Re-editing and re-jiggering soft-core porn films to create hardcore porn films is an unsung art, and natural follow-up to the common '60s practice of spicing up movies with skin-flick insert shots. THE VELVET EDGE is one of the more interesting examples of this frowned-upon (by critics and purists) genre.
I had seen the core movie THE BANG BANG GANG, and it is a fully-realized film in its own right. But by the mid-1970s the market, (other than the sort of backward Ohio drive-ins I used to frequent) for soft-core trash had waned. So the fictitious "Eddy DeWitt" took the equally fictitious "Van Guylder's" action comedy as a spine around which to build a diverting if hard-to-digest mishmash, using the magic of flashbacks and telling tales to merge the old with the new.
Mike Ranger is the hero of the new footage, a big-cock stud who's organized an orgy party at his home. Pic opens with a hot scene of him banging wife Jennifer West on a water bed, followed by them making out (soft-core style) in the shower. An imaginative credits sequence set at Paradise Cove has the credit cards posted as signs on the highway as we drive along.
At the orgy attended by the likes of Turk Lyon, Ranger tells all assembled stories about his Mexican grandpa Chico and his exploits and deadly fate in the 1920s: roll the archive footage liberally lifted from BANG BANG GANG.
Simple format has orgy XXX scenes coming to their money shots conclusions, after which party-goers insist that Ranger continue his tall tale, so we get to see most of the BANG BANG plot unspool in spurts. The filmmaking challenge here comes not in marrying the two, a process common to scores of unsturdily assembled loop carriers, but rather to the spice added to the "flashbacks".
Several blow jobs for the inserts are well-shot but the faces of the women don't match those of the BANG BANG actresses. Silliest moment comes from the "big-deal" violent scene where Chico (played by the very familiar soft porn hero Edward Blessington) drops his pants to reveal via 6-years-later insert a huge curved cock a la Tony Perez, with which to ravage the hapless heroine in some more insert close-ups. I wonder if Ed ever got to see VELVET EDGE and discover the flattering body doubling, a practice we movie fans ordinarily associate with actresses, most famously Jennifer Beals and Julia Roberts in recent history.
For the new scenes, there are some interesting tricks - such as Ranger bringing out La Machine to liven up the party - a mechanical pumping dildo of the type occasionally used in XXX movies or videos, as well as an elaborate anal sex deflowering of one of the women by Turk Lyon. Since Lyon is usually a dumb dolt with a dick in Frisco-lensed porno movies, I was amused by him waxing philosophical from time to time here, always pontificating in a sexist fashion.
