The Group

John Holmes stars and narrates THE GROUP, no - not a remake of the '60s ultimate chick flick that starred Candice Bergen and friends, but an amateurish junker that plays like an hour- long loop.

Trying to knit the desultory footage together is an establishing scene of Holmes on a massage table, where he memorably receives an endless blow job in tight closeup but is otherwise filmed from such a distance as to be unrecognizable. If the model giving him fellatio were the slightest bit attractive this might have been worthwhile.

Motor mouth Johnny keeps babbling in voice-over (this is mainly an MOS shoot) about his experimenting with two women, then three, then attending orgies. When he comments how boring even orgies have become, the viewer is likely to agree based on the terrible one presented here.

A crummy set with throw rug on the floor is re-dressed several times to host different scenes, but the orgy itself is shot from such a distant camera that one assumes the brain-dead filmmakers are trying to out-do Andy Warhol (or maybe Michael Snow) in purist lack of technique. Live sound dialog is suddenly used, but it's unintelligible with everyone yapping at once, and the camera so distant that helpful lip movements are imperceptible.

Previously Holmes has been serviced by 3 girls at once, one of them ultra-buxom and fat enough to look pregnant. Finale has Holmes suddenly becoming a porn director (he warned us of this in the voice-over) and stripping as he watches his performers humping away on that same rug. He gets so excited as a voyeur that he pulls silly reaction faces in a vain effort at humor. John finally gets exasperated and yells cut -walking off the set for one last unfunny sight gag.

Yet another example of a movie back in the day whose prime usefulness was to act as a chaser: so bad that when it came up a second (or third for hardy souls) time in the continuous grind-house projection cycle, patrons would head for the exit to avoid sitting through it again, thus reducing the number of people using a theater as an all-day (and all-night) flophouse.