I like Richard Mailer's work during the hardcore porn era, but this forerunner made during the soft-core porn prelude is nearly devoid of content, wasting a talented and uninhibited cast (most of whom went on to star in XXX assignments). It's yet another time-capsule strip of celluloid, interesting to film archaeologists decades later but of zero value otherwise.

Norman Fields, paired here as he often was with unrelated Suzanne Fields, appears to be lording it over a lavish commune of hippies, in a beautiful glass-walled mansion over looking the Valley. One suspects that then (as now -see most gonzo porn videos' settings, like the work of Jules Jordan) the wages of sin paid for a producer's lavish life style, shown off on screen as backdrop for sex.

THE APHRODISANS suffers from lack of content - nothing happens except the cast speaking inanities and basically participating in an hour-long orgy. It's a game of "spot the familiar face (or body)" with gap-toothed dirty-blonde porn performer Terri Johnson among the easiest to identify, followed by cult favorite Suzanne Fields and then currently prominent again (via reissues) Kathy Hilton and Eve Orlon. Hilton especially simulates sex but everyone stops short of penetration (or money) shots to keep this picture soft-core, though Norman Fields' big dick is shown erect briefly, an uncommon element of the late soft-core period 1969/1970.

Just when I thought it was too late for this frankly boring exercise to accomplish anything other than nude bodies writhing, dancing and dry humping, film segued into thematics concerning our American Dystopia, 1970-style. A hapless delivery guy brings much needed food to the humping mansion denizens, to keep their strength up, and Johnson & Ms. Fields invite him in and work him over sexually.

When the sprawl of sleeping bodies start to wake up next day, a guy from Tennessee lectures the delivery guy about how "lost" all these people are and urges him to flee - film ends with naked cast of porn stars waving at him and yelling "Bye" as the boy gets back in his delivery truck and exits this failed Free Love/Flower Power microcosm.

This presages our society's incredible pendulum swing back to a right-wing/consumerist/Ted Cruz for president version of capitalism 40-50 years after the "everything is everything" '60s change in lifestyle experiment failed. I love the '60s and '70s and the entertainment they produced (my favorite music and movies) - I lived through it and regret what has followed, and this odd, lousy movie inadvertently yet vividly sets forth the reactionary response with its final moments.