy nonsense that surrounds them. And that's exactly what it turns out to be like all these years later. The hardcore footage has supposedly long since been lost--Something Weird's release is of the softcore-only version. But beyond being shorter, the effect is pretty much what I remember seeing circa 1977. (Who knows why this 1973 film was playing a midwestern multiplex four years later--but then "Not Now Darling" had also taken that long to get there.) There's nudity, but the sex scenes are all jokey, and sometimes in sped-up motion for slapstick effect.
The satire of "Dragnet" with two poker-faced police detectives investigating "full moon murders" by fatal B.J. (needless to say, this turns out to be due to a female "vampire" thirsty for something other than blood) is heavy on groan-worthy double entendres. Yet everyone here works in a deadpan mode, as opposed to the sometimes labored, juvenile, yuck-yuck cartoonishness that 70s porn flicks trying to "funny" often resorted to. You get the feeling that everyone here was actually having fun, and that the two party scenes (on a yacht, and at a house with a pool) were full of the filmmakers' actual friends.
Further on the plus side, there's some pretty groovy music soundtracked that's above-average for this kind of joint at the time. The women are pretty, Harry Reems is amusing as usual in a sort of running cameo (with guest-star billing), and the whole thing is over before you know it. It's trivial as hell, of course, but it's not boring, sleazy, depressing, downright amateurish or a lot of the other things that similar films from the period often are. (This is presumably because, as others have noted, several participants had already made "legit" movies like "Last House on the Left," notably co-director Sean S. Cunningham of the later "Friday the 13th" and my favorite 80s grade-B teen comedy, "Spring Break.") It's the kind of movie that makes being smack in the middle of the Sexual Revolution in the Me Decade--not something that was conspicuously going on in my small town then, mind you--look really fun, which no doubt it was.
Anyway, my memory of it was that it was deliberately cheesy and silly and kind of likable, with the explicit parts not very potent (ahem) due to the general air of spoofy nonsense that surrounds them. And that's exactly what it turns out to be like all these years later. The hardcore footage has supposedly long since been lost--Something Weird's release is of the softcore-only version. But beyond being shorter, the effect is pretty much what I remember seeing circa 1977. (Who knows why this 1973 film was playing a midwestern multiplex four years later--but then "Not Now Darling" had also taken that long to get there.) There's nudity, but the sex scenes are all jokey, and sometimes in sped-up motion for slapstick effect.
The satire of "Dragnet" with two poker-faced police detectives investigating "full moon murders" by fatal B.J. (needless to say, this turns out to be due to a female "vampire" thirsty for something other than blood) is heavy on groan-worthy double entendres. Yet everyone here works in a deadpan mode, as opposed to the sometimes labored, juvenile, yuck-yuck cartoonishness that 70s porn flicks trying to "funny" often resorted to. You get the feeling that everyone here was actually having fun, and that the two party scenes (on a yacht, and at a house with a pool) were full of the filmmakers' actual friends.
Further on the plus side, there's some pretty groovy music soundtracked that's above-average for this kind of joint at the time. The women are pretty, Harry Reems is amusing as usual in a sort of running cameo (with guest-star billing), and the whole thing is over before you know it. It's trivial as hell, of course, but it's not boring, sleazy, depressing, downright amateurish or a lot of the other things that similar films from the period often are. (This is presumably because, as others have noted, several participants had already made "legit" movies like "Last House on the Left," notably co-director Sean S. Cunningham of the later "Friday the 13th" and my favorite 80s grade-B teen comedy, "Spring Break.") It's the kind of movie that makes being smack in the middle of the Sexual Revolution in the Me Decade--not something that was conspicuously going on in my small town then, mind you--look really fun, which no doubt it was.