Saturday, May 30, 2020

A Gay Man Watches Straight Porn #2: ‘A Place Beyond Shame’

Vinegar Syndrome's DVD of A Place Beyond Shame
I watched a crappy VHS rip online
(#cheapassqueen), but Vinegar
Syndrome has a pristine DVD available.
I knew the next straight porn film I watched would have to feature Seka, but which one? There were a lot of contenders: Blonde Fire appealed to my love of noir, even if Johnny Wadd wasn’t exactly Philip Marlowe (more of a draw was the trifecta of three porn legends, Seka, John Holmes and director Bob Chinn), and Ultra Flesh, with its vaginal laser beams, looked fun. Prisoner of Paradise—also with Holmes and co-directed by Chinn—was another strong contender. But, at the end of the day, I went with 1980’s A PLACE BEYOND SHAME because of the title. I love the title, which would be perfect for a lurid novel about backwoods debauchery or an early Russ Meyer drive-in movie.

 A Place Beyond Shame likely wasn’t going to be a hardcore take on RM’s Mudhoney, of course, but by this point I was so enamored by the title that I felt compelled to watch it, even if its story was considerably less ambitious than I wanted it to be.

Said story is slight indeed. Seka (or “Seka,” as the star is cast as “herself”) has an acute lack of sex drive—you know, just like Seka. Sex repulses her, in fact. When her suitor in the opening scene, Paul (Don Fernando), makes advances, she tries to put him off. “I’ve got hors d’oeuvres warming in the oven,” she says, trying to escape his embrace. “You’re the tastiest hors d’oeuvres I see,” is Paul’s leering reply. (Three people are credited with writing the script.) Seka tolerates Paul’s roving hands, but she can’t hide her revulsion when he guides her hand to his dick—not that Paul notices. “I’m gonna fuck you,” he pants. Not tonight, he isn’t. Seka angrily pushes him away.

“I said I CAIN’T!” Seka shouts, exposing her Virginia origins. (When I was 14—the time I first learned of Seka’s existence—I thought Seka was Swedish because she was a frequent star of all those Swedish Erotica movies that I saw advertised in various skin mags, not realizing Swedish Erotica was an American brand name. I also thought her name was pronounced See-ka.)

Who can fuck with a boom mic looming overhead?
The following morning Seka calls her friend Diana (Lori Blue), wanting to talk. Diana says she’ll be over in an hour, allowing enough time for the man sitting beside her chair, idly jerking off, to go down on her. “There’s always time for breakfast,” Diana drawls. After her morning sexing, Diana gets dressed in her tightest disco finery (1980 was really just 1979: The Sequel, after all) and visits her frustrated friend.

It turns out Diana had problem similar to Seka’s (“Not a heavy one. I just couldn’t come.”) and she knows a guy who can help. That guy is Michael, played by Paul Thomas. During Seka’s first meeting with him we learn that she’s a computer programmer (I feel cheated that we’re denied scenes of her at work, busily coding). “And you’re here to be reprogrammed,” Michael says. (Three screenwriters, ladies and gentlemen.) He tells Seka that he can help her complete her “book of thoughts.” Translation: he’s a hypnotist. Now if only someone can help Michael get rid of that boom dangling just above his head.

A screen capture from the 1980 adult film A Place Beyond Shame.
Paul Thomas with special guest star: the boom mic.
While hypnotized, Seka doesn’t relive past experiences but rather, achieves a sort of clairvoyance, seeing events for which she was never present, such as her ex (Ken Scudder) on his honeymoon with another woman, and her mother (Veri Knotty, who made me feel retroactively vindicated by also pronouncing Seka “See-ka”) in a three-way with Mike Horner and Blair Harris.

There is also an extended sequence during which a hypnotized Seka “sees” Jesse Adams as a cowboy getting it on with cowgirl Lysa Thatcher; Diana Holt getting her cooch crushed by Cossack cosplayer Aaron Stuart; and some obligatory girl-on-girl action between Mai Lin and China Leigh, who are later joined, all of a sudden, by Billy Dee. Intercut between these different sex scenes is footage of a Seka, uncontrollably turned-on, stripping off her clothes, turning her butt to the camera and digitally exploring her lower orifices.

TL;DR: A Rant About Scene Length, Unimaginative Filming

This montage of four different sex scenes makes up nearly a quarter of the movie’s 75-minute runtime, which is damn near epic compared to all the movie’s other sex scenes that usually clock in at four minutes. Yes, four minutes! That’s barely enough time to work up a hard-on. Lest you feel cheated, the brevity of the sex scenes is offset by the sheer number of them: a whopping nine, counting that 23-minute montage as one and not counting Seka and Fernando’s abortive attempt at the movie’s opening. Of course, 23 minutes seems stingy by current porn standards, when a single scene can be over 30 minutes long, with at least 20 spent on pounding ass (or pussy, though my experience with current straight porn is limited to my hasty perusal of what’s available on aebn.com). They’re not scenes anymore; they’re gifs. Personally, I find 10-15 minutes per hardcore sex scene a happy medium: long enough to perform a variety of sex acts, but short enough to keep the scene from becoming boring and repetitive.

Speaking of boring and repetitive sex scenes, the aforementioned montage highlights directors Sharon Mitchell and the late Fred Lincoln’s lack of inventiveness in filming them, the pair favoring the alternation between close-ups of faces and close-ups of genitalia. At one point I lost track, as can happen when you check your phone, and couldn’t be sure if the out-of-context cock and pussy on my screen belonged to Adams and Thatcher or Holt and Stuart (Lin, Leigh and Dee were a bit more distinguishable). Sure, the draw of these movies is that they show non-simulated sex, but we want to appreciate the rest of the performers’ bodies, too. I certainly wanted more coverage of a few of the guys—namely Blair Harris, Jesse Adams and Aaron Stuart—but even the women are often little more than disembodied vaginas.

And Now, Back to Our Feature Presentation

The therapist, Michael, having shown remarkable restraint while his patient masturbated a few feet away from where he sat, finally gives Seka the necessary hot meat injection to push her Beyond Shame (a surprisingly underwhelming scene). A cumshot later, Seka is all horned up and ready go out into the world and fuck, starting with a jogger (R.J. Reynolds) she and Diana pick up in the park. (When the jogger responds to Diana’s proposition with, “I’m game!”, I thought he said, “I’m gay!”, which I thought would’ve been a funny twist.*) Seka may be horny, but she’s still apprehensive, having to be coached by Diana when handling the jogger’s member: “Wanna try to suck it? C’mon, it won’t bite you.”

The finale sees Seka having a do-over date with Paul, the newly confident “computer programmer” ordering the young man to get out of his clothes and promising to give him the ride of his life. Once said ride is completed, Seka turns to the camera and says, “Look out world, here I come”—and it’s obvious by her seductive tone how “come” should be spelled.

Seka and Don Fernando in 'A Place Beyond Shame.'
Look out world!

Sharon, Fred and Seka

Book cover for 'The Other Hollywood' by Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne
A Place Beyond Shame was an early effort for co-directors Lincoln and Mitchell, both better known in 1980 for working in front of the camera (this was Mitchell’s directorial debut). In the 2005 book The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry, by Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne, Mitchell recounts how she got the money together to make some movies and brought in Lincoln to help her. According to Lincoln, the original plan was to re-shoot a movie Mitchell had started with Vanessa Del Rio (the rushes sucked so the project was scrapped), but none of the original players were available. They had heard about Seka, who was shooting loops at the time, and booked her as the new lead. “[Seka] was very nice, very cool, and I just liked the way she liked to fuck,” Mitchell is quoted in The Other Hollywood. She later adds: “A Place Beyond Shame was Seka’s first movie. I probably made about $35,000 off of it.”

Front cover of the autobiography Inside Seka
In her interview with the Rialto Report, Seka says Dracula Sucks was her first feature (IMDb lists Love Notes as her first movie but that just may be the first of her movies to be released). In fact, there are a lot of contradictions in the recollections in The Other Hollywood and what Seka herself told the Rialto Report (she wasn’t interviewed by The Other Hollywood authors). Mitchell says she was the one who coached Seka on losing her “horrible Southern accent” and pornographer Roy Karch says it was the late porn star Bill Margold who came up with the name Seka. In her Rialto Report interview, Seka says she took voice and elocution lessons to lose her accent before she ever got into porn and that she got the name Seka from a woman she knew in Las Vegas. Was I to read Seka’s autobiography, Inside Seka, I’m sure I’d encounter even more contradictions, but my to-be-read pile is pretty daunting as it is. Considering that everyone involved is recounting events from decades ago and all have consumed more than their fair share of drugs during that time, it’s best to just take everyone’s account with a grain of salt (or, in the spirit of the Golden Age of Porn, a line of coke).

So, how about the final product? Lincoln and Mitchell did a respectable job (we’ll forgive those boom mic intrusions and sometimes murky lighting, though these aren't issues in the Vinegar Syndrome DVD release), but I didn’t enjoy it as a film as I did Every Inch a Lady. It’s just something to jerk-off to, the work of performers looking for a Plan B, not aspiring filmmakers looking for a creative outlet. (Lincoln directed nearly 350 porn videos before his death in 2013, so the move to directing clearly worked out for him.)  The only thing that makes Shame distinctive is its leading lady. “I’ve never been an actor,” Seka told the Rialto Report, and she’s not—she’s a star, and she’s about the only reason to see Shame. I still love the title, though.

*R.J. Reynolds was bi, with a few gay porn titles— Jockstrap, Joe Gage’s Closed Set—in his filmography. He died in 1987 from an AIDS-related illness at the age of 32. Now I’ve made you sad.

Sunday, May 17, 2020

Bulges, Bitches and Bad Wigs

Posters for a selection of male stripper movies and TV show

Strip clubs generally don’t do it for me—I find it difficult to objectify someone I’m interacting with—but movies about male strippers are another story. Besides eliminating that pesky direct interaction, movies about male strippers are, with a few notable exceptions, enjoyably ridiculous.

When women strip in movies, they’re often presented as victims or sluts (again, there are notable exceptions). But if a man takes his clothes off for an audience of women—and they’re always women in mainstream movies — he gets a wink and a nudge. Dude, you must be up to your tits in pussy, amiright?

Christopher Atkins in A Night iin Heaven
Christopher Atkins shows off his talent.
Rick, an exotic dancer by night and junior college student by day, has easy access to pussy in 1983’s A NIGHT IN HEAVEN. He’s got a girlfriend, sexy redhead Slick (Sandra Beall, whose acting style is best described as Kristen Stewart with wired jaws), but she’s cool with him bedding other women, like the dimwitted blonde neighbor in his trailer park, where he lives with his mother. But when his professor, Faye, whose class he’s failing, shows up at one of his performances—at a club called Heaven, of course—Rick makes it his mission to give her a (hard pounding) F.

Rick is played by early ’80s heartthrob Christopher Atkins, who was sort of like ’70s heartthrob Shaun Cassidy, only with a third of the talent and a 100% more likely to take his clothes off. Being naked with Brooke Shields (and her body double) in The Blue Lagoon put Atkins on the map. He kept his clothes on for musical comedy The Pirate Movie in 1982, though he did sport a skimpy diaper during the song “Pumpin’ Blowin’”(there might be a god, after all…). That Atkins was cast as a stripper was inevitable, though his stripper costume is surprisingly modest, a pair of silver lamé shorts rather than the high-waisted thongs—dad thongs?—of his fellow dancers. Viewers need not give up hope: Atkins goes full Monty later in the movie, when he finally beds his professor, Faye.

Faye is played by Lesley Ann Warren, who is kind of like an insecure Susan Sarandon. Though Heaven is Atkins’ vehicle, and there is potential to develop Rick’s story into one about the struggles of working-class America, this movie primarily belongs to Warren because sometimes it’s best to just accept that you’re dealing with a Playgirl fantasy and nothing more. Faye is all high collars and hand wringing, married to a NASA engineer (Robert Logan), who rides a recumbent bike and who sulks when she doesn’t take a day off from her job at the college so they can mess around (the selfish bitch!). Faye’s dragged to a strip club by her visiting sister, Patsy (a feisty Deborah Rush), and because college boys in silver lamé shorts trump recumbent bikes, her libido is suddenly kicked into high gear. Faye’s timing is off, though. Her husband loses his job and his sex drive just when Faye wants to put some lovin’ on him. Suddenly Rick’s flirtations become harder to ignore, but is he really smitten or is she just another notch in his belt?

A Night in Heaven
bombed in theaters, though its soundtrack, featuring Bryan Adams’ hit “Heaven” (Adams’ connection might be problematic now), gained some traction in pop culture. Unsurprisingly, the movie has a gay cult following. Enjoyably dumb and we get to see Christopher Atkins’ cock? How could we resist?

Even dumber is JUST CAN’T GET ENOUGH, a 2002 made-for-Here! TV movie about the rise of Chippendales in the early 1980s and its co-founder Somen Banerjee’s hiring of a hit man to kill choreographer Nick De Noia. The movie is quick to disabuse anyone of the notion that they are about to see a serious account with a title card that reads: What you are about to see pretty much happened. Although most of the names have been changed for legal reasons, we did use a few names of real people who, as a result of their untimely deaths (details to follow), can no longer sue.

But if you’re expecting to see a satirical take on a true crime story, à la To Die For or Bernie, guess again. Just Can’t Get Enough was written and directed by Dave Payne, and Dave Payne, whose credits include Alien Terminator, is no Gus Van Sant or Richard Linklater. What you get is the equivalent of Showgirls with the production values of Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of ‘Dif’rent Strokes’, made slightly less awesome by the fact that Just Can’t Get Enough is self-aware. There is a lot of intentional, if poorly executed, comedy in Just Can’t Get Enough, like when a dancer lands in jail after whipping off his thong (the movie’s one shot of peen) and dry humping a female vice cop, but I also suspect the makers of this movie were hoping to hide this movie’s shittiness under the comedy label. Nice try, but no.

Kevin Dailey in a scene from Just Can't Get Enough
Hilarious.
I’ll give the movie this: the actors cast as Chippendales men do have some pretty hot bodies, especially Jonathan Aube as Chad, the club’s “innocent” host, who I found much more appealing than Christopher Atkins’ in A Night in Heaven. Whatever lustful feelings their bodies inspire is immediately undone by some horrendous wigs, however. A pre-Six Feet Under J.P. Pitoc, as the club’s cokehead emcee Clayton, appears to be wearing Lorraine Bracco’s hair from Goodfellas. At least Aube’s fake mustache isn’t too obvious.

J.P. Pitoc in Just Can't Get Enough and Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas have same hairstyle
Who wore it best?
A bit more disturbing than the wigs is the racism. Almost every character in this movie is an airhead, but you can subtract 20 extra I.Q. points if that character is a person of color. Banerjee wasn’t an easy guy to love, and he clearly made some questionable decisions, but this movie portrays him as a fucking moron. That actor Shelley Malil was evidently directed to really Apu the fuck out of the role doesn’t help matters. Worse is the Mexican hit man hired to off De Noia. It could be argued that his stupidity is attributable to his heroin addiction, not his nationality, but that’s a weak argument, considering the actor playing him, Alejandro Patiño, plays him like a white actor doing brown face. There is one lone black dancer in this movie’s Chippendales crew, but he’s nothing more than an extra. Considering how other people of color are treated in this movie, I’d say that actor dodged a bullet.

Peter Nevargic as Nick De Noia in the movie Just Can't Get Enough
Grrrl!
Most of the acting in the movie ranges from barely passable to offensive, but Peter Nevargic as Nick De Noia deserves a special shout out, not for being especially skilled but for best embodying the campiness that the filmmakers claim they’re going for. Wearing over-sized aviator glasses and a Members Only jacket, Nevargic minces into every scene, teeth bared, ready to bite into every line. And when he bites, he bites down hard. Other than being called a faggot by a disgruntled dancer, De Noia’s sexuality is never remarked upon, but Nevargic makes it clear the choreographer is a vicious queen. He’s not on screen nearly enough.

Not all male stripper movies are stupid, as Magic Mike recently proved (not so its pointless sequel, Magic Mike XXL). And some male stripper movies are actually TV shows, like TOY BOY, a Spanish-made series currently streaming on Netflix. I was drawn to its male stripper-seeks-justice storyline, envisioning thong-clad men beating the shit out of people, something I’d hoped Jean Claude Van Damme might have treated us to in the ’90s. Alas, Toy Boy doesn’t give us something so glorious, though it’s still very much worth watching. Hugo (Jesús Mosquera) is a stripper framed for a murder he’s sure he didn’t commit (he was drugged at an orgy; how that flaming corpse ended up on his sailboat is a mystery to him), and once released from prison he seeks to clear his name by finding the real killer. Though he gets in plenty of dangerous situations, Hugo’s quest, aided by his lawyer Triana (Maria Pedraza), is more methodical than violent. The story that unfolds, involving rival wealthy families, corrupt policemen, rape, pedophilia, illicit affairs and doomed loves, is more Prime Time soap than crime thriller, and that’s OK. More than OK, in fact.

Though Mosquera and his exotic dancing brethren are easy on the eyes, it’s the women who make Toy Boy interesting. Macarena Medina (Cristina Castaño, stealing almost every scene she’s in), Hugo’s sugar mama until he was sent to prison for murdering her husband, is the show’s vixen character, a bit more dangerous than Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington but not quite as vicious as Game of Thrones’ Cersei Lannister. Just as ruthless is Benigna (Adelfa Calvo, also excellent), matriarch of the wealthy Rojas family. Benigna presents herself as a kindly grandmother, content to just tend to her tomato garden while her son-in-law manages the family fortune, but she’s a ball-breaker of a bitch behind the scenes. She’s a live action embodiment of Mom in Futurama.

Carlo Costanzia as Jairo.
There’s also a gay romance between one of the dancers, Jairo (Carlo Costanzia, whose got a Kit Harington sad-eyed-puppy thing going on), a mute, and Macarena’s blue-haired son Andrea (Juanjo Almeida), a basket case. The show is very matter of fact in its treatment of homosexuality. None of Jairo’s co-workers seem to care that he’s gay, only expressing concern that he’s turning tricks to supplement his income (never mind that Germán, the sole Black stripper, regularly services older women for cash), and Macarena is more concerned about her son’s mental health than his homosexuality. Jairo and Andrea’s relationship doesn’t really progress beyond the hand-holding stage, though this can be attributed to Andrea being a fucking mess. Most of same-sex action shown in Toy Boy occurs during drug-fueled orgies, as if gay sex is nothing more than a kink to be indulged once the molly kicks in.

It’s in the prurient interest department that Toy Boy disappoints. Sex scenes, straight and gay, are few and relatively tame, and the series is surprisingly stingy with the nudity. In scenes showcasing the dancers in action, of which there is at least one per episode, the men don’t even strip down to thongs but Speedos and boxcuts. You’d see more man ass in a season of American Horror Story, and don’t even think about seeing any dick.

You’ll see some dick in the 2018 documentary THIS ONE’S FOR THE LADIES — if you watch the NC-17 version, that is. What I saw streaming on Hulu was rated R and the exposed, erect cocks were all blurred out. In the words of one of the women interviewed, “Why’re you running? It’s just penis.” Fortunately, like Toy Boy, This One’s for the Ladies has more to offer than just bare flesh.*

Director Gene Graham focuses his camera the male exotic dance circuit in Newark, New Jersey. What sets Graham’s documentary apart from other docs about male dancers is he’s focusing on Black dancers (according to IMDb, Graham made this movie in response to the lack of diversity in the Magic Mike films). Though the temporary venues aren’t much, the shows are flamboyant, rowdy and plenty raunchy, making Magic Mike look like a church Christmas pageant. (Channing Tatum never sported a sequined cock sock on his stiff member or ate a cupcake off a woman’s ass.) “Y’all ready to see some sexy motherfuckers?” emcee Sweet Tee asks the crowd. Hell, yeah!

Among those sexy motherfuckers are Young Rider, who learned showmanship from a drag performing uncle; Fever, a hardcore Superman fan whose energetic performances make him a fan favorite; Satan, whose ripped body makes a church-going woman shudder with dirty thoughts (“…[H]e got up on stage, took his piece out, and I’ve just been in love with him ever since,” she gushes); and, my favorites, the brothers Raw Dog and Tygar, who were encouraged to dance after taking their shirts off at a house party. Only Tygar was interested initially: “Raw Dawg told me from the rip, ‘It’s gay and I don’t want nothing to do with it.’” As so often happens, money helped change Raw Dog’s mind.

One of Raw Dawg and Tygar’s promotional photos. Raw Dawg
had no worries about appearing incestuous, either.
There’s even a female dancer in the mix, Blaze. She a lesbian, but what’s interesting about her story is that she is able to find a place in the roster of male dancers, and that she has fans in an audience of straight women. “When Blaze is here I’m gay that one night,” says one fan, who goes by the handle Poundcake. I’m pretty sure audiences at  Penthouse Executive Club, say, would not be as accepting if a male dancer were introduced into the mix.

There’s a side of social commentary that creeps into this documentary, though it’s never explicitly addressed. The dancers and their fans live working class lives, and expectations are calibrated accordingly. One dance event, benefiting an autism organization, nets less than $300, which is nothing to sneeze at but still seems low. Yet the organizer deems the event a success. More positively is the strange sense of community that shown among the dancers and fans—strange only because it arises from doing Jell-O shots and watching men swing their dicks around. I can certainly think of worse causes for communities to coalesce.

*That said, when I watch a movie about strippers, I expect to see everything, goddammit.