A blast from the past, A Little Bit of Hanky Panky has a host of famous porn stars: Ginger Lynn, Ron Jeremy, Jamie Gillis, Bunny Bleu, and Jerry Butler. As far as the plot goes, it was almost non-existent. It seems a pair of couples are camping out and unbeknownst to all but one of them, there are a sex games happening on the island where they're staying. This creates some situations that, without the characters or the viewer having this knowledge, border on pedophilia and rape...actually it doesn't just border on rape, since Jerry Butler's character is listed as Rapist. Of course, later in the movie when this knowledge is revealed things don't seemquite as creepy as they originally appeared.
My introduction to XXX movies happened during the golden age of porn films. A Little Bit of Hanky Panky, being from that era, has very short sex scenes. This is a good thing in my opinion, some modern XXX movie sex scenes are so long they become uninteresting. A Little Bit of Hanky Panky isn't the greatest classic porn film, but it is still very enjoyable and well worth watching. I grade this one a high C+
I recently watched Sextette to review for my other blog, Gonna Put Me In The Movies, and thought it would be "campy" fun, instead it just turned out to be an embarrassment for Mae West and a dull viewing experience for me. Blonde Ambition, on the other hand, fulfilled my desire for camp and comedy.
Sugar and Candy Kane (Suzy Mandel and Dory Devon) are performers in a small Podunk town in Wyoming. They get a call from their manager to come to New York for a job (which turns out to be non-existent). The first sex scene has the girls in their dressing room, which is just another stall in the horse barn. Sugar has sex with her boyfriend (David Morris) on one end of the barn while Candy is doing her make-up on the other end. There are a lot of double entendres spoken during this scene and it's played more for laughs than sex. It seemed strange that Sugar's boyfriend had a huge bald spot (which looked like a fake bald cap) and he wanted to keep his cowboy hat on most of the time....little did I know that this plot point would come into play before the end of the movie. I'm not going to reveal how it came back at the end of the movie, but just wanted to note how well written Blonde Ambition was that it could take a minor bit from the start of the movie and make notation of it again at the end of the movie.
They don't have any funds to get to New York but luckily Eric Edwards and his man servant Richard Bolla are in town picking up a priceless brooch for Eric's aunt and they will fly the girls to New York. Sugar shows him an exact double for his brooch and tells him she bought it on the cheap....there's a fight in the bar and the brooches get switched (like we didn't see that one coming!).
On the plane trip, Candy has sex with Eric and Sugar gives Richard oral sex....well actually a body double (Suzy Mandel did not do any hardcore scenes in the movie) wearing a gray wig (Candy is blonde) gives Richard oral sex. Neither sex scene was very remarkable and both scenes seem to be included in the movie simply as sex scenes with no plot development involved. In New York when the girls find that no job exists, they have to look for other work. The girls get parts in a porn production of Gone With The Wind directed by Jamie Gillis. This has a huge number of people in a choreographed sex scene which is more "campy" than sexual.
Back at the apartment Candy is showering and masturbating while thinking about Eric Edwards, while we see him showering and masturbating thinking about her. This is a particularly odd scene, while seeing a woman masturbate in a porn is nothing out of the ordinary, seeing a man with no female involved masturbating is out of the norm and maybe this had something to do with the directors, who also worked in gay porn.
Eric's aunt, Lady Buckingham, has sent a private detective to check on the two girls. She thinks they are too low class for her nephew and has them pegged as golddiggers. The PI and Candy hook up and of course this results in a sex scene. In the meantime, Sugar has met a frisky couple in an elevator and gone back to their apartment with them. In the apartment, the sex scene begins with the man naked playing a piano while the woman is trying to undress Sugar, but Sugar pulls away and lo and behold the floor is a skating rink and Sugar skates around while undressing. We have now moved from the campy into the surreal!
The girls are both back at the apartment and we find Sugar checking out a guy sunbathing a couple of floors below and she drops the brooch over the balcony. Sugar goes downstairs to the apartment to retrieve it, where the guy (George Payne) has now moved his sunbathing inside under a sunlamp. Sugar finds that it is a gay couple living in the apartment and she's cool with them being gay and agrees to let one of them use her brooch as part of his costume at an upcoming drag show. After he leaves, Suzy still has the hots for the other guy. Since he has protective eyewear on and can't see what is going on, Sugar starts rubbing on him...he thinks it's his partner but when he finds out it's Sugar they have sex anyway!!! I'll let you draw your own conclusions from this scene.
Sugar and Candy want to go to the drag show but are refused admittance, so they disguise themselves as drag queens to get into the club. The dialogue inside the drag club was similar to what I have heard at drag shows, so I assume that a real club or at least some of the real performers were used.
In the meantime Lady Buckingham has found out about the brooch switch and has come to New York to have the ladies arrested. She is easily mistaken for a drag queen and gets into the club, but before she can have the girls arrested, the whole club gets raided and everyone is put in jail. Lady Buckingham finds out that she actually owns that club among all of her other New York property. The girls are such a hit that Eric's aunt buys them their own club. The final scene is a choreographed dance number with Suzy Mandel and Dory Devon at their new club backed by a group of gay dancers.
I would say they don't make them like this anymore, but actually I don't think they really ever made many like this one. My grade A-
Blonde Ambition starring Kurt Mann, Patricia Dale, Molly Malone, Tara Belles, Dory Devon, Jean Joseph, Suzy Mandel, Eric Edwards, George Payne and directed by John and Lem Amero
The back of the box actually has a pretty decent summation of the movie: "Nick (John Leslie) and Nora (Gina Carrera) Chalmers write mystery novels...steamy, sexy mystery novels. In search of plots for their next book, they travel to Europe to experience the passion, desire and intrigue on the legendary Orient Express. Once on board, they discover a cast of shady (and horny) characters including a Potent Potentate and his Hand Job Hand Maiden, Horny Colonel Kittridge, and the anything but Lady Like Ashley and her Sex Starved Secretary - all plotting to steal a priceless diamond. "The Eye of Eros". It's a four day erotic adventure where it's not whodunnit, but who's doing it, that counts."
Lust On The Orient Xpress (LOOX) was made in the waning days of the Golden Age of porn, but definitely qualifies as a Golden Age movie with its well thought out logical plot that progresses the storyline from start to finish. LOOX was a big budget porn in 1986 with scenes shot outside a train, realistic movie sets inside different train cars and even insert shots of a real train pulling in and out of train stations. Another plus are the period costumes that everyone gets to wear. All of these elements add up to a pretty decent movie.
In LOOX, John Leslie proves he was as good an actor as any second string actor in movies and TV during this same time period. Everyone's acting for the most part is pretty good with one exception: Tracey Adams, who tries to do a Cockney accent, but somehow manages to sound American Southern and British at the same time....maybe she's from South London :-)
The worst parts of LOOX are the sex scenes, which are all deadly dull. Without them of course, this wouldn't be a XXX feature, it would just be a fairly decent "Made For TV" movie (actually better than some). The sex scenes were "shoehorned" into the movie, instead of having situations that led naturally to them, making them just as irritating as many sex scenes in modern day XXX features. Even discounting for the sex scenes, this one still rates a solid B
John Leslie, Gina Carrera, Jamie Gillis, Pat Manning, Eric Edwards, Tracey Adams, Andrew Herbert, Keli Richards, Jim Woodman, Paul Thomas, Francis Papillion, Raymond Roberts, F. Powers Gireau, Jennifer Lacy, Nich Kypros and directed by Tim McDonald
