City of Sin

Howard Ziehm directed the breakthrough hardcore porn film MONA in 1970, but soon slacked off into rather mediocre efforts like this "Dragnet" parody. But of course his FLESH GORDON, soft-core to be sure, cements his place in porn history.

Perhaps merely a footnote, CITY OF SIN is perhaps the earliest XXX film to spoof popular TV shows, a format which has yielded many thousands of movies & videos since, and currently dominates the Adult industry. But Ziehm & co. use this merely as a gimmick on which to mount typically wall-to-wall mindless sex action of 1-Day-Wonder low quality.

The familiar "Dragnet" theme song introduces our story, as a narrator intones with stats: 7,000,000 people in L.A., 30,000 of them are prostitutes, 1,500,000 are homosexuals and 2,000,000 are deviants. Well at least the movie was educational.

Sgt. Thursday and his partner Smutley are assigned in 1971 to crack down on prostitution in the fair city. With Nixon and Reagan photos adorning their office, they set out on an undercover mission per Thursday's plan "to subject ourselves to this vice and corruption" so they can catch the perpetrators.

Thursday picks up a leggy blonde on the street and she takes him to her apartment. It turns out to be Linda McDowell, one of the premiere stag loop stars (still revered today), and thankfully preserved in feature film doing her stuff here. Ironically, per an IMDb trivia posting, her sex scene in CITY OF SIN was later cannibalized and issued as a stand-alone stag loop. Film's only good gag occurs at the end of her segment, when Thursday, his voice straining in the throes of passion during his money shot, flashes his badge and tells her: "You're busted!". Cue the "Dragnet" theme.

The extreme closeups, often grotesquely so, that Ziehm pioneered in MONA are on display here, and the print used by Alpha Blue Archives for DVD transfer has deteriorated to the extent that these "in your face" shots are no longer cause for arousal but look like something from an abattoir. No matter, the gals employed, notably McDowell and Ziehm's FLESH GORDON star to be Nora Wieternik are quite attractive and hold their own in medium and master shots.

The team is next sent by their buffoonish police chief to a brothel on Sunset Blvd. With comically sped-up slapstick footage, Smutley plants tiny video cameras in all the rooms, cuing the rest of the film resembling a loop carrier. The chief and our intrepid duo watch a tiny TV monitor back in the office, looking at one sex scene after another. Running gag is that the chief is repeatedly horrified at what he sees, but is masturbating as he watches.

The brothel madam is well-played (in a non-sex assignment) by mainstream actress Mady Maguire, part of soft porn history in the title role of the 1970 classic NORMA. The other gals are well-chosen and enthusiastic, though their direct-sound "porn-speak" ad lib dialog is terrible.

A couple of kinky scenes liven up the action. In one, a very young john with a big dick masturbates in his chair, as he orders two hookers to have lesbian sex with a noisy vibrator and then a huge double-dong dildo. Ziehm carefully shows the slow removal of the dildo as they finish to prove to the fans the great lengths to which his performers went in order to stimulate their audience.

Kinkiest scene from the brothel has a submissive guy put into bondage, his hands and ankles tightly tied with twine, as Jane Tsentas/Louise abuses him physically and verbally. She whips him with a riding crop and then, using a strap-on dildo, humps him in very odd fashion by penetrating a bag he's wearing on his crotch, as he sort of impersonates a blow-up love doll. One presumes that girl-on-guy anal sex was a bit too freaky for Ziehm to perpetrate on an Adult Cinema audience, as this is not a gay feature. When the submissive asks her to bring on the broom, she merely uses it to sweep him, not to violate him.

Successfully arresting Maguire and her girls, the boys are rewarded by the chief with an ominous new assignment titled "Operation Gay Bar".

There are many phony acting credits displayed at the end including "John Maxwell", "Victor Toomey", "Liz Randolph" and "Pam Lincoln", but I salute my fellow IMDb-ers for identifying virtually the entire femme cast.

Very entertaining for me was Ziehm's choice of pirated musical score: he plays numerous jazz tracks by Jimmy Smith (with trio) and Wes Montgomery (with big band), each carefully attuned to the mood of a given sex scene, ranging from slow blues to up tempo action. Later in the film, for effect, he switches to psychedelic guitar or atonal jazz as the sex gets kinky.