Slave of Pleasure

SLAVE OF PLEASURE is a good mix of decent mystery story, arousing sex, and some downright sleaze and S&M action. That's a lot to balance in one film - but this one pulls it off well.

Hardcore Private-Dick, Dan McCord, is hired by an adulterating husband whose jealous girlfriend enacted a scheme to get his wife kidnapped and sold to a white-slavery ring. McCord calls in a favor and gets the scoop from an old acquaintance, Lefty - who clues McCord in on a ring involving a woman named Sultana who secures "product" for slave-trader, Henri Picard. Turns out that the crew uses a governmentally produced drug called UT-13 that seems to be a lot like the modern-day equivalent of Ecstasy, and makes victims horny and submissive, to control their "cargo". The story follows McCord on his pursuit of information, and also along parallel lines documents the abuses of his client's wife at the hands (and cock) of Picard. We also see the devious "girlfriend" of McCord's client punished severely for trying to renege on her end of the deal, in some decent and very real looking S&M, whipping, and humiliation action...

SLAVE OF PLEASURE is the strongest of the McCord mysteries that I've seen, as the sex is hot, the girls are hot, and the sleazy sexual torture at the end places this a little more firmly in the "roughie" ranks than the tamer entries. Jamie Gillis plays the soft-spoken but perverse and dominant role perfectly yet again and personally the film works on all levels to me. Not nearly as depraved as FORCED ENTRY or WATER POWER - but an all-around solid entry...8.5/10

Singled out by porn critic extraordinaire as well as fine adult filmmaker in his own right Jim Holliday (who passed away in late 2004) in his essential 1986 tome ONLY THE BEST as the best of Shaun Costello's '70s grinders, this one sees private dick Dan McCord (Roger Caine) hot on the trail of a white slavery ring run out of a Coney Island amusement park, a great location put to maximum use.

Contacted by Richard Anselm (Costello) to locate his missing wife Eileen (Roseanne Farrow, also in Costello's TWO LIVES OF JENNIFER), McCord soon finds himself up to his neck in some of the sleaziest characters the series had to offer. Eileen's best friend and Richard's secret mistress Barbara Benedict (C.J. Laing, the girl in the legendary kitchen pee & anal encounter with Wade Nichols in Radley Metzger's brilliant BARBARA BROADCAST) kept pressing him to tell and leave his spouse, helping matters along by hiring the evil Sultana (black starlet Gloria Todd who had bit parts in ALL ABOUT GLORIA LEONARD and Armand Weston's impressive TAKE OFF) and her horny idiot henchmen (early turns from Herschel Savage and Dave Ruby, the Al Bundy of porno) to kidnap and drug Eileen with U.T. 13, a mind-bending substance developed by the CIA to render enemies of the state helpless. As Barbara's machinations prove fruitless (Richard wants nothing more to do with her and only yearns to have his wife back), she tries to undo what she has wrought only to find that Sultana is but a cog in the wheel spun by international ringleader Henri Picard (Jamie Gillis) who ships housewives to wealthy potentates in the Middle East. Dan's one time informant Lefty Jacobs (Ashley Moore) fills him in on Picard's whereabouts and provides information about the drug by showing him a stag film demonstration featuring Robert Bolla (soon to embark on a parallel career as "Robert Kerman" in Italian zombie movies) and brain-fried Patty Barnett a/k/a frequently name-changing Patty Boyd.

Considering the modest means available, this probably has the best plot/porn ratio of the entire Dan McCord canon. The story, while nonsensical (perhaps proving that Costello maintained a healthy sense of humor about what was in essence a poor man's JOHNNY WADD series), rarely gets in the way of some superbly staged sex scenes. Costello and Farrow get the ball rolling with an extremely erotic encounter, approximated yet not quite matched (adding insult to injury for the neglected mistress) by his motel room tussle with Laing. In the only substantial part of her brief career, Todd chews the scenery with gusto and performs a couple of seriously raunchy three-ways, including a double penetration at film's end. To make good on this film's title, he threw in a nasty comeuppance for Laing's character with the expected use of whips, chains and nipple clamps.