Escape to Passion

ESCAPE TO PASSION is the lesser of two anarchic 1970 movies made by itinerant auteur James Bryan. More famous for one of the lousier horror movies on everyone's list, ungrammatical DON'T GO IN THE WOODS, Bryan's star is due for unearned redemption, as a no-brainer video company Code Red is poised to foist his work on an unsuspecting public.

The amateurism of PASSION, and flop-sweat intensity of its unbearable leading man Leonard Shoemaker, mask yet another example of a pornographer revealing himself via cinematic Freudian Slips. Here we have a tale of Leo, an overage stock boy working for mean J.J., who lives a life of petty crime while having asinine pipe dreams of "being somebody".

It doesn't take too long to realize that his dumb hopes stand for the equally misguided goals of incompetent director Bryan. Tedious film consists mainly of annoying cross talk between Leo and his stooges Jason (a pimp whose combination of dark glasses and bangs vaguely lampoons Roy Orbison's look, for no apparent reason) and imbecilic yes man Nads (one-note goon Frank Millen), alternating with copious amounts of full-frontal nudity and simulated sex scenes. It's stupid soft porn, with no threat of turning into a real movie.

It's interesting that many of the male cast members later ended up in XXX Rene Bond porn films, albeit in non-sex roles.

Exterior scenes and incompetent "action" footage are staged at the level of a backyard film made by elementary school kids. Even for a no-budget effort, this is slipshod, annoyingly inept filmmaking. Several set-pieces, notably a botched bank robbery and a climactic shootout with the cops, are the sort of garbage termed "satire" as a cop-out -they are so poorly done right down to the exploding tomato-squibs one is supposed to assume it's on purpose.

What got my goat is Bryan's misuse of one of porn's most beautiful leading ladies -not just my own opinion but by consensus. Barbara Mills co-stars as Jason's wife and to her credit maintains a sort of elegance and always-in-character stance, even though she is subjected to a series of ignominies, concluding with endless scenes fully naked covered in Crisco. Bryan's concept of an "orgy" is preposterous even by porn standards: obese J.J., two pretty girls (Mills and the film's makeup lady Signe Marlene doubling as a nude dancer/whore) with Jason as cheerleader.

Bambi Allen and Kathy Hilton also provide pulchritude but the film is a mess. Its only real humor, despite endless failed attempts at slapstick and wordplay, comes with a prescient political current, exemplified when it's stated: "Ever since the Republicans started balancing the budget, money is tight" and other complaining about cuts, as relevant today as 40 years ago.

To show his "I'm an indie filmmaker" chops, Bryan keeps featuring an untalented folk duo, whose songs are performed at a club (with preposterous huge crowd applause when there is no audience), and used as sung-over ballads throughout the action. The height of his pretentiousness is their music used for a stupid back story of Leo's upbringing in Oklahoma, which consists mainly of random still shots of a field, there being no budget to shoot actual scenes.

For further evidence where director Bryan is coming from one needs to watch his notorious THE DIRTIEST GAME. In a world where Tarantino and his ilk are role models, I'm not surprised that this hack may be lameduckedly acquiring a following.

Not very exciting but somehow still watchable tale about Leo, a man who hates his job and turns to crime as a means of achieving the kind of lifestyle he wants. Although he enjoys the simple things in life (he inexplicably pours some unidentified candy into his bottle of RC cola in one scene), he wants more. He is a petty thief who can't get a raise at his job. Fed up, his girlfriend leaves him at the beginning of the movie. He then hooks up with a stripper, and together with a dim-witted buddy they rob a bank. Needless to say, things don't quite go as planned. The climax features a crisco orgy interrupted by a shoot out with the police.

'tis a low budget film with all the expected weaknesses. And very dated. It features some fun, hokey country music. Perhaps the oddest thing is how it shifts gears between a would-be action drama and scenes which feel like they belong in a soft-core porn flick. There's quite a bit of gratuitous full-frontal nudity.

This is typical early 70's softcore sexploitation so, of course, you have a lot of ridiculously gratuitous nude and sex scenes with buxom but not necessarily very attractive skanks--sorry, I mean "actresses"--that slow the plot down to a bare crawl every ten minutes or so. The acting is very bad. The male leads look, respectively, like George Blake and Roy Orbison, but don't have a fraction of the acting or (presumedly) the singing talent. There are lot of strange scenes such as when a female accomplice, for reasons that eluded me, participates in a bank robbery wearing nothing but a scuba-diving helmet (I'd like to see the police sketch of her). There are also a lot of strange shots that look like product placement, but of the kind of products (i.e. RC Cola) that probably wouldn't WANT to be associated with a movie like this.

Nevertheless, this movie has some things going for it. It has some kind of film noir elements to it focusing on this group of marginal and inept criminals trying to pull off a bank heist. "The Killing" might have looked something like this if Stanley Kubrick was a much less competent filmmaker and was making something he could peddle on 42nd Street in the early 1970's. There's plenty to laugh at here, but generally the filmmakers seem to be in on the joke. I actually WOULDN'T recommend it for the sex (unless, of course, you have a fetish for pimply, corpulent early 70's stripper-types who couldn't act their way out of a crisp paper sack). What's good about these movies though is that the filmmakers were often trying, however ineptly, to make real movies (which was not really the case after the advent of hardcore), and because they had a kind of "captive" audience they could sometimes get away with being experimental or different. This isn't "Mantis in Lace" by any means, or even "The Toy Box", but it's better than most.

Escape to Passion (1970)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Leo (Leonard Shoemaker) is a low-life, wannabe hood who doesn't have much going on in his worthless life. His apartment walls are covered with photos of Bogart, Cagney and Robinson as he wishes he could be something more. Soon he falls in with a gang and they plan a heist that will put them on the big time.

ESCAPE TO PASSION was the third film from director James Bryan and it's certainly a letdown from the somewhat notorious THE DIRTIEST GAME. This film here starts off well enough with a catchy opening sequence but outside of this there's very little here to recommend until we get towards the end but more on that in a second. If you've read Stephen Thrower's NIGHTMARE USA then you'll know some of the behind-the-scenes stories but even if you haven't read that book you can look at the film and see the low-budget issues.

There are countless issues that you'd expect from a film with this budget including some choppy cinematography, a pretty bland flow of the story as well as some really lame performances. The biggest issue with this movie is the fact that it just doesn't pack much of a punch and there's no energy to be found anywhere. The film moves extremely slow and the 84-minute running time drags really bad. None of the characters are all that interesting and in the end the film just doesn't have much going for it.

The most entertaining and outrageous scene comes at the end when an obese Coleman Francis (director of THE BEAST FROM YUCCA FLATS) takes his clothes off and two women smear him with Crisco. This scene expands to him covering the women in the grease and another guy joins. What does this scene have to do with the rest of the movie? I'm really not sure but it appears the actors are having a good time with it.