A Gay Man Watches Straight Smut #6*: ‘The Passions of Carol’

The original poster for The Passions of
Carol not only features some questionable 
illustrations (how are we seeing a full rear
 view of that woman’s ass in what’s otherwise 
a side-view pose?), it has absolutely 
nothing to do with the actual movie. 

I meant to post this before Christmas, but then time got away from me, and then I got sick. So, like the protagonist in 1975’s THE PASSIONS OF CAROL, I’m hoping people will see the value of keeping the spirit of Christmas alive all year long, or at least keeping the holidays hardcore until December 31.

Set in New York City when it was at its grimiest (looking even grimier in the Video-X-Pix version streaming on adult sites), our story begins in the offices of Biva Publications, which produces Biva Magazine, a skin mag for women a la Playgirl (or Minx). But editor-in-chief Carol Scrooge (Mary Stuart, the Shelley Duvall of 1970s porn, billed as Merrie Holiday) is not happy with the layout her art director Bob Hatchet (Jamie Gillis) presents her on Christmas Eve, which she’s deemed “impotent.” None the men pictured for the year-end issue are hard.

“Today’s woman will not accept a limp dick in her bedroom, will she?” she rants. “And she will not accept a limp dick on a singles’ weekend, will she? Then she certainly won’t accept a bunch of limp dicks in her favorite magazine.”

She demands Hatchet re-do the layout, insisting the cocks pictured had better be “as big and hard as the Washington Monument,” not caring that its Christmas Eve. She even says “bah humbug,” albeit in a way that makes it clear that some expressions just shouldn’t be uttered by Americans.

A flattering angle of a pre-Predator,
 pre-Libertarian politician Sonny Landham 

After sending away her miserable art director, Carol interviews a prospective model Curt Reynolds (Sonny Landham, who went on to appear in legit movies like 48 Hrs. and Predator). Curt is something of an Elvis impersonator—well, Elvis-ish (I was going to write Elvish, but then I’d have the Lord of the Rings geeks on my ass, and no one wants that). Really, though, he looks more like a young Tommy Lee Jones portraying Elvis than the King himself, which was a relief as I was afraid Jamie Gillis was going to be as cute as the men got in this movie (though learning some of Landham’s extreme political opinions makes him retroactively less attractive). Carol is impressed when Curt peels off his skintight white pants, but she’s not quite sold. She summons her secretary Gina (Daniela di Orici, a.k.a. Day Jason), who happily fluffs the prospective model, because this office doesn’t have an HR department, and #MeToo is still decades away.

Carol (Mary Stuart) is a busy woman.

“You do understand, Mr. Reynolds, that even though my assistant is touching and caressing your penis, that this is only business,” Carol reminds him, before she and Gina take turns getting him as big and hard as the Washington Monument, their oral attention sound-tracked to the theme from The Exorcist.

Carol yells at her sloppy maid.

One would think this afternoon three-way in the office would put Carol in a better mood, but she returns to her apartment as bitchy as ever. She yells at her poofy-haired maid (Angela Dermer, a.k.a. Toni Scott, who struggles saying the simplest lines) for leaving her “cleaning apparatus strewn all about,” then denies the maid’s request to get off work early so she and her boyfriend can catch a Christmas show. With the maid sent back to work, Carol Scrooge gets ready for bed.

We know what happens next. Carol is visited during the night by the ghost of her former business partner, Lance Marley (Marc Stevens, hamming it up just the right amount, though he loses his place in his lines a few times). He tells her she will be visited by three spirits and then, after complaining that “there’s nobody who gives good blow jobs in heaven,” he pleads with Carol for one last worldly fuck. Next, we see Marley going down on Carol in startling close-up (it’s practically a jump scare) while a spritely Muzak rendition of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” plays on the soundtrack. 

Marc Stevens gives Carol 10-and-a-half inches of Christmas spirit.

Child’s play.

The three spirits arrive shortly after Marley cums and goes. The Ghost of Christmas Past (Arturo Millhouse) takes Carol back to her childhood, when she manipulated her friends Barbie (Susan Sloan, billed as Rose Cranston) and Billy (Alan Marlow, billed as Alan Barow) into playing some very adult games (“OK, Barbie, I want you to kneel down and make Billy’s pee-pee hard”). Even though all the performers are adults, the fact that they’re dressed as and acting as children makes it a little cringe when Barbie starts blowing Billy, especially in a time when we hear the word “pedophile” in the news every fucking day. 

Then there’s the art on the playroom wall. Were
Carol’s parents ever investigated?

Still, Barbie using a doll’s arm as a dildo on Carol was a unique twist, especially funny when all you see is a tiny hand sticking out of Carol’s cooch. Pussy wave bye-bye!

Kevin André makes the Yuletide gay.

The next sequence features some of the best performances in the movie, starting with Kevin André as a drag queen Ghost of Christmas Present.

 “This reminds me of the baths,” the GCP sighs wistfully as they’re engulfed in fog (this is yet another porn movie that liberally uses a smoke machine).

“The Continental Baths?” Carol asks.

“My, my, we are tacky. I mean the original baths, at the original Caesar’s palace.”

The GCP shows Carol the scene inside Bob Hatchet’s apartment, where he and his wife (Kim Pope) are wrapping presents for their unseen daughter, Tiny Kim, whose existence is represented by a pair of crutches leaning against a chair. Besides being among the few members of the cast who do not use an a.k.a. (If you’ve got a non du porn, stick with it, goddammit), they are also among the few with genuine acting talent—a good thing, too, as they’re supposed to be a committed, loving couple, a rarity in this genre.

A committed, loving couple who fuuuucks.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Pope, and while Gillis wasn’t exactly hot (few of the men in ’70s straight porn were), he was one of porn’s best actors. I just wish I hadn’t learned about his proclivities later in life (they nasty). Knowing he went on to hire hookers for some very smelly fetish videos made it difficult to accept him in the role of a loving husband and father.

Becoming editor of Vogue is not 
in Carol Scrooge's future.

Speaking of hiring hookers, when the Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come (Cum?) appears, Carol is shown a future where she’s a Times Square prostitute, a development that made me want some backstory Wouldn’t she be more likely to fail upward? At the very least, land a copy editor job at Screw? Her going from editor-in-chief to ’ho just seems a little far-fetched, but I dunno, maybe got into meth or something.

Anyway, Future Whore Carol, wearing a big yellow clown wig and harsh makeup, takes a john (Ashley Moore, billed as Stuart Dickerson) up to a depressing cheap hotel room. Moore, who looks like Marlboro model from the neck up and a furry pear from the neck down, is appropriately shy (he’s never hired a hooker before, he has a wife and kids, blah blah blah), but Future Whore Carol has no patience for his bashfulness and hurries him into getting his clothes off. First order of business: washing his privates, which she does with all the eroticism of a nurse prepping a patient for surgery. This was way more verisimilitude than I expect from a porn film, as was the moment when Carol, after giving a very noisy BJ, unrolls an ill-fitting condom on her trick’s stick before mounting him. The scene is not sexy at all, but that’s the joke (I’m sure guys jerked off to it back in the day, though). Carol does all the work while her trick lies back, moaning listlessly, as if he can feel anything with a Glad Sandwich Bag wrapped around his dick. The scene ends with Carol informing her trick that he’s a rotten fuck.

A rotten fuck is all it takes for Carol Scrooge to embrace
the spirit of Christmas.

Not as Campy as Expected

The Passions of Carol may be spoofing the Charles Dickens story, but I wouldn’t describe it as a porn parody. Writer-director-and-Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come Shaun Costello (best known for Waterpower), using the pseudonym Amanda Barton, never lets the movie get that crude or that stupid. In its own porny way, it’s actually kind of respectful of Dickens. Still, I wish there was more effort made to camp it up. Imagine the fun the Amero brothers could have had with this material.  

Video-X-Pix's DVD (left) and Mélusine's Blu-ray covers 
are better than the original poster, but neither is exactly sexy.

The production values are impressive for a porn movie, with Costello using a lot of theatrical tricks to sell the spirits’ visits, hiding the cracks with the liberal use of a smoke machine. The above average acting of the cast helps, too, with André, Landham, Pope and, of course, Gillis giving the strongest performances. Stuart is OK, but her performance is inconsistent. In real life, she was reportedly pretty sweet, and I can believe that, more than I could believe her as a hard-ass editor. As Carol Scrooge, she’s just not bitchy enough (the role would be a better fit for Gloria Leonard or Georgina Spelvin). Her performances as Future Whore Carol is spot on, though.

An unpaid advertisement: Though The Passions of Carol is available for streaming on
adult sites, Mésuline’s Blu-ray edition is the more watchable version,

All in all, The Passions of Carol was fun alternative to a Hallmark or Lifetime holiday movie, though I think I’d rather see the cast members of those movies naked. My Christmas would be a whole lot merrier if Chad Michael Murray or Luke Macfarlane agreed to go full-frontal, is all I’m saying. Until that Christmas wish comes true, I guess some Dickensian straight smut will suffice.

“You are a tacky bitch.” 

*The minor rebranding is an attempt to get the Blogger morality bots off my ass. It didn't work, the post still got flagged.

Reading Roundup: Sin in the Suburbs More Fun Than Small Town Secrets

The cover for the 1962 paperback
 edition of John D. MacDonald’s
Soft Touch suggests it’s a novel about
 a vacation fling gone wrong. Regardless,
I wish the eBay seller I bought this
from had chosen a different spot for
their barcode.

As important as the setting can be to a story, I often encounter authors (and sometimes filmmakers) who treat it as inconsequential. This is especially true of books about the sexploits of the beautiful people, which usually do little more than mention the city where the characters reside/travel to (Los Angeles, New York, Paris) and a few chic locations (Rodeo Drive, Le Cirque, Maxim’s) before focusing on excessive cocaine use, backstabbing and fucking. Of course, there are other authors who go too far in the other direction and use up a lot of ink with florid descriptions of every vista observed, every street traveled, every room entered, every zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

But most authors get it just right, careful to evoke their story’s setting without writing about it to distraction. Not surprisingly, one of those authors is John D. MacDonald, whose 1958 thriller SOFT TOUCH provides a snapshot of suburban depravity, where bored couples fill their empty existences with liberal amounts of alcohol and casual flings. For Jerry, suburbia is a stifling prison, made unendurable by his wife Lorraine, described as “unhappy, shallow, lazy, short-tempered, cruel and amoral.” Lorraine spends most of her time partying with the neighbors, only coming home to sleep it off or pregame for the next night. Jerry wants to divorce her and hook up with Liz, the attractive secretary at E.J. Malton Construction Company where he works. Except, the construction company is owned by his father-in-law. If only he had the capital to start his own company, he could make a clean break and start over with Liz.

Enter his old war buddy, Vince Biskay, who now works as a pilot doing odd jobs for a South American dictator. Vince has come to Jerry with a scheme to intercept a suitcase filled with the dictator’s cash in Miami before it’s handed over to an arms dealer. Jerry is resistant at first but is ultimately swayed when assured he’ll be little more than a getaway driver.

Things don’t go as planned, and they get worse as Jerry’s increasing greed and paranoia clouds his thinking. The ever-reliable MacDonald ramps up the tension as Jerry tries to stay one step ahead of real and imagined threats, convinced he’s pulling it off despite his near-misses and total fuckups, which includes a fight with Lorraine that ends very badly and a tryst with one of the neighborhood’s bored, horny housewives who steps naked out of the bedroom at the worst possible moment.

Soft Touch is a lean, fast-paced thriller that proves once again that MacDonald was a master of the genre. I’ll also recommend the 1961 movie adaptation, Man-Trap. Though Ed Waters’ screenplay takes a lot of liberties with the book’s story, giving it a much happier ending, the movie is largely worth watching for Stella Stevens’ enjoyably nasty performance as Lorraine (re-named Nina in the movie for some reason).

The model’s expression on this 1975
paperback edition of The World They Wanted
is less “Come hither,” and more “What
 the hell do you want?”

Sticking with another tried-and-true author, I selected something from the Herbert Kastle bibliography, THE WORLD THEY WANTED, in which suburban malaise moves to center stage.

Though the cover of the Mayflower Books edition I have makes the novel appear to be about bed-hopping in the 1970s, the novel was originally published in 1962, when women weren’t expected to have ambitions beyond becoming a housewife, when $17K a year was a decent income, and when a three-bedroom split level could be purchased for $20,000. And $20 grand is what it costs to buy such a home in Birch Hills, a development that’s the brainchild of builder Matt Swain, who hopes there are New York City residents willing to make the move to a more bucolic setting.

Plenty are. Among the first to buy homes in Birch Hills are the Rands, who hope that their juvenile delinquent son George will start flying right once he’s moved away from the bad influences of the city. Joe Bialdi, who has been struggling with mental illness much of his adult life, thinks owning a home in Birch Hills will give him plenty of projects to occupy his troubled mind. Only the Lerners make the move to the ’burbs for typical reasons—more space for the kids—though Miriam Lerner wishes her husband Dave would consider some place closer to NYC, a place that is known to have a Jewish community. Dave, who wants only to assimilate into WASP circles, is drawn to Birch Hills precisely because it affords him an opportunity to deny his Jewish identity.

Of course, the move doesn’t mean their problems stay behind in the city. George Rand finds different ways to rebel, mainly by boning the Bialdis’ overweight daughter, Josie, who has decided the best way to attract boys’ attention is to put out (well, she’s not wrong). Meanwhile, his parents’ marriage begins to fall apart. Steve Rand becomes an alcoholic, and his wife Nancy reveals herself to be a judgmental, antisemitic bitch who hates sex. Is it any wonder that Steve cheats on her?

The move also threatens the Lerners’ marriage. Dave, a commercial artist, is experiencing a career slump and takes his frustrations out on his wife—violently at one point. Miriam, who’s seen how Matt Swain looks at her, contemplates having an affair. Joe Bialdi, on the other hand, seems to get what he wants out of the move, but mowing the lawn and chopping wood can’t keep his inner demons at bay when he discovers George is “taking advantage of” Josie.

It's tempting to label The World They Wanted as a soap opera and, well, it basically is, but it’s more John Updike than Grace Metalious. It has plenty of lurid parts, but they are written to make a point rather than titillate—and much less explicit than similar scenes in Kastle’s later books. Kastle certainly has the talent to pull off a more ambitious novel, and he almost does it with The World They Wanted. Unfortunately, it’s brought down with a wrap-around narrative concerning Matt Swain and his sales director Adeline Teel. I found myself way more invested in Matt’s business challenges than whether he’d finally come to his senses and marry Adeline (or whether “Addy” would finally come to hers and move on). Worse, Kastle gives the book a corny ending that’s so Hollywood romance you can practically hear the swelling orchestra as you read the final paragraphs.

Avon at least got its cover right for its
1982 paperback edition of
Family Reunion.

Still, I’ll take an OK Herbert Kastle novel over a dud suspense novel, which is what I got when I picked up 1982’s FAMILY REUNION by Joyce Harrington, an author primarily known for writing short stories.

Ten years have passed since Jenny Holland left behind her mother and the small town she grew up in for New York City. Though she hasn’t once visited during her decade away, she has kept in touch with letters to her mentally unstable mother, who never replies, and her cousin Wendell, who writes frequently, never mind that Jenny rejected his wedding proposal before lighting out for NYC. (As for that whole cousins thing: Our cousinship was far enough removed to make this union not only feasible but appropriate.) Recently (roughly 1979 or ’80) Wendell has been writing to Jenny about a planned family reunion at River House, her late grandmother’s estate that has been vacant since her passing. Jenny, who has some unanswered questions about her late father as well as hoping to make amends with her mother, decides the reunion is as good a time to visit as any, and books a flight.

Returning to her hometown raises more questions than answers. An antique straight razor frequently disappears, only to reappear in different parts of River House. The door to the house’s cupola has rusted hinges but a shiny new padlock that is sometimes locked, sometimes not. Jenny returns to her room to find her new clothes cut to ribbons. A heavy dresser in an upstairs children’s room is mysteriously overturned while all adults are on the ground floor. Jenny hears ghostly voices calling to her from across the nearby river. The face of an old hag appears in a kitchen window, disappearing just as suddenly. Are these events supernatural, or part of a sinister real-world plot? Also, what really happened to Jenny’s father?

These mysterious goings-on and past secrets might have yielded an intriguing Midwest gothic (assuming Jenny’s hometown is a fictional stand-in for Harrington’s hometown of Marietta, Ohio), if only Harrington hadn’t written the suspense out of her story at almost every turn. The characterization of Jenny, our narrator, is uneven to the point of being annoying. She is at once quirky and independent, passive and needy, depending on what the story needs her to be. There are a few passages that imply she’s possibly unwell, such as when, seemingly possessed, she contemplates slicing her wrist with that straight razor. One could argue that revelations later in the book would explain some of her behavior, such as her becoming more unsure of herself once in the presence of her family, but Harrington never quite makes that connection.

But Jenny isn’t the only problem character. There is Wendell’s sister Fearn (probably pronounced Fern, but that extraneous “a” had me wanting to pronounce it Fee-urn), who is mildly bitchy at best, a total cunt at worst, and she’s usually at her worst. When she’s not berating Jenny like a high school bully she’s yelling at her children whenever they move, being downright abusive to her daughter Millie. However, there are moments when she’s suddenly nice to Jenny, which immediately struck me as suspicious. These moments come to nothing, though, and Fearn resumes being her usual unpleasant self. Another thought was Fearn was being set up as cannon fodder and I eagerly awaited the moment she was killed by whatever/whoever is terrorizing this family reunion, or at the very least, that someone would beat the shit out of her. Instead, Fearn remains unharmed for the entire book, with no one, not even Jenny, bothering to call her out on her shitty attitude.

Most of the other characters in Jenny’s family are written as either judgmental biddies or close-minded yokels, suspicious of Jenny and her big city ways. The few exceptions are Aunt Tillie, a sharp-tongued retired schoolteacher, and another conveniently distant cousin, David, a hot, motorcycle riding hippie who lives in Tucson with his young son Malachi. David becomes Jenny’s closest ally and eventual love interest, Harrington having a thing about keeping romance within the family.

To Harrington’s credit, she does effectively capture the setting of River House and its nearby town, though her description of the unnamed town’s named neighborhood of Muley is cringeworthy: It wasn’t quite the town ghetto, but a few [B]lacks lived there. Oof! Too bad Harrington seemed more concerned with writing about Jenny’s hometown like a high school outcast with an axe to grind than crafting an entertaining gothic thriller. Had it been kept to 200 pages, Family Reunion could have been a tight tale of suspense. Instead, it’s a long-winded and tedious 304 pages, not really kicking into gear until its final 75. Like most family reunions, this one’s best avoided.

What if ‘Hellraiser’ was Gay(er) and DTF?

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