HONEY BUNS or HEADS or TAILS (both titles seem fake and tacked-on) is an anomaly: a soft-core porn feature that was obviously drastically altered in the frequent '70s fashion by adding many XXX closeup inserts of explicit sex. Resulting version is currently available on DVD from Impulse, and I believe the changes hurt it severely.

Putting the re-editing aside, we have a typical skin flick, not unlike the Uschi Digard vehicle GETTING INTO HEAVEN. It was better than average due to casting many top femme beauties, six in the original version and eight to 10 or 11 (counting insert doubles) in the mutilated one.

Simple-minded story has meek Matt Hewitt in the enviable position of working in an office with Rene Bond, but sexually frustrated. After rear-end tracking images of Uschi Digard who he tails walking to work, Rene catches Hewitt with dirty magazines and makes fun of him.

At this point the movie in available form begins to literally fall apart due to the alterations. Hewitt's mean boss John Barnum calls Rene into his office and we are treated to extreme closeups of him getting a blow-job, under his desk. At this point the film is not suspect so we assume (wrongly I believe) that Bond is in her hardcore assignment mode.

Uschi waiting to be interviewed by Barnum for a job gets extremely angry with Hewitt for no reason, a cryptic and out-of-character scene for the buxom superstar, but then she and Rene are called in for the interview. Bond flashes a beaver shot at Hewitt to rile him up before seeing the boss, so horny Matt pulls a dirty magazine from his drawer and the movie diverges altogether.

Inserted is a very lengthy sequence, which I would date as shot approximately in 1975 (dating the re-edited version) of a three-some featuring Frisco talent John Seeman, Joan Devlon (wearing her signature index-finger jade ring) and a bleached blonde played by Monique Cardin. This talkie loop is stimulating hardcore and lulls the viewer into believing HONEY BUNS is a strictly XXX project, but the scene has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the film and even detracts from its central fantasy premise which has yet to be established.

After viewing the entire 74-minute print I discovered that this added extraneous scene does a lot more than merely satisfying the fans of generic explicit sex footage (who dominate today's porn market, but were not yet in the ascendancy in the early '70s).

The pornographers who authored the "new" edit used this loop to replace entirely the Bond/Digard threesome scene in Barnum's office. All we see is the three of them leaving his office disheveled, and that's the last we see of the film's two marquee stars. As a result, in HONEY BUNS neither Bond nor Digard disrobes (Bond's beaver flash aside, a 1973 equivalent to Sharon Stone's immortal moment in BASIC INSTINCT), and Digard's role in particular is reduced to a cameo. Fans of either star are bound to be disappointed by this drastic decision to jettison good old soft-core content in favor of the trendy XXX (undoubtedly made in order to obtain bookings at the increasing number of adult theaters that had gone strictly hardcore).

Film settles into its one-note fantasy mode after this with a vaguely hippie type Magician (wearing tux jacket and tie, bare chest under his vest and jeans) approaching Hewitt on the street after work to get him hooked on a magic pill that LSD-like will cause his sexual wishes to come to life.

That sets into motion a parade of fabulous '70s porn starlets, all tantalizing Hewitt until a happy ending when he winds up in bed with four of them at once. Getting there is soft porn delight, of which Starlyn Simone pleasuring him in a bathtub is the highlight. However, nearly every sequence is "enhanced" by extreme closeup inserts of a couple of body doubles very poorly matched (to Simone, Sandy Carey, Kathy Hilton and Becky Sharpe) so that we can see explicit fellatio, cunnilingus or intercourse.

The movie's premise that Hewitt is being teased and cannot get off by these appearing/then vanishing beauties is largely dropped in the urge to let his fingers do the walking in vaginas or his hard-on (obviously a male body double) do its thing. So the fans are left to ponder: is the urge to see gynecological closeups of genitals in penetration mode so important that all else in a film be disregarded?

The answer is a resounding No from me - an okay skin flick has had its two leading ladies forcibly removed and the other equally beauteous actresses upstaged by some disembodied body parts. And I am a huge fan of Joan Devlon, but I'd rather see her perform in her own movie than be added to someone else's under false pretenses.

I've seen many similar exercises in movie mutilation, notably quite a few '70s Italian releases where Ornella Muti, Sirpa Lane and Janet Agren were turned briefly into XXX- rated performers via non-matching body/face doubles. The pandering for the almighty lira (or dollar or euro) deserves the harshest criticism.