Most of Carlos Tobalina's porn films are asinine, with insultingly stupid story lines. In this one, made at the tail-end of his prolific but uneventful porno career, erstwhile auteur "Troy Benny" shares the blame with star/scriptwriter Radio Ray Wells -who also fortunately was hanging up handing in his mic after an equally ho-hum XXX career.
To give the devil his due, the film does serve one positive function: because Carlos owned his own means of production (camera and all facilities) he insisted on shooting 35mm film three or four years after everybody else had turned to crappy & cheap video cameras. So "Pulsating Flesh" serves to preserve on film the beauty of several video-era starlets otherwise in our memories via unsatisfactory lighting and pictorial quality of VHS video: Mindy Rae, Tamara Longley, Renee Summers and Bunny Bleu.
Ray stars as Peter, an arrogant creep who boasts on TV that he always gets a woman pregnant when he humps her, even when he pulls out for a money shot (as he does throughout the film). Show in question is the Joanna Carson show, an unfunny Wells the writer reference to the King of Latenight, but unfortunately conjuring up an insult to his recently deceased ex-wife Joanne in the process. Pornographers have no shame.
Typical of a C.T. production, film is haphazardly constructed, opening with a lengthy, unidentified flash-forward of a sex scene from later in the movie -presumably in order to give the fans immediate gratification (or groans) by doling out Harry Reems' top- billed guest appearance as a peeping tom milkman (!) who watches Ray servicing a wealthy sperm customer Mrs. Wilson (Tess Ferre) and two beauties (Bunny Bleu and Tammi Lee Curtis) she's gifted him with. Of course Harry in his cute '50s milkman uniform later joins in for one of Carlos's inevitable boring orgies. Price incidentally for Peter's services is $1,600 -$800 due upfront.
Actual TV broadcast is viewed by two very horny lesbians, and for film structure students, including the IMDb-er who reviews movies from his "folding" theory often cryptically applied, some complexity is generated (perhaps unwittingly, given my low appraisal of Ray's and Carlos's abilities and intentions) by multiple layers of voyeurism: we the hapless viewers at home watching the lesbians watch Peter's porn clips he's dragged to the Joanna Carson show, in which Reems is in turn watching Peter & company have sex.
The sets are all phony and poorly dressed - a fake look even less convincing than Tobalina's studio creations of a decade earlier. Ray's cum shots are suitably copious fountains of liquid a la more recent stars Peter North and Steven St. Croix, but Carlos cannot resist adding a stupid slapstick sound effect when Ray shoots; and he also can't resist showing one of these money shots over from a different angle as inept padding.
As usual, I have to commend DVD distributor Vinegar Syndrome for preserving porn using only the finest materials, but simultaneously condemn them for continuing to revive among the crummiest and most ephemeral (hence least worth preserving) junk imaginable. To don my "old fogie" cap in closing, back in my day 40 or 50 years back poor films were categorized by potential distributors as unreleasable and lived up to that prediction, left unfinished and unclaimed in a lab or otherwise tossed at some point into a dumpster, not released just because they still exist as is the practice (at least with old, "archival" material) today. In the age of the internet and information overload, all manner of gatekeepers are ridiculed (c.f.: The Music Industry's record labels and a&r departments) by a generation unaware of their often useful contribution.
