The Wayward Mistress

THE WAYWARD MISTRESS is a case of porn-makers with delusions of adequacy. This pretentious junker is a boring time-killer, but fortunately is paired with an excellent & arousing co-feature SEX SPA in the After Hours Cinema edition, featuring overlapping casts.

The anonymous director of WAYWARD MISTRESS starts off emulating the masters of indie filmmaking, Warhol and Cassavetes in the opening sex scene of Suzanne Fields as Cindy having a nasty verbal battle with boyfriend Ric Lutze after having sex. They've been together 6 months, but she claims he won't listen to what she has to say, and splits -aiming to sort out her life.

The direct-sound dialog between the two is ad lib and extremely poor acting, excruciating to watch as both performers just keep repeating themselves, screaming. For a quality confrontation scene in XXX cinema I recommend Tina Russell in THE DEBAUCHERS, a movie that actually uses this Cassavetes technique to good dramatic effect.

What happens after Cindy goes to stay with her friend Barbara, a hooker, is poorly edited and haphazardly photographed sex scenes with any semblance of plot discarded. Keith Erickson has sex with his g.f., who is one of Ric's ex girl friends, but that is merely a pointless link established when he calls her up. The unidentified actress is a similar type to Fields, just poor casting, not of any significance.

Meanwhile Ric is consoling him via sex with a blonde ex-girl friend, also unidentified and a very poor performer: she has big boobs but is unconvincing, merely closing her eyes throughout the dull scene.

Fields is being taught the art of prostitution by Barbara (another unidentified actress) and it is strictly mechanical. A nerdy young guy named Neil comes over to shoot photographs (his character seems to be left over from nudie-cuties a decade earlier), and pays $30 to snap shots of Barb and Cindy having lesbian sex. He joins in, and suddenly leaves in an extremely clumsy bit of editing/zero continuity -insultingly slipshod cinema.

Two guys visit Barb & Cindy in another ludicrous scene where one of them suddenly leaves before things get too hot & heavy, exclaiming: "Can't do it, I'm thinking about my wife". If blurted out statements were the stuff of drama, WAYWARD MISTRESS might be a contender.

Apres sex the blonde declares she wants to move in with Ric permanently. As soon as he adjusts to this surprise revelation Cindy returns to make up with him, catches the duo in bed and cries. Finale has Ric very nastily screaming at Cindy and throwing her out for good, followed by a cynical final shot also meant to be insulting to the viewer.

The co-feature SEX SPA stars Andy Bellamy, Keith Erickson, Suzanne Fields, Ric Lutze and Annette Michael. It's one of the better porn quickies I've seen recently and is a must-see for Bellamy fans, giving the petite beauty one of her very best showcases.

It looks to be of 1971 vintage, as Bellamy resembles her look in Bob Chinn's JOHNNY WADD film made that year. She's a client at Erickson's health spa where he scams customers with a sex regimen to lose weight. He services Bellamy while his nurse Fields takes care of Lutze.

Film is cleverly structured so that half-way through their sex scene Erickson has Bellamy watch Fields in action to see how it's done, and then a reel later they resume with a classic blow job plus between-the-breasts sex scene executed by Bellamy, resulting in a massive, slo-mo money shot from Erickson. It's worth the price of admission.

Rest of the film is an orgy involving the big-breast queen Michael, and that's the entirety of SEX SPA. Simple but consistently arousing porn running 65 minutes.

Main drawback to this double feature is After Hours Cinema's typical adulteration of the soundtracks, based on their fear of litigation concerning pirated music. So the Muzak from the original films is dropped in favor of the same old Nick Millard "bleating sax" jazz track from one of his AHC reissues. SEX SPA also features the hypnotic theme music from Millard's best movie, ROXANNA, seeming out of place arbitrarily applied here.

Contradicting this practice, After Hours issued in 2007 a Sandy Dempsey film SEXXXERCISE (not listed at all in IMDb) with original soundtrack intact, noting on both the notes (written by illiterate jerk "42nd St. Pete") and back of DVD box its "so-so crappy music tracks". In fact, over 30 minutes of pirated classic Miles Davis performances (including Wayne Shorter's "Footprints") from his mid-'60s Columbia LPs are intact on that DVD, marketed under the title "Deviate Sex Thrills" (which these geniuses manage to misspell as "Diviate" on screen). Obviously, "Pete" and the head honchos at After Hours listen to Miles Davis in a blindfold test and think they're hearing Muzak, not worth removing to prevent lawsuits.