Despite the shilling "plot summary" in IMDb, submitted by some over-the-top fan of this film who was too timid to put his review in the form of a review, this XXX quickie is an off-the-cuff example of assembly line porn. The ultimate fame of its guest star Georgina Spelvin gave it an afterlife, currently reissued on Vol. 51 of Something Weird's Dragon Art Theatre series.
One of the hoariest plots for porn is the "let's make a porn film" hook, but in this case one can imagine the ensemble cast yawning when the director told them what the "story" was about. There are no production values here, just the mere idea of making a film, and the improvised dialog is lame as usual. It's just a case of get-it-over-with-and-on-to-the-next-one.
Darby Lloyd Rains and Cindy West star as roommates (with obvious lesbian tendencies) who wake up one morning & decide to make a porn film in order to pay their rent, due in just a few hours at noon. Auditioning talent, including Spelvin and Marc Stevens alternates with their dalliance with boy friend Jeffrey Hurst.
That's all he wrote, or rather improvised, leaving the viewer with an unintended, and easily inferred, insight into what the pornographers really meant. Fellow NY-based adult filmmaker Shaun Costello made many similar improvised junkers like this, employing Stevens and other familiar local talent, but he came up with goofy and often outré plot lines to divert the viewer. This film, credited to John Christopher but predating his career, is so thin in all respects that true intentions shine through, in the cinematic manner of a Freudian Slip.
Rains gets the porn bug while reading an issue of Variety newspaper, which reports a $2 million gross for "Deep Throat". On-screen we see the natural impulse of "why can't I do that?", as the Damiano hit represents the sort of success with evidently little effort that these less talented filmmakers would like to cash in on. However, there is a big difference between merely underachieving and ZERO effort, with the latter on display here.
The cast is made up of seasoned pros simply going through the motions for a one-day paycheck. Ironically the same impetus to make this film would eventually result in going the logical next step: if anybody can cash in on porn, let's go strictly amateur in front of the cameras, too. That resulted in the no-name filler that dominates recent decades of porn in the Video Era.
Retrospectively, the problem is the nostalgia factor at work - putting this film on a quality pedestal as representative of some "Golden Age" is preposterous -it is a feeble, though vintage, attempt to dress up the all-sex format now prevalent with some uninteresting ad libs. The performers, especially Spelvin and Stevens, go through their paces in professional if blasé fashion, although Hurst seems extremely bored by the whole thing. Fans of Rains have so many interesting performances of hers to choose from that this phoned-in turn adds little or nothing to her canon.
The photography is poor, format of cross-cutting back & forth between two ongoing sex scenes dull, and getting things going with West in the bathroom urinating in closeup is hardly a sign of quality filmmaking. The Spelvin d.p. scene, meant to be novel and something special for the fans, is clumsily staged and mere evidence of a "no retakes" policy for such a quickie.
I saw this film theatrically back in the day when it was shamelessly reissued as "Inside Georgina Spelvin" in a typically insulting effort to cash in not only on her subsequent (and well-earned) fame but to ride the coat-tails of the then lucrative confessional style of porn film (so well handled by Joe Sarno). It remains four decades later a sow's ear, no amount of romanticizing can elevate.
