Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

Posting this, since where else would it go? From back in the day when a major television program would interview a director of underground roughy and titty films.

Dildo Heaven is on YouTube lol

This leads me to wonder if there's a Dildo Hell? And if so, what are the differences?

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Captain's Log
My Collection

I imagine the shape and quality of the dildos.

Well, considering you're making this a Doris Wishman year, it's clear what you need to do.

Every time a bell rings, a dildo goes to heaven.

Fun fact: Wishman directed two movies called Satan Was A Lady, one of which is a hardcore porno, the other of which is on YouTube, so I guess I'm committed to a double feature. I just hope my brain hasn't already melted by that point.

I own Satan Is a Lady. Definitely not the porno version. From what I recall, it was pretty bad.

Oh dear.


Pretty sure Doris Wishman will be my Ray Dennis Steckler for 2022.

I just watched his Wild Guitar. It might be the only thing by him I've seen though.

Tubi has a bunch of his movies. I'd recommend Rat Pfink A Boo Boo or The Lemon Grove Kids as the priorities. A few of his slashers are on there as well, but are only worth seeing if you like boring crap if nothing happens. I mostly enjoyed them.


Also, you don't need me to tell you this, but avoid his pornos at all costs. Pretty sure I felt my brain start to evaporate as I watched them. Just maddeningly dull.

Ya know, honestly, if I were gonna watch some Franco, it would be Vampyros Lesbos, Female Vampire, and A Virgin Among The Living Dead, Two Female Spies With Flowered Panties, and Venus In Furs.

You are not far wrong.

Hadn't heard of this one so I googled it and...LOL at Lina Romay's hair.

Attachments

 

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Dildo Purgatory?

I'm not gonna lie, I've never seen this, I just felt like that title had to appear in my post.

Laurien Dominique has marital troubles. You see, her husband Dr. John Holmes the psychiatrist can't get it up. And her friend Candida Royalle (one of whose first lines is "Look, no crotch!", to which Dominique responds "Lou, I'm eating") doesn't seem to take it very seriously ("My husband can't get it up and you wanna joke"). Or when she does, the advice she offers is of limited help ("You gotta show him crotch"). To tackle the problem, the two of them embark on a series of sexual misadventures. There's the trip Royalle makes to Holmes' office incognito (she wears a ski mask) and ****s a patient she mistakes for Holmes' character (and promptly punches him in the dick once she realizes her mistake). There's a milkman to whom Dominique offers to judge the size of his organ while unloading about her marital troubles, briefly interrupting the proceedings to put away the milk, and then having to help recover from a heart attack when Royalle walks in.

At this point, Dominique gets the bright idea that she wants to help people with their problems, like the Peeping Tom whom they indulge, although Royalle briefly expresses her annoyance ("Take it easy, this isn't a ********* watermelon!"). She also decides to pitch in at the office, mostly bungling the act of answering the phones and then pissing off a janitor (or as he calls himself, a "maintenance engineer") played by Paul Thomas, who then has his way with her. (This is probably the weakest part of the movie, mean spirited in ways the movie otherwise mostly avoids. It also heavily features the dreaded under the balls angle, although there's the intermittent lens flare to block half the screen, so it is perhaps a bit more bearable than average in this respect.) The main set piece of the film is a group therapy session that Dominique and Royalle try to run in Holmes' absence, mostly by ****ing the patients or letting them get it on with each other. (Highlights include a mime dressed as the Big Bad Wolf trying to get it on with another patient dressed as Red Riding Hood, and Royalle doing double duty with a pair of brothers who argue and spasm as she does the deed.) Finally Dominique is paid a visit by her sister, who claims to have gone blind after being flashed, and posits that the only cure is a 14-inch dick. ("Fourteen inches long? That was no flasher, that was a ****ing horse!") Cue the dramatic music. Enter John Holmes. Will this be the solution to everyone's problems?

Hard Soap, Hard Soap was apparently the first comedy Bob Chinn directed, and judging by the results, he took the genre like a fish to water. It's a pornographic parody of soap operas, and while I'm not quite familiar enough with the genre to say how astute a parody it is, I laughed pretty often. As you can guess from the title, the primary reference point is Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and Chinn cites his sources, placing a magazine with Louise Lasser in-character on the cover in one scene.) I think the usual jab at porn is over the contrived scenarios, but that's entirely the point here, with one ridiculous situation after another resulting from the heroines' misguided attempts to find a solution to their problems. Chinn has in his arsenal a great sense of timing, punctuating jokes with over-the-top organ music that only makes the jokes that much funnier, and sneaking in deft audiovisual gags (car crash noises and sirens on the soundtrack during a sex scene, a steadily accumulating collection of cigarette butts to mark an extended bout of lovemaking). Working with a larger budget than he was accustomed to, he gives the movie a pretty distinct look thanks to the campy set design and careful visual direction. (Note the theatrical staging of the group therapy scene, or the heart-shaped cutout of the Fonz in the bedroom.)

As far as the sex scenes go, Chinn does take care to craft them into gags while delivering the goods (more than one scene ends with Royalle punching somebody in the dick), and avoids going to certain obvious places. (At the risk of sounding like a degenerate, I must report that the group therapy does not devolve into a gangbang, nor do the heroines partake in a lesbian scene. I guess narrative integrity is important.) There are a few less than politically correct jabs (as you can guess, the group therapy scene is not a sensitive portrayal of mental illness, and there are other gags involving gay and trans characters that might be seen as punching down), but the overall vibe is genial enough that I had a hard time getting offended. But the real reason the movie succeeds is the chemistry between the lead actresses, with Dominique as the more sincere one and Royalle as the feistier one, proving to be great comic foils for each other. (Chinn would reunite with them and Holmes in the very entertaining Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls, where they're joined by Christine De Shaffer as a bitchy adversary for Royalle and Desiree Cousteau as the adorably naive Ann Chovy and Chinn himself as their coworker, as all of them work together to foil the mysterious Night Chicken, a dirty tricks operator hired by a competing fried chicken syndicate trying to shut down their pizzeria. Chinn's direction is good enough to be almost invisible, juggling the likable cast members and their tremendous chemistry seamlessly to keep the good vibes coming. The skateboard scenes help too.) And in the interest of transparency, I must note that in one scene, Royalle wears a getup that I'm tempted to describe as "sexy pirate", and folks, I'm not made of stone.

^That was the sexy pirate look, btw. It's a bit of a stretch, but I stand by my description.

I'll buy it.

The important thing to remember about Bob Chinn's Disco Lady is that the title refers to a place, not a person. You might be fooled by the poster, which has a person of someone who could very well be the titular Disco Lady. You might also be fooled by the theme song, which specifically refers to the Disco Lady as a lady, while introducing us to someone who could very well be said Disco Lady. (It is worth noting that the song does not actually fall into the disco genre. I wouldn't call it a particularly good theme song, but the part where the singer really stretches out "Disco Lay-ay-ay-ay-dy" has been stuck in my head the past few days, so I suppose it did its job. It's not an unpleasant listen.) No, my friends, the Disco Lady of the title actually refers to a discotheque. You see, it's New Year's Eve, and anybody who's anybody (read: an assortment of uninteresting randos) converge upon Disco Lady to send the year off with a bang. Because this is a porno, that last sentence doubles as a pun.

To be honest, there isn't a lot to this movie, which consists of vignettes about underdeveloped characters gettin' it on in between endless, endless disco dancing. The closest thing this has to a main character is Rhonda Jo Petty, who gets picked up in the first scene by a drug dealing pimp who calls himself the Candyman, who then prostitutes her out to a patron of the disco. I suppose that this makes her a disco lady of sorts, although she doesn't get to do any actual disco dancing. It's also worth noting that she resembles Farrah Fawcett (and indeed, another movie of hers, Little Orphan Dusty, was promoted based on that resemblance), and that at one point she mistakes another character for Peter Frampton. If like me, you occasionally pretend a movie stars the better known personalities that its actors resembled when bored out of your mind, you may find some enjoyment from this angle.

Other notable situations involve a couple celebrating their anniversary, where the husband gifts the wife a nice watch (and also his penis), and later wants to stay home and nurse a stubby while watching the game, and only for them to cheat on each other once they arrive. I should note that his tryst with a waitress is set in the romantic milieu of a backroom decorated with rolls of paper towels and crates of Coca Cola, and that the copious jewelry he wears gets as intimate as he does with his partner's privates. I suppose, like Charles Grodin once admitted in an interview with David Letterman, that he didn't know where else to put his valuables. The climactic situation includes another bad husband, who after admitting to cheating on his wife, tries to kill her during the New Year's countdown for the crime of going out of the house. (This guy's a real piece of shit, if you couldn't tell, although I did chuckle when I saw how much worse his car looked than hers.) The movie stretches this out with slow motion, by Chinn's admission in a vain attempt to hit a full hour runtime. A DJ presides over the proceedings ("you count it down with Scorpio Sound"), although he lacks the verve of say, Rudy Ray Moore in Disco Godfather. ("Put your weight on it, put your weight on it, put your weight on it, put your weight on it!")

One of the biggest changes in mindset needed to enjoy vintage hardcore as actual movies is to acclimate to the pacing. For the most part, you have to accept that the movie is going to contain at least a few sequences that fulfill genre obligations, and at that point you can direct your attention to how the rest of the movie develops the story and how the different sections complement each other. If a movie goes on for longer than an hour and a half, it might be a challenge for it to hold your attention. At the same time, if the movie is too short, those important story bits might not have enough time to develop, and as a result the sex scenes that make up the majority of the movie might end up feeling overlong. Such is the case here, and it doesn't help that the overall tone is mildly depressing. There is a way to do this premise right, and one should turn their attention to Cecil Howard's Foxtrot. That movie is also centered around a New Year's Eve celebration and doesn't have any real main characters. What it does have is a much better cast, who can wring some real personality out of their limited screentime, and a much stronger emphasis on how the pieces fit together, juggling its ensemble in a way that imbues both an Altman-esque and montage quality to its slick, heady atmosphere. This feels comparatively shapeless. Chinn himself has handled ensembles much better elsewhere (Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls, The Young Like it Hot), although in those cases he was working with superior casts.

Disco Lady doesn't have too many familiar faces, aside from Petty, who went on to become something of a star, Mike Ranger, who later played Kay Parker's son in Taboo, and Rene Bond, who doesn't have a sex scene but gets to show off her dance moves. (Apparently Chinn was introduced to Petty by an associate who told him to "get a look at [her] Zizeks." One assumes he was a student of philosophy.) Chinn made this movie right after Hard Soap, Hard Soap for about a third of the budget, and while both are quite small in the grand scheme of things ($15,000 vs $5,000), you can see how the former movie uses that money to craft a cohesive visual experience. Disco Lady kept its costs down by shooting in a club owned by another associate of Chinn's, and while it doesn't look "bad", the results feel a lot more indifferently filmed. So unless you have enough interest in Chinn's career (or happened to pick up the Vinegar Syndrome double feature of this and Hard Soap, Hard Soap like I did), you can skip this one.