It is very hard to take the work of Carlos Tobalina seriously, since the prolific pornographer consistently aimed at the lowest brow of his Adult Cinema audience. SEXUAL HEIGHTS is a typical example of his sloppy, "sex by the meter" approach, but this one's content raises some serious questions concerning kiddie porn.
A legal loophole permits consumption of material like this unencumbered, whereas the same film could not be shot and distributed today: explicit sex films & videos made pre-1995 are exempt from certain rules. Chief among these is the familiar warning on videos regarding all performers and characters being 18 or older at the time of production.
With the usual dumb inter-titles to suggest social significance, this time about divorce (first one claims Frisco having the most divorced men of any city in the world - undoubtedly a made up claim similar to Tobalina's earlier on-screen admonition in CARNAL HAVEN that over 30% of Americans are Black), HEIGHTS' excuse for a story concerns 4 divorced guys living together who plot to ravage an underage babysitter for fun.
Tawny Pearl, a superstar in the world of porn loops whose feature career was less successful, is the prototypical jail-bait protagonist -here almost raped by employer Herschel Savage early on, but saved by the untimely appearance of his wife, thereby ending his marriage and setting up the divorced guys premise. In current porn, Riley Reid presents a very similar persona, in both gonzo and acting assignments, to the legendary Tawny.
Hearing of this (we see the assault on the couch in flashback), Savage's roomies Jamie Gillis, Michael Morrison and Jesse Adams decide to go after Tawny, with Gillis buying some cheap costumes to set up a dumb burlesque ruse of posing as household in need of babysitter. Savage throws himself into campy mode as a housemaid, even singing "Summertime" at one point, and Adams with dress and wig is allotted the role of the baby's mama. Portly Morrison, as usual, is merely along for the ride as the daddy.
This nonsensical routine, poorly filmed in mainly distant master shots like an amateur attempt at making a TV sitcom, is interspersed with plenty of sex filler, notably guest star John Holmes humping girls like loops star Kitty Shayne on his ugly looking bedroom set as well as Savage putting porn videotapes on his TV for the guys to watch.
Read the other IMDb review by the Belgian XXX expert for the blow by blow details, but suffice it to say that Tobalina pulls out the poor-taste (and subsequently illegal) stops in moving his narrative to one of his inevitable time-killer orgies, in this case involving Pearl, her younger sister (Tawny's sitter role is identified as being 14 years old by Savage so baby sis is pegged at likely 12) pig-tailed short-stuff Lolita Grant, Lysa Thatcher and busty (but young looking) Holly McCall.
Before Savage is ultimately in another tacky bedroom humping a now-willing Pearl on a fourposter en route to porn's equivalent of a happy ending the four little gals have a lesbian orgy on the living room floor joined by the other 3 guys (including a d.p. for anal specialist Thatcher).
Little 4-foot something Lolita even has lesbian incest with her sister (undoubtedly sloppiness rather than by design in this no-script junker) and of course designated bad boy Gillis rapes her, including a pause as she screams when it hurts, merely cuing the standard Jamie porn-talk her way through it. Copout, this time hard to assess in terms of intention because Tobalina's camera-work is so lazy, has the Gillis/Lolita hookup presented soft-core, though her previous lesbian footage was already over the line.
Like its co-feature UNDULATIONS on this two-fer DVD reissue by Vinegar Syndrome (who have evidently pacted to release oodles of Tobalina titles from high-quality negative materials), HEIGHTS trumpets a starring role for Serena, who in fact has only tangential footage in both of them.
The sloppy way Carlos assembles his porn is most evident here by an extraneous scene where Holmes visits Gillis in the 4-man pad and shoots the breeze for a few seconds pointlessly before splitting, inserted in the 90-minute film as a pretend link of main story to the time-wasting Johnny Wadd filler. I'm surprised the low-rent auteur didn't dispense with narrative altogether (a la Mr. MOS, Nick Millard) and just shoot uncut orgies and release them as movies with a minimum of effort and editing - he obviously assumed the audience didn't care what they watched as long as the ladies got naked and humped a lot.
