By Lee Pfeiffer
Vinegar Syndrome has released another "Peekarama" double feature of hardcore retro porn from the 1970s. In the amusingly garish packaging, it promises both features are "Full Color, Widescreen" as though the productions were directed by John Ford. First up is Deep Roots, which has to be the only attempt to mingle Alex Haley's landmark bestseller and TV mini-series with the peculiar oral talents of Linda Lovelace. Such creative marketing has long been a mainstay of the porn business which always incorporated the latest social phenomenons into grind house productions. Remember On Golden Blonde and Romancing the Bone? Deep Roots presents top-liner Jesse Chacan as Billy, a beefy, good-looking Native American guy who is bored with life on the reservation. He inherits a house in L.A. and decides to move there. The opening sequences actually boast some real production values and some relatively impressive camerawork as we watch Billy drive his motorcycle through the city streets then do the tourist bit on foot. There's a retro kitsch appeal to seeing him walking through the big city and admiring a wax figure of Paul Newman and John Wayne's hand print at Grauman's. 'lest the audience gets too restless, however, things start moving fast for Billy in the romance department. He picks up a free-spirited, buxom hippie girl and within minutes she's stark naked and being body-painted by him. (This was the '70s, after all.) Billy has an eye for another nubile young girl but her reluctance to surrender her virginity to him results in him seducing her sexually insatiable girlfriend. So much for Billy getting in touch with his feminine side. The "plot" follows its leading man as he samples a seemingly endless array of willing women. Thrown in out of nowhere is a subplot featuring a forty-something cougar who looks like the love child of Mae West and Dolly Parton. The whole film ends up in an orgy sequence hosted by a guy dressed like Groucho Marx(!) For reasons unexplained, Billy finds the prospect of having free sex numerous times a day with good looking women to be difficult to cope with so, in the film's abbreviated finale, he returns to his previously-discarded girlfriend on the reservation. Presumably, he's matured quite a bit...and now also knows how to incorporate the image of Groucho Marx into erotic bedroom sessions. Deep Roots ("Deeper Than "Throat"...More Powerful Than "Roots" read the poster) is average retro porn fare from the era, if not a grade above a lot of the "one reelers" produced during the period. The women did not have to undergo Botox treatment in those days and, thus, they really do look like a girl who could live next door. (Though unfortunately, never next door to me.) As the male lead, Jesse Chacan's performance is up to par in the physical sense but he has all the charisma of Ted Cassidy's Lurch. The DVD transfer looks pretty good with rich colors and a minimum of splotches on screen.
Starlet Nights, also released in 1978, treads the (even then) cliched path of adopting famous fairy tales as porn movies. In this case, Snow White (Candy Nichols) is an innocent 19 year old girl who is fawned over by her father, a successful Beverly Hills physician. Snow's stepmother (porn legend Leslie Bovee) is jealous of the attention her husband gives to his daughter and schemes to discredit her virginal image by luring her into a sex orgy that dad will presumably witness when he comes home from work. The trappings of the Snow White legend are awkwardly interwoven in the tale. Every character has a name derived from the fairy tale and the wicked step mom consults a variety of wizards who reside in her bedroom mirror. She ultimately succeeds in getting Snow into the sex movie industry but her jealousy only increases when she becomes a major prospect for stardom. As with Deep Roots, everything comes to a head (so to speak) in the orgy sequence, but the step mom's plans go awry here when her hubby has to attend a business meeting overnight, thus being deprived of witnessing Snow's depraved behavior. Not one to waste a good orgy, the step mom gets in to the mode and the action heats up. Like Deep Roots, there are some effective production values in Starlet Nights, which was supposedly directed by a woman named Lisa Barr, but in reality was directed by a guy named Joseph Bardo who used the nom de plume for marketing purposes. ("A Woman Porn Director????") There are some good L.A. location shots including sequences filmed outside major studios. (Retro geeks will enjoy seeing huge billboards for "current" movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind.) The performances are all dreadful but the sex scenes are genuinely erotic and there are even some original pop music songs on the soundtrack that rise to the level of "not as bad as you might have expected." The DVD transfer is quite good but there are plenty of artifacts from where the reel changes took place. However, these just add to the flavor of watching a genuine grind house double feature.
In all, another enjoyable release from Vinegar Syndrome.