SPLENDOR IN BED/(THE SACK) is a truly lame early porn film. Both versions out on video (via After Hours Cinema and competitor Something Weird) are lousy.
Because a husband-wife team of some prominence from porn's early days are toplined, the film has modest historical value. But they have been better in every other film I've seen thus far.
Aussie-accented Pete Dawson has sex with a hooker in the opening scene, shredded in both extant versions. Fellatio is merely implied visually and the sex is simulated, so it is likely this was never a hardcore film.
Camera-work is particularly poor, even by porn standards, with haphazard framing, only exacerbated in the AHC version due to their insistence on cropping off 20% of the frame at top and bottom in some mania to market the concept of "widescreen" to an unwashed video generation. I suspect these NJ clowns would try to reissue Chaplin and Keaton classics in "widescreen" ratios if they ever get off their current porno jag.
Rest of the film consists of a nonsensical sort-of-plot wherein Dawson's wife (his real-life wife Jan Davis hiding under a tall & terrible wig) seduces her cute & short virginal maid Angie. Jan then supposedly plots with her against hubby, when in fact she ends up holding the unfortunate lass down while Dawson rapes her upon his return home.
This final reel is styled as a roughie, but despite Angie's screams and our married couple's callous manhandling of her, it is going-through-the-motions soft porn. I suspect a XXX approach, or some bondage/domination action, would have given this segment more bite.
The unknown actress playing Angie is a looker, though vertically challenged, and one suspects the bad experience of shooting this trash cured her of any ambitions to make it big in (porn) movies. Dawson & Davis prove fallible this time - they needed a director or facsimile thereof.
Because a husband-wife team of some prominence from porn's early days are toplined, the film has modest historical value. But they have been better in every other film I've seen thus far.
Aussie-accented Pete Dawson has sex with a hooker in the opening scene, shredded in both extant versions. Fellatio is merely implied visually and the sex is simulated, so it is likely this was never a hardcore film.
Camera-work is particularly poor, even by porn standards, with haphazard framing, only exacerbated in the AHC version due to their insistence on cropping off 20% of the frame at top and bottom in some mania to market the concept of "widescreen" to an unwashed video generation. I suspect these NJ clowns would try to reissue Chaplin and Keaton classics in "widescreen" ratios if they ever get off their current porno jag.
Rest of the film consists of a nonsensical sort-of-plot wherein Dawson's wife (his real-life wife Jan Davis hiding under a tall & terrible wig) seduces her cute & short virginal maid Angie. Jan then supposedly plots with her against hubby, when in fact she ends up holding the unfortunate lass down while Dawson rapes her upon his return home.
This final reel is styled as a roughie, but despite Angie's screams and our married couple's callous manhandling of her, it is going-through-the-motions soft porn. I suspect a XXX approach, or some bondage/domination action, would have given this segment more bite.
The unknown actress playing Angie is a looker, though vertically challenged, and one suspects the bad experience of shooting this trash cured her of any ambitions to make it big in (porn) movies. Dawson & Davis prove fallible this time - they needed a director or facsimile thereof.