Country Doc

Like so many '70s films largely hidden away from sight till recently (they did their brief grind-house duty and were promptly tossed aside), COUNTRY DOC remains cloaked in mystery. Given its obscurity and lack of a hook to interest film archaeologists I suspect we'll never find out what happened between concept and realization of this particular beastie.

What we have is obvious to any serious porn fan or student (or both): a soft-core sex comedy spiced up by addition of numerous XXX tight close-ups of intercourse or fellatio. Whenever a movie has such explicit close-ups completely detached from full-body shots or even master shots by which you could actually identify the participants, you automatically know you're watching a pasted-together mish-mash.

Dirty-joke premise is workable, though stretched out a might thin at 79 minutes running time. Title role is played by an elderly actor who gives a fine performance but is unfortunately unidentified (and because he's not from the porn world, has no eagle-eyed following to match the face with credits). He has a horse and buggy taking him to a motley lineup of female patients who he ogles but he's too old to give them the sexual attention they crave.

Enter Patrick Wright, the talented, burly action film actor who's worked for everyone from Russ Meyer to Ted Mikels, but for whom lightning never struck the way it did for similarly situated Charles Napier, who did make the big time eventually. Wright is great at both physical and verbal comedy, as he's taken under Doc Adams's wing to hump the patients.

Wright's wife Tallie pops up as a nurse back home in the doc's office, playing sexual hide and seek with the genre's inevitable hanger-on Buck Flower, hammy as ever alternating straight lines and punch lines in his moronic banter with Tallie.

Cleverest (but decidedly low-brow, all the better) vignette has Doc pretending to service a horny French patient Laverne (played by Brenda Fogarty, often seen in popular '70s drive-in movies). He gives her special eye drops, so that she's blinded when Wright substitutes for him in bed with her, but doc (lurking nearby) keeps up the verbal patter -sort of porn's answer to Cyrano de Bergerac. She gets the last laugh in a genuinely amusing sex sequence. Unlike 1-day wonder porn, film has a catchy musical score emphasizing banjo and harmonica, with a country version of Can- Can music playing during Laverne's scene.

Also in the cast is Maria Arnold, one of hardcore's first real stars, and her presence plus the Wrights matches up with their magnum opus work together in 1976 for the should-be- legendary Patty Hearst ripoff TANYA.

Many such scenes suggest the anonymous filmmakers (director has phony name "Corry Phelps") studied at the knee of Bethel Buckalew, the prolific auteur whose soft-core country- fried movies (all shot in the L.A. area, however) for Box office International were wonderful drive-in fare that I sat through umpteen times during the '70s.

There is a knowing hand here, as when the film very briefly turns serious after Doc Adams rescues a young woman who's been abused for years by a terrible mother, and she runs off bruised and naked - Patrick shouts "Holy damn, a streaker!", lightening up the mood considerably. Film is bookended by a scene of a hoe-down (and go-down sex orgy) in a barn with lots of extras. Picture's tag line for the doc is: "Take 2 aspirins and come again". Its "The End" title is written on bandages pasted to Buck Flower's bare butt.

The actual hardcore content by various stunt cocks, vaginas and female mouths is very poorly matched to the live action (pardon my terminology, but I don't know how to put it otherwise). At one point, even the femme double's fingernails (chewed down to the bone it looks like) don't match the actress handling the principal photography. It's not quite Bob Guccione messing with Tinto Brass's work on CALIGULA, but the process and intent is the same.