porno chic

Café Flesh (1982)

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The most infamous critical assessment of pornographic filmmaking was penned by a judge, not by a professional film critic. During a 1964 obscenity case, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was forced to legally define the dividing line where sexually explicit art becomes hardcore pornography, and the best he could come up with was “I know it when I see it.” At the time, he was ruling on what kinds of material would be legally approved for public exhibition in the US, participating in a long tradition of governmental censorship of pornographic art, but it was such a rarely honest, human moment within that tradition that it’s continued to reverberate in the half-century since. That “I know it when I see it” ruling even continues to resonate in how modern film critics write about pornographic cinema, as the Porno Chic moment of the 1970s & 80s has once again become a fascination for film-nerd tastemakers. There’s an attraction among hip genre-film aesthetes to treat vintage hardcore pornography as the next taboo cult-cinema frontier to be conquered, now that every last slasher, giallo, erotic thriller, and noir pic of any interest has already been given the loving 4K Blu-Ray restoration treatment. How far does that renewed critical interest in hardcore porno go, though? If a vintage porno like Bijou or Blonde Ambition is worthy of critical re-appraisal through a modern lens, why aren’t more recent best-seller titles like Visiting My Anal In-Laws 2 or POV Juggfuckers 8 also afforded that same critical consideration? I’ve personally reviewed feature-length porno parodies of films as wide-ranging as Batman, West World, The Exorcist, and Repulsion on this very website, so why haven’t I also made the time for Pulp Friction, American Whore Story, or Back to the Cooter? Part of that decision making is that all movies become more interesting and culturally significant with time, so the better-funded, better plotted pornos made in the Golden Age of Porno Chic are going to be inherently more attractive for critical analysis than the straight-to-VOD porno of today. But where is the dividing line? Is there a definitive temporal or budgetary cutoff that cleanly divides the art from the schlock? The simple answer is no; I just know it when I see it.

Of course, this fussy self-analysis over what forms of hardcore pornography I consider worth covering on this sub-professional film blog doesn’t carry much big-picture significance. I’m no Supreme Court Justice. It was just on my mind after I looked up the 1982 dystopian sci-fi porno Café Flesh on the social media website Letterboxd: this generation’s online hub for cinematic discourse. I had just watched Café Flesh for the first time after purchasing a nice, newly restored scan of it on Blu-ray from the niche genre-cinema label Mondo Macabre. As if it wasn’t already embarrassing enough that I was curious what my fellow Letterboxd users had to say about the artistic merits of a 40-year-old porno, my search also dug up three titles in the Café Flesh series, not just the infamous one from director Stephen Sayadian. Apparently there was a Café Flesh 2 produced in 1997 and a Café Flesh 3 in 2003, long after the Porno Chic wave had crested. While the original film maintains a small, niche place in genre-filmmaking history (and on the boutique Blu-ray market), those two direct-to-video sequels are the kind of long-abandoned porno schlock you’ll only find on copyright-infringing streaming sites with names like SpankBang & TNAFlix. Based on their release dates, screengrabs, and slipcover art, I totally get it. They appear to be purely, crassly commercial products that conform to the respective industry standards of their times, produced entirely with the intent of arousing a few orgasms and, more importantly, selling a few video tapes. Meanwhile, Sayadian’s original Café Flesh is a bizarre cultural oddity: a hardcore porno that routinely, deliberately makes creative decisions that undermine its commercial, erotic potential. A post-apocalyptic sci-fi parable about a near-future dystopia where most nuclear-fallout survivors can’t stomach sexual contact without wanting to vomit, the film is stubbornly silly, depressing, and gross. Maybe that’s the dividing line between pornographic art and porno schlock: the willingness to undermine any possible titillation to be found in visual depictions of penetrative sex with so much extraneous bullshit that the audience can only walk away wondering, “Who was this for? Why was it made?”

Set in “a world destroyed, a mutant universe” left over after our impending nuclear holocaust, Café Flesh imagines a future society in which 99% of surviving humans become insurmountably nauseated when they attempt to have sexual intercourse. So, a fascistic government agency has been created to force the remaining 1% of sexually viable survivors to perform for the majority population’s entertainment, as a kind of addictive surrogate for sexual release. The titular “café” is a nightclub in which large groups of Sex Negatives gather to watch a small celebrity class of Sex Positives get it on in public, performing on a small stage as if they were singing karaoke. Think it of it as the de-evolution porno, a series of novelty sex acts staged through music video choreo in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where everyone’s horny but (almost) nobody fucks. Stephen Sayadian puts his personal stamp on the material as a name-brand reprobate auteur (under the porn-industry pseudonym Rinse Dream). Here, he develops a lot of the sound-stage surrealism imagery he would later push to ecstatic German Expressionist extremes in his career-high achievement Dr. Caligari, to much sillier results. In the opening sex number, a milkman in a humanoid rat mask fucks a bored housewife while her three overgrown man-babies watch from their high-chair perches in the background, dancing in place to the beat. Then, a giant sports-mascot pencil in a business suit fucks an office worker on his desk while his secretary types notes in rhythm, giving new meaning to the phrase “pencil dick.” Even when these cartoonish exhibitions are replaced with more traditional sex acts, Sayadian continues to undermine all potential for sincere arousal in his audience, such as in a lesbian orgy that is scored with maniacal male laughter and the droning bomb sirens of an oncoming air raid. These theatrical novelty acts are broken up by the recursive reaction shots and petty domestic squabbles of the Sex Negative audience watching from the floor, occasionally interrupted by a Steve Martin-impersonating MC who ads an air of state-sanctioned menace to the proceedings. The only genuine moments of eroticism are found in the taboo of crossing the threshold from observer to participant. When someone officially designated as Sex Negative is found out to be a Sex Positive in hiding and pressured into exhibitionism, the movie allows for genuine erotic tension to hang in the air; everything else is grotesque mockery of Reagan’s America and its inevitable toxic fallout.

While Dr. Caligari is Stephen Sayadian’s greater artistic achievement overall, Café Flesh holds its own cultural significance as the definitive 80s movie. It expresses all of the artistic & sexual neuroses of a generation rattled by Porno Chic, MTV, and nuclear bombing drills through a funhouse mirror reflection of the times. I’ve seen lowlier, crasser versions of this exact 80s-specific porno aesthetic in contemporary titles like New Wave Hookers, but I’ve yet to see it achieved with such an active disinterest in the erotic potential of the depicted sex. Even in making that distinction, I’m attempting to draw a line between the commercially minded pornographic filmmaking of Gregory Dark and the for-their-own-sake poetic indulgences of Stephen Sayadian, once again relying on a “I know it when I see it” system of assigning artistic merit to one version of pornography over another. Sometimes you just have to admit that there’s nothing new or novel left to say about film as a medium that wasn’t already better worded decades before you were born; it’s just that we’re more used to those short-hand critical wisdoms coming from a Roger Ebert or a Pauline Kael, not a judge on the Supreme Court.

-Brandon Ledet

Blonde Ambition (1981)

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I recently picked up a used copy of Linda Williams’s landmark academic text Hard Core at The Book House in Dinky Town, a wonderful Minneapolis bookstore.  Written in response to the anti-porn feminist movements of the 1980s, the cultural context of Hard Core‘s arguments may initially seem outdated, but it’s proven to be an extremely useful read.  In attempting to assess the filmic medium of pornography from a neutral, objective distance, Williams found herself writing one of the first substantial academic works on the subject.  She breaks the genre down to its building-block elements, performing a kind of autopsy on the fresh corpse of porno’s Golden Age, killed by the rise of home video.  One of her methods in attempting to define pornography in academic terms (beyond the famously vague “I know it when I see it” definition coined by the Supreme Court) is finding direct 1:1 comparison with other cinematic genres.  The most obvious go-to for those comparisons is usually the horror film, since they are both genres that intend to stimulate a physiological response in the audience.  Williams goes a step further by citing horror’s “Final Girl” trope, indicating that pornography invites male viewers to identify with its female stars the same way they are when watching slashers.  The genre comparison that really tickled me in Hard Core, though, was pornography’s likeness to the Old Hollywood musical, which I had never considered before.

The generic parallels between the porno and the musical are obvious once you start looking for them.  Williams spends a lot of time cataloging the individual “numbers” that make up a typical porno feature (i.e, the blowjob scene, the masturbation scene, the lesbian scene, the group sex climax, etc.) and likens them to the way musicals stop their plot momentum dead to deliver a full song-and-dance number.  She writes, “It is commonplace for critics and viewers to ridicule narrative genres that seem to be only flimsy excuses for something else—musicals and phonography in particular are often singled out as being really about song and dance or sex.  But as much recent work on the movie musical has demonstrated, the episodic narratives typical of the genre are not simply frivolous pretexts for the display of song and dance; rather, narrative often permits the staging of song and dance spectacles as events themselves within the larger structure afforded by the story line.”  In that paradigm, the spectacle of a blowjob or a threesome is just as worthy of a minutes-long break from narrative as a Fred & Ginger dance routine; they’re the very reason for the film’s existence.  Porno may be similar to horror in its intent to provoke a bodily response in its audience, but in terms of narrative structure it’s much more akin to the movie musical. It’s a variation of musical with all of the usual song-and-dance numbers replaced by suck-and-fuck numbers instead. 

Given this astute observation of the structural similarities between the porno and the musical, it’s incredible that Williams does not cite the 1981 feature Blonde Ambition in her research.  It perfectly illustrates her point.  Blonde Ambition is deliberately structured as an Old Hollywood backstage musical wherein all of the song-and-dance numbers are replaced by sex numbers.  The movie chronicles the sexual exploits of the Kane Sisters (Suzy Mandel & Dory Devon) as they rise up the entertainment industry ranks from Podunk South vaudeville performers to reluctant porn stars to makeshift drag queens to Broadway legends.  They’re characterized with a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes dynamic, wherein the older sister (Mendel) shrewdly negotiates their business deals while the younger, ditsier sister (Devon) constantly cruises for men.  Like in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, there’s even a comedic mix-up involving a wealthy man’s inherited jewels (in this case, a diamond-encrusted broach instead of a diamond-encrusted tiara).  Otherwise, Blonde Ambition reaches even further back into the great Hollywood songbook to follow the example of Busby Berkeley backstage musicals like 42nd Street, finding hokey humor & romance in the lives of off-duty Broadway performers.  Only, the joke is that that the Kane Sisters are not especially talented.  When they receive their first round of applause from a smitten hunk during their dive-bar stage act, they ask “What was that noise?” in total confusion.

Blonde Ambition‘s substitution of song-and-dance numbers for hardcore sex numbers is so direct and so literal that there’s no point in hammering the point home any further.  My favorite example is a shower masturbation scene in which one of the sisters slips into what would normally be a dream ballet in another musical but instead is a kaleidoscopic homage to the gay-male psychedelia of Wakefield Poole’s Bijou.  Directed by and partially starring gay men, Blonde Ambition also shares DNA with the Old Hollywood musical in the conceptual conflict of its heterosexual romance narrative versus its aesthetic appeals to queer sensibilities.  Once the sisters make it to New York, they become overly friendly with a gay couple who live one floor below their apartment (including coercing them into sex with women, of course), and the whole saga climaxes at a dive-bar drag night hosted by one of those men.  In an effort to reclaim possession of the Buckingham Broach, the women sneak into the bar undercover as drag queens, performing for a room full of leather daddies who find themselves disappointed (and comically horrified) by the resulting strip show.  Blonde Ambition was ostensibly made with a straight male audience in mind, but it’s so classically Old Hollywood gay that it includes an “original gowns by” credit in its opening scroll. 

Less surprisingly, it turns out the shared intersection of the Golden Age porno and the Golden Age musical is shameless hack comedy.  Comedically, Blonde Ambition is located much closer to Branson than it is to Broadway, but its punny, campy humor is charming all the same.  Between its cutaways to barnyard animal reaction shots and the costuming of its orgiastic Gone with the Wind parody sequence, the musical it most directly resembles is The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (released just one year later), which has just the right sweetly hokey flavor to counterbalance its old-fashioned sensibilities.  Presumably, the locker room jockstrap number in that musical was also designed for a gay audience’s gaze, despite the totally hetero sex shenanigans in the foreground.  Although Linda Williams does not directly assess Blonde Ambition in her book, she does frequently touch on that dissonance between the presumed sexual orientation of pornography’s target audience and the audience mostly likely to enjoy it.  That topic mostly crops up in the way presumed-straight male consumers view pornography socially and value extraordinarily large male genitalia in their erotica, suggesting their enjoyment of the medium is somewhat inherently bisexual.  In the addendum of my 1999 edition of Hard Core, Williams also references her own participation in that dissonance, explaining that as a straight female viewer, her favorite, most effective category of pornography depicts male-on-male gay sex, something that was presumably not made with her gaze in mind.  Blonde Ambition works much in the same way.  It’s self-categorized as a straight film, but most of its scene-to-scene appeal would be to gay men who enjoy vintage showtunes.  Those men might have preferred to watch actual musical numbers instead of the sex numbers that provide the movie’s narrative-stopping spectacles, but the genre’s dissonance is often its greatest source of fascination & entertainment, especially after decades of distance. 

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Boogie Nights (1997)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic Golden Age of Porno drama Boogie Nights (1997).

00:00 Boomer rants

12:04 Winter Kills (1979)
18:39 Dazed and Confused (1993)
24:12 Mars Express (2024)
30:46 Class Action Park (2020)
36:28 The First Omen (2024)
44:54 Kalki 2898 AD (2024)
49:29 The Bikeriders (2024)
52:39 Pandora’s Mirror (1981)

54:44 Boogie Nights (1997)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Bijou (1972)

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I’ve been trying out a new strategy when purchasing Blu-rays & DVDs lately, and it’s resulted in my modest collection quickly filling up with smut.  Instead of prioritizing tried-and-true personal favorites I know I’ll revisit in the future, I’ve pivoted to blind-buying movies I assume will never be accessible on streaming.  The plan was to finally see some independent, arthouse obscurities that fall through mainstream distribution gaps and, thus, eternally gather dust of my watchlist, but in practice it’s only prompted me to purchase more & more vintage pornography.  I can pretty safely assume that titles like Bat Pussy, SexWorld, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street will never populate on Hulu or Netflix, so I figure the best (legal) chance I have to see them is to own them.  That’s not to say there’s no overlap between high-brow experimental art and vintage porno.  In my casual, sporadic splurges on discounted discs, I’ve found plenty of artsy-fartsy filth to help refine my porno palate, including heavy-hitter titles like Equation to an Unknown, Pink Narcissus, Luminous Procuress, and, most recently, Wakefield Poole’s seminal classic Bijou.  There is a three-way intersection between D.I.Y. independent filmmaking, pretentious arthouse mindfuckery, and prurient perversion in these films that you can’t find anywhere else in cinema, which somehow makes owning them feel like an academic pursuit rather than a masturbatory one.

In that arthouse porno context, Bijou is considered by many connoisseurs to be the best of the best.  There’s a girthy stretch at its warped, misshapen center where I totally understand that claim.  I can’t fully vouch for its most stunning sequence’s lengthy bookends, though, which occasionally tested my patience despite their flagrant obscenity, as if I were watching Apichatpongian slow cinema instead of vintage smut.  The opening sequence is effectively a non-sequitur, featuring our main POV stud (Bill Harrison) leaving his construction site job, witnessing a deadly car accident, and snatching the purse of the woman who was run over.  He shakes off the guilt of that petty theft by masturbating in the shower, attempting to focus on the porno mag centerfolds hanging on his apartment walls instead of the tragedy he got himself needlessly involved in.  It takes 20 languid minutes for our well-endowed construction hunk to give into his obsession with the mysterious woman, following an invitation in her purse to the titular Bijou theatre, when the movie finally comes (and comes and comes and comes) alive.  The Bijou turns out to be less of a secret sex club than it is a phantasmagorical otherworld.  After following a few Alice in Wonderland instructions (signs flashing “Remove shoes” & “Remove clothes” instead of “Eat me” or “Drink me”), our main man finds himself in an endless black void decorated only with smoke, mirrors, tinsel, and nightclub lighting rigs.  His descent into the subliminal bowels of the Bijou is a gorgeous, disorienting display, recalling the funhouse mirror freakout at the climax of Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai.  Then, a 30-minute orgy ensues among the “all-male cast,” gradually overpowering the D.I.Y. psychedelia with the monotony of a nonstop sex scene.

Wakefield Poole directed Bijou the same year that the Golden Age of Porno was supposedly kicked off by the mainstream success of Deep Throat, a film with much less pronounced artistic ambitions, to say the least.  His previous film The Boys in the Sand was a similar cultural landmark, covered like a Real Film by the trades in a way no previous gay porno could have hoped for, despite its weirdly muted legacy as a porno-chic landmark lurking in Deep Throat‘s shadow.  As a follow-up to that early critical success, Bijou seems less interested in mainstream attention than it is in academic pursuits.  The way Poole transforms his tiny NYC apartment into an endless liminal pleasure realm can’t help but recall the arthouse porno sensibilities of James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus, which was filmed on the same kind of D.I.Y. “studio” set (although much less efficiently).  In its best moments, Bijou plays like the scrappier, more brutish kid brother of Narcissus, doubling down on the abstraction & obscenity of Bidgood’s work instead of the sub-Technicolor beauty.  Poole includes self-portrait camera tests and screen-test cast interviews as side-by-side slideshow projections, the kind of visual experimentation that was making waves in that era’s art galleries, not its porno theatres.  The classical soundtrack makes even the orgy sequence play like a perverse parody of Disney’s Fantasia, the closest that studio has ever gotten to genuine pomp & prestige.  In its most transcendent moments, Poole’s version of pornography can only be compared to art film experimentation, more often recalling Kenneth Anger than Gregory Dark (although all three directors likely had major influence on the music video as an artform).  Unlike Pink Narcissus, though, Bijou isn’t entirely comprised of transcendent moments, and it takes a little patience to get to the core down-the-rabbit-hole sequence that makes it such a well-regarded all-timer.

I don’t know that I have the passion nor the stamina to make it as a full-on, well-versed porno sommelier (for that, I will defer to Ask Any Buddy‘s Elizabeth Purchell, longtime Bijou advocate), but I do think it’s a genre I owe more time & attention, so it’s one I’m likely to continue collecting.  Swampflix doesn’t have much of a guiding ethos beyond promoting appreciation for low-budget, high-art genre filmmaking, and there is plenty pornography that deserves to be discussed & exalted in that context, alongside more frequently cited genres like action, sci-fi, and horror.  In that canon, Bijou is clearly a central, definitive text, even if its loopy, unrushed entirety can’t live up to the psychedelic transcendence of its best stretch.

-Brandon Ledet

SexWorld (1978)

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I can only think of two feature-length porno parodies that I watched before catching the original films they “erotically” spoof: 1974’s Flesh Gordon (a parody of the 1930s Flash Gordon sci-fi serials and subsequent 1950s TV show, later adapted again into a fully clothed action-adventure feature in 1980) and now 1978’s SexWorld (a parody of the 1973 sci-fi Western Westworld, later adapted into a semi-clothed prestige series for HBO in the 2010s).  In both cases, I basically got the gist (and the jizz!) of their parodic targets from their loglines and through general cultural osmosis.  Besides, both of those vintage pornos are more interesting for how they reflect the mainstream sexual attitudes of their era than they are for their thin satirical commentary on their respective source texts.  For its part, Flesh Gordon plays like a corny softcore holdover from the Russ Meyer nudie cutie era, shying away from taking full, explicit advantage of the porno chic movement that arose post-Deep Throat.  By contrast, SexWorld is unmistakably porno chic.  The Anthony Spinelli Golden Age porno shares some of Flesh Gordon‘s wink-wink-nudge-nudge cornball humor in its hardcore perversions of the Westworld/Futureworld premise, but its polished production values, abbreviated sex scenes, and vague gestures towards social commentary make it feel deliberately designed as a date-night dare for yuppie couples to giggle through, rather than pandering to the trench coat brigade.  Both films soften hardcore’s harshest edges to make porno publicly palatable for curious-but-cautious mainstream audiences but, of the two, only SexWorld gave those audiences their money’s worth.

As you would likely assume, the titular SexWorld is an isolated luxury resort that simulates “a world devoted entirely to sex,” realizing its horned-up tourist’s “wildest” fantasies though sci-fi convention make-em-ups that are never fully explained in the plot (but are hinted to be a combination of hologram projections & shapeshifting animatronics).  What you might not assume is that SexWorld’s high-end customer base travels to that resort via bus, a detail significant enough that it gets its own shout-out in the titular disco theme song.  The bus itself proudly advertises the SexWorld logo to lookers-on—no brown paper bag covering the label in shame—which was apparently somewhat risky to stage, given that the bus ride montage is mostly composed of a few quick shots repeating in an endless loop.  During that bus trip and subsequent interviews with the SexWorld staff, we get some insightful flashbacks into the dysfunctional sex lives and escapist fantasies of each tourist.  The staff repeatedly remind their guests that the far-out, unexplained SexWorld technology can realize their wildest, most unfathomable fantasy fucks, referencing taboos like incest, BDSM, and water sports that no one takes them up on.  The most transgressive their fantasies get are in exploring interracial taboos (including a bonus mini-parody of Behind the Green Door), but the less said about those particular vignettes the better.  Otherwise, between the budget restraints and the presumed hetero POV of its audience, the actual sex in SexWorld is relatively tame, unless you’re somehow still shocked by mostly straight women indulging in some momentary bisexuality in an otherwise straight porno.

The sex looks great, though, and Spinelli makes the most of the production’s cheap sets with a few well-positioned gel lights and some complicated wallpaper.  There isn’t much to the sci-fi conceit beyond a few SexWorld employees milling around in white lab coats, pushing useless light-up buttons on a switchboard to nowhere, but it’s all in good, hokey fun.  As a cultural artifact, its greatest value is in imagining what hipster city couples were supposed to get out of seeing it publicly projected in its original porno chic context, besides the obvious visual titillation and transgressive thrill.  Most of its characters’ fantasies are presented as quick-fix resolutions for common marital conflicts, to the point where it’s just as much couples’ therapy for straights as it is porno sleaze.  I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the film came with its own pre-loaded discussion topics on index cards for audiences to sort through as they travel from theatre to bed after the credits roll.  Personally, my favorite two characters are the evil shrew wife who desperately wants her husband to be more forceful in bed and the phone sex addict who feels intense shame in her post-nut-clarity every time she enjoys a dirty call – the shrew (Sharon Thorpe) because she reminds me of Mink Stole’s legendary comedic performance in Desperate Living, and the shy phone-sex pervert (Kay Parker) because her pre-cure flashback scene is genuinely hot.  It’s kind of a perfect porno chic movie in that way: a little sexy, a little silly, a little offensive, a little historically insightful, and—most shocking to anyone who grew up watching porn in the video or internet eras—a little considerate in its lighting & composition.  You don’t need to have seen Westworld or Futureworld to understand the appeal of that.

-Brandon Ledet