Anne's Ordeal

Available in two versions, ANNE'S ORDEAL (or MAN AT THE DOOR, as is titled what seems to be the original cut) is a fairly desultory early storefront roughie no matter how you slice it. I'll begin by describing the MAN version...

Minimalist set-up finds Anne (Sandy Carey) getting a call from her roommate Jill (Sunny Boyd / Eve Orlon) saying she's staying late at the office (you can guess doing what!). Left alone in the house, Anne is surprised by Howard Alexander knocking at the door. After first claiming he has a date with Jill, Howard takes Anne hostage and ties her to a chair. Certainly the film's most interesting / fetishistic scene, this plays out like something between an Athena (Terry Sullivan's SF fetish company) and Avon production, as Howard threatens Anne at knifepoint, then makes her pee all over the chair after she asks to use the restroom. Finally untying her, he forces her to masturbate on the couch after she reveals she's a virgin, then drags her into the bedroom to render that moot.

Noise at the door announces third roommate Leslie (Becky Sharpe). Barely a minute into her conversation with Howard, Leslie proclaims she's harbored feelings for Anne and would love to have her way with her too - some pal! Things proceed apace, with the three getting into various configurations, before Jill comes home to join the party. Can Anne manage to grab her attacker's weapon and find her way to freedom? (Well, this has to end somehow...)

Aside from the roughie segment, there's little to write home about in this cut, with prosaic, early one-day-wonder cinematography, stiff improvised dialogue, and a total lack of narrative momentum. ANNE'S ORDEAL, which I originally assumed to be a projectionist's personal hack job on a single print but actually appears to be a professional (the term being relative) alternate edit, grafts on a slightly more complicated story by turning the bulk of the narrative into a flashback. Carey has been brought back and is now dating well below her station in the form of portly Kris Flanagan. After the two experience the usual porn problem of frigidity issues (after Flanagan finds a knife under the bend and pulls it on poor Sandy!), Flanagan brings Carey to a quack psychiatrist who hypnotizes her, cueing an abridged flashback version of MAN. Why someone felt the need to rebuild this from the ground up (maybe it was to include a greater variety of sex scenes?) is a mystery, but all of the good stuff (i.e. The chair scene) seems to still be there, with more of the lollygagging shorn away (albeit replaced by similarly turgid filler). Either way, you're not signing up for much. For now the film's main point of interest remains the story behind its two radically different iterations.