Use Whichever Hand You Like

I’ve been so busy at work and bogged down in the never-ending nightmare of getting work done on our house (as I write this the interior of our home is draped in plastic sheeting, like we’re aspiring serial killers) that I almost let May slip by without posting anything. And I still might (I write slow), but I want to at least try to post something new before June.

So, let’s watch some classic gay porn!

Director Jack Deveau’s 1972 debut LEFT-HANDED, co-directed by Jaap Penraat (no, not the World War II resistance fighter) not only gets singled out as one of the first scripted gay porn films with an original musical score, but it’s lauded as much for its artfulness as it is for its eroticism. While I appreciate all those things, what drew me to the movie was its star, Ray Frank. The moment I saw Ray Frank’s photo on the cover of the Bijou Video DVD of Left-Handed—his hair damp from the shower, his body like a Greek sculpture if Greek sculptors were into man-sized penises, and wearing an expression that lets it be known that he’s just been fucked and ready to be fucked again—was the moment I knew I had to see this movie despite some initial reservations, which we’ll get to later.

No doubt his crotch would be censored if he
wore these pants on American television in 2023. 

When we meet Ray, he’s walking down a New York City street, wearing a Canadian tuxedo like it’s fetish wear. I swear his pants have been specially tailored to accentuate his crotch and ass. Ray covers a lot of ground in his post-credits walk, so it’s understandable he’d have to stop at a men’s room to drain the lizard at some point. While he takes a leak, we get a sampling of the graffiti adorning the walls, from jokey (“Please don’t throw toothpicks in the toilet—crabs pole vault”) to the usual offers of blow jobs with numbers for interested parties to call. Other people are advertising more specific needs: “I want to meat [sic] a young boy with a huge cock to fuck my ass and eat my cock who I can beat with a big wip [sic] and cat of nine tail [sic] and make bleed and cry and come in my mouth as I shoot off in my wife’s mouth.” (So, does he mean boy as in “young man” or as in “icky and illegal”? And is his wife just sitting around waiting until her husband is ready to nut? Maybe she could enter this harrowing scene as a cruel school mistress, taking that cat o’ nine tails to her husband every time he misspells a word, which will most definitely leave him bleeding and crying.)

Elton-Carvey is ready for another round!

The graffiti that piques Ray’s interest is a drawing of a large dick pointing at the last stall, with the accompanying plea to “lick my hot cock.” He opens the stall door to discover a bespectacled dude idly beating off, just waiting for someone to follow the dick drawing to his toilet stall lair. This might be more inviting if the man in the stall didn’t look like a cross between a young Dana Carvey and a young, de-glammed Elton John, neither of whom inspire instant lust. But Ray is clearly not focused on this tearoom queen’s face—the camera certainly isn’t—when he joins him in the stall and, as instructed by the graffiti outside, licks his hot cock, as well as sucks it.

Meanwhile, Woodstock-based drug dealer Bob (Robert Rikas), goes into the city to make a delivery. His client is Larry (Larry Burns), who owns an antiques store in NYC and sells pot on the side, or, more likely, the antiques store is just a front for his drug dealing as Larry seems to have zero interest in his antiques business.

This is Larry, hard at work.

It turns out that Larry’s antiques store is also Ray’s ultimate destination. He’s hoping to find a good deal on a Queen Anne tea table. OK, I’m kidding, he’s there to score some weed. Ray arrives at the shop about the time Larry and Bob are concluding their deal, and it’s lust at first sight. (One of the sights Ray sees is Bob lifting his sweater to stick his payment into the waist of his jeans, because sticking the money in his pocket like a normal person would deny Ray—and the viewer—a glimpse of Bob’s rippling abs.) Larry tells Bob to say hello to his girl for him. “What a waste,” Larry laments once Bob’s out the door. “That’s one we’ll never get.”

“Maybe you can’t get him. I bet I could,” replies Ray.

All this thirst for Bob might seem a bit mystifying if your only frame of reference is his unflattering photo on the cover of the Bijou DVD, on which he looks like Crispin Glover as an anthropomorphic steam shovel. However, Ray is more appealing in the movie proper, resembling a young Viggo Mortensen. Also, he’s got a rockin’ bod.

There’s no escaping straight people,
 even in gay porn.

Perhaps to hammer home the challenge Ray faces in seducing the hunky dealer, we get a scene of heterosexual humping (not an uncommon occurrence in ’70s gay porn; Navy Blue and Passing Strangers, to name but a couple, also feature scenes of hetero fucking). I’m sure there will be queer viewers who will find this sequence unnecessary/repellant—the same ones who let out a horrified shriek whenever a woman doffs her top at Pride—but the camera is primarily focused on Bob’s body, which, again, is quite nice. His girlfriend (played by Cindy West) could just as easily have been a Fleshlight with a wig glued on top. At the end of the scene, as Bob’s unnamed girlfriend sucks him off, she suddenly declares in a voice over that “you’re all a bunch of bastards” because... he came in her mouth, maybe? It’s never explained.

We then join Ray back at his loft, where he strips down to a pair of fishnet briefs, lies back on his bed and rubs one out fantasizing about Larry, never mind that fantasizing about Bob makes more narrative sense. It’s still a hot scene, the fantasy action shot in black and white while Ray’s stroke session is captured in glorious, grainy color. Robert Alvarez, Left-Handed’s editor who co-founded Hand-in-Hand Films with his partner Deveau, said in an interview on the Bijou Blog that this sequence was meant to be a reverse of The Wizard of Oz. “I really loved the idea of creating a piece, a sex scene that had some rhythm to it and some sense of movies, of real movies, you know?” says Alavarez.

Ray enjoys some personal time.

Bob suddenly accepts the fluidity of human
sexuality.

Later—the next day, next week, next year, who knows—Ray and Bob meet up and head back to Ray’s place to smoke a couple joints (in stars-and-stripes rolling papers, no less). As the evening wears on Bob’s straightness begins to wear down. Next thing we know, the staunchly hetero Bob is tentatively reaching for Ray’s crotch, because no one is that straight. Ray drowsily rolls into Bob’s arms for a kiss. The camera then backs up into a wide shot to capture them naked and making slow, sensual love. They later hop in the shower for an energetic fuck.

This no one night stand but the beginning of an affair, with Ray spending weekends up at Bob’s place in Woodstock. Seems awkward, given that Bob lives with his girlfriend, but she seems content to just hang around the house, smoking cigarettes and staring pensively into the distance while Bob and Ray go off to the barn for a quick B.J., or to make out by a creek. Though we never get to see a direct confrontation between Bob and his girlfriend, we can tell by her body language that she’s not happy. Later, Ray tells Larry that Bob’s GF won’t be around much longer. She’s definitely not around when Ray spends another weekend with Bob, the two men doing ’shrooms before doing each other. Deveau and Penraat earn points for not resorting to the usual camera tricks used to portray onscreen drug trips—fly vision, fisheye lenses, kaleidoscope effects—but they still manage to find a filter that robs the scene of its erotic impact by making the action look like an animated Rorschach test.

Hot?

Alas, the high can’t last forever, with the beginning of the end signaled by Ray telling Larry that he’s ready for a change. Ray then makes the tragic decision to shave his beard.

Noooooo!

Becoming Al Pacino.

Ray Frank is an attractive guy with or without facial hair, but personally speaking, I found him 35% sexier with a beard. Ray’s decision to shave coincides with Larry’s invitation to attend a little orgy that he’s hosting, starting promptly at 8 p.m. This orgy also presents another argument against Ray shaving his beard: most of the orgy attendees are also dark-haired, clean-shaven men with slight, muscular builds (diversity is not one of the movie’s selling points), so Ray gets lost in the pile. Larry, another bearded dude, and a guy who kind of resembles Barry Gibb if you squint, end up being the only distinctive performers. This makes the final minutes of the film, when Bob—invited to show up at eleven, after all loads have been spilled—appears at the door and discovers his boyfriend is a cheating bastard, a lot less impactful since Ray blends in with the crowd.

 Or maybe Bob’s just sad that Ray shaved his beard.

It should also be mentioned that this final orgy scene includes a fisting sequence, something I could’ve done without, personally (it makes me think of animal husbandry, but that’s just me). In fact, that is why I was initially wary of seeing this movie, because I was sure its title alluded to there being a whole bunch of handballing going on. (Had Left-Handed been directed by Joe Gage I’d just assume it would be all about masturbation.) But the fisting in Left-Handed is not only brief but executed far more gently than is usually seen in gay porn (it’s all hearts and flowers compared to the PTSD-inducing anal assault seen in Fred Halsted’s Sextool.) More viewers will likely be put off by the scene’s boner-killing jazz rock score.

Grittier than Boys in the Sand, yet Weirdly More Romantic

Ray gives Bob a hand.

Left-Handed was released shortly after Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand, and while it’s not quite as polished a movie, it’s no less effective. In fact, I’d argue that it’s more effective than Sand. Sand is pretty to look at, and the sex is fairly hot, but it’s strictly fantasy, while Left-Handed’s gritty style and story arc, simplistic thought it may be, make it more involving. Consequently, though Sand has the more romanticized presentation of gay sex, it’s the grungy looking Left-Handed that’s the more romantic movie, the fisting notwithstanding. It even features a couple ballads worthy of any second-rate Vegas crooner’s set list.

Left-Handed is available through
BijouWorld.com, and can be streamed on
PinkLabelTV.com and GayHotMovies.com

As much as I enjoyed this movie, and really think it’s hot, I realize it’s a tough sell to present-day audiences. Even if you’re cool with the scraggly hippie look and aren’t turned off by the early ’70s fashions (they are a hoot, but the guys usually aren’t dressed very long for them to be a distraction), the sex scenes will likely not appeal to current sensibilities. For that reason, Left-Handed is best approached as a movie to be watched in its entirety, rather than a mere masturbation aid. The sex scenes are plentiful, but usually last for only 5-10 minutes, and the acts aren’t always captured in explicit detail, a fact that Alvarez acknowledges: “Our [movies] were more like—at least I felt, and Jack felt—to capture the sensuality of the sex or the dynamics of a sex scene, and whatever shot said that the best is the shot that we used. So, we didn’t go in for, like, where you can see every pubic hair, you know?” I didn’t think Deveau’s approach is any less powerful, though I will admit there were a couple scenes—the tearoom blowjob; Ray and Bob in the barn—that could’ve benefited from better lighting.

Above all, what really makes Left-Handed worth a watch are the two lead performers, Ray Frank and Robert Rikas. When so many current porn videos look like endurance tests, it’s nice to see performers who 

What’re you looking at?

appear to actually enjoy sex. Frank is the more dynamic performer, as well as the more charismatic presence, though Rikas proves to be more sensual than his stone-faced expression would have you believe. Yet, despite being such a natural, it was Frank who bowed out of the industry after two movies, his only other credit being in Deveau’s follow-up feature, Drive, while Rikas went on to appear in several more movies, his last IMDb credit being 1976’s Fetishes of Monique. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything else out about either performer. Alvarez wasn’t any more enlightening about the Left-Handed’s two leads when asked about them by Bijou: “[Jack Deveau] used to put out casting calls. And, I think, we knew the guy who played the lead. We knew both of them. And so, they agreed to be in it.”   

Considering how often I’m disappointed when I learn more about performers’ personal lives, maybe that’s all I really need to know.

A Story of Big Business and Blue Balls

Harry Whittington is one of my favorite novelists, so I’m kind of surprised I’m just now getting around to reviewing one of his books. But better late than never, and this particular book is even somewhat topical, it being about the railroad industry, which is kind of a hot topic in the U.S. now. Although the likelihood of people following the disaster in East Palistine, Ohio, immediately seeking out historical fiction about the expansion of a railroad in Florida during the 1800s is negligible, I figure it’s worth a shot.

Anyway, back to Harry. I first discovered Harry Whittington when I caught the movie adaptation of his 1956 novel Desire in the Dust on the Fox Movie Channel, back when that was a thing. I thought the movie was awesome and immediately sought out the book, which was just as good. Since then, I’ve been going on periodic eBay binges, searching out his work. Luckily, there’s a lot to choose from, and in a wide variety of genres: westerns, crime thrillers, mysteries, sexploitation, soapy potboilers and even queer pulp.

Of course, not all of Whittington’s books were written under his own name. Among his many pseudonyms was the name Blaine Stevens, which he used for a trio of historical epics he published in the very late 1970s and early ’80s, the first of which was 1979’s THE OUTLANDERS.

Set in the late 1800s, The Outlanders is the story of Ward Hamilton, a man with a dream: to own his own railroad. He’s so driven to achieve this goal that he hunts down his older brother Robert, wanted for stealing $100 thou in gold, so he can collect the $20,000 bounty. Also, he wants to know where Robert hid the gold. “I can use that money you stole,” the 19-year-old Ward explains to Robert when he finds him, hiding in a shack in the wilds of Florida with his servant (and recently freed slave) Thetis, “and warrant you a tenfold return you’ll never get with it planted somewhere in the ground.” Robert, out of spite, doesn’t admit to having stolen the gold, let alone divulge where it’s hidden. Ward will just have to make do with the $20 grand reward money.

Twenty-thousand dollars isn’t enough to buy a railroad, but Ward doesn’t let that stop him from bidding on the East Florida & Gulf Central railroad when he learns it’s for sale—information he gets when he beds the frustrated wife of its owner (“It’s been ten years since [my husband has] had an erection. Five since he’s wanted one.”) With some financial sleight of hand and the kind of self-confidence only found in those too young to know better, Ward’s bid for EF&GC is accepted. Now he must cover the full purchase price. So, he heads to Atlanta, where he calls on Lily Harkness, the prettiest of the Harkness daughters and Robert’s fiancée prior to his incarceration. She’s pretty, sure, but what Ward wants as much as access to her pussy is her knowledge of where Robert stashed the hidden loot—surely, he’d have told the person he loved the most. He gets neither, even when they marry. Lily has her own motive for marrying Ward, and that motive ain’t sex, the very concept of which she finds disgusting (the couple only bones two times during their decade-long marriage). Worse, Lily has no clue where Robert stashed the stolen gold (hint: the person Robert loved the most was not a woman). Ward gets more out of a business arrangement with one of Lily’s other suitors, the homely but goodhearted bank vice-president Hobart Bayard, from whose bank Ward secures a generous line of credit.

As the story progresses, Ward’s business success increases while his home life becomes more and more miserable. He and Lily have two children, only one of which is Ward’s: a son, Robin, and daughter, Belle. Lily becomes a religious nut, and then just plain insane. Ward isn’t always the easiest guy to root for — he’s a bastard in many instances — and his reasons for courting Lily were hardly admirable, but it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for him as he tries to do everything possible to give Lily a happy life, only to see her grow more hostile, poisoning Robin against him and resenting Belle for her closeness to Ward. Lily is also a sad case, but since The Outlanders is told from Ward’s point of view her behavior is often presented as the result of her being a spoiled bitch and not mental illness.

Adding to the tension is Julia Fredrick, the daughter of Dayton Fredrick, a one-time successful developer who was depending on buying EF&GC to transport vacationers to his struggling resort in Port St. Joe, Florida. When the two first meet, Julia is a precocious 13-year-old who develops an immediate crush on the young Ward Hamilton, which, fortunately, Ward doesn’t take advantage of even though the book is set at a time when sex with underage girls wasn’t necessarily frowned upon (“I like to pluck ‘em young, too,” a sleazy EF&CG rail executive tells Ward conspiratorially when he discovers Dayton Fredrick’s teen daughter in Ward’s company). Her feelings change, kind of, when Ward buys EF&GC, and she swears she hates him as much as she loves him, even though Ward and her father continue to be friendly. Ward’s feelings also change, from viewing Julia as a smartass kid to seeing her as a woman and realizing he has romantic feelings for her (mitigating factor: by the time Julia is in her twenties Ward’s balls are the color of Concorde grapes).

Ward’s fortunes begin to turn as the 19th century draws to a close. He is granted a divorce from Lily, but by the time it’s final Julia has married someone else — Hobart Bayard, now a bank president. Ward’s son Robin will have nothing to do with him, while Belle is uncontrollable, having been kicked out of every school she’s been enrolled in. Then Belle marries Laddie, an arrogant aspiring artist and abusive prick who beats Belle as regularly as she cheats on him. 

The stresses aren’t confined to Ward’s personal life, however. Industrialist Henry Flagler needs a railroad to transport guests to his Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, and the railroad he wants to buy is Ward’s. He asks Ward to name his price, but Ward is too proud to sell. But Flagler’s not the type of man to take no for an answer. If Ward isn’t going to sell willingly, Flagler will use his power and influence to make sure he’ll have to sell. Still, Ward holds out, until a hurricane forces his hand.

Harry Whittington by Any Other Name is Just as Good

I’ll admit that I was wary of this one before I started reading it. Several years ago, I read Whittington’s second Blaine Stevens novel, Embrace the Wind, which was marketed as a bodice-ripping romance, and found it tough going for its first fifty pages or so, when Whittington really leans into the romance genre, adopting an uncharacteristically florid prose style (the book picks up when it becomes more of an adventure story). Thankfully, Whittington keeps the flowery descriptions to a minimum in The Outlanders, the novel being more discount John Jakes than Johanna Lindsey rip-off, though the eBay seller I bought it from categorized it as a western, probably because of the cover.

The Harry Whittington copyright
was enough to sell me on this book.

Essentially a rags-to-riches story, The Outlanders doesn’t necessarily offer a lot of surprises—you’ll realize early on that Dayton Frederick’s story foreshadows Ward’s, that Ward and Julia are destined to end up together—but that doesn’t diminish its entertainment value. Whittington’s writing keeps the story moving, and he cleverly weaves in real people (Flagler, Dr. Lue Gim Gong) and events (e.g., using prison labor to build railroads), as well as a few Easter eggs. One character that I thought was a real person in history was Marve Pooser, leader of a homesteader uprising against Ward’s ever-expanding railroad. I was sure I’d read about him somewhere before. And I had: that was the name of the villain in Whittington’s 1959 novel, A Moment to Prey (a.k.a. Backwoods Tramp).

If I have one quibble with the book, it’s that while Whittington successfully keeps us in the world of the late 1870s, a few of his characters behave as if they stepped out of the 1970s, specifically Julia. Yes, she’s supposed to be wise beyond her years, but sometimes she’s a little too sexually blunt for the time. The likelihood of a young woman in this time period declaring, in her father’s company, that she would like to go to bed with a man, and that her father would not rebuke her for doing so, strains credulity. Less anachronistic, though still behavior more closely associated with our time, is when Ward’s sister-in-law Lavinia seduces him (hey, Ward was bound to stray sooner or later), immediately giving him a BJ (He felt her face pressed against him, her breath across her parted lips hot and moist upon his glans). I realize blowjobs were discovered long before the Summer of Love, but I don’t think one would be so freely given by a young woman with limited sexual experience and raised in the Antebellum South. But considering that readers of the 1970s expected at least a dash of smut in their pop fiction, this can be written off as fan service. The sex scenes, BTW, aren’t all that frequent and are just explicit enough to make it clear what’s going on without straying too far into raunch.

I find Harry Whittington to be a safe bet, no matter what the genre. Even his lesser books are, if nothing else, entertaining. The Outlanders, while no classic, is a satisfying read, well worth checking out if you should happen upon a reasonably-priced copy.

Short Takes: ‘Someone is Bleeding’ (1974) ★★

Someone is Bleeding is alternately known
as Les seins de glace, which translates
into this movie’s other unfortunate/awesome
English a.k.a., Icy Breasts.

Georges Lautner directed the 1970 film The Road to Salina, which is one of my favorite movies. A few years later he directed Someone is Bleeding, which isn’t.

In fairness to Lautner, though the movies share some themes—a beautiful woman with a deadly secret; mind-fucking the protagonist—Someone is Bleeding (a.k.a. Les seins de glace, or Icy Breasts) is a different sort of thriller. Whereas Salina is what happens when an art film gets stoned and makes wild monkey love to a ’70s drive-in movie (or vice versa), Someone is Bleeding is all sideways glances and stony silences broken up with cryptic conversations and minimal bouts of violence. In short, Someone is Bleeding is kinda boring.

But boring isn’t the movie’s biggest problem; the character of François Rollin is. François (Claude Brasseur) is a hack TV writer working on his latest script when he decides to take a walk on the beach to clear his head. This is when he encounters beautiful blonde Peggy (Mireille Darc). François, undaunted by the fact that she’s out of his league and clearly not interested, makes it his mission to get his hands on her icy breasts by harassing his way into her heart, including getting into her parked car while she’s out shopping, then refusing to get out when she returns. Remarkably, Peggy is charmed by this. Me, less so.

Just because Peggy hasn’t filed a restraining order doesn’t mean she’s an easy catch, as François soon learns. Cockblocking him at every turn is Peggy’s overly protective attorney, Marc (a haggard looking Alain Delon), who not only has set up Peggy in a house staffed with a gruff—and kind of rapey—manservant, Albert (Michel Peyrelon), but also has his hulking chauffeur/henchman Steig (Emilio Messina) keeping tabs on her, violently intervening when necessary. Marc explains to François that Peggy is not stable, that she is a former drug addict and that she murdered her husband—a crime for which Marc defended her, getting her off with an insanity defense. She is so repelled by men that she kills them should one touch her. Of course, Marc is in love with her, too (never mind that he’s married, and y’know, the whole killing-any-man-who-touches-her thing), so his motives aren’t exactly pure. Yet, as the movie progresses, we begin to suspect that Peggy might be as unbalanced as Marc says she is.

Though Someone is Bleeding picks up steam as it goes along, it seldom heats up to a proper boil. Lautner’s script, adapted from a novel by Richard Matheson, has made Peggy so mysterious that she almost has no characterization beyond looking pretty and smiling nervously while François and Marc fight over her. Consequently, Darc, Delon’s girlfriend at the time, is a rather passive femme fatale. Nicoletta Machiavelli, who plays Marc’s steely wife, makes a stronger impression, making me wish her part had been bigger. Delon’s performance is solid but nothing special. As for Brasseur, besides being saddled with an irritating character, his buffoonish performance is tonally at odds with the film surrounding it. Not helping is his character’s brand of humor translates as assholery in any language. And since François is the lead (not Delon, as the poster would have you believe), you must endure his company for the entire movie, meaning that by extension you’re enduring Someone is Bleeding when you should be enjoying it.

Short Takes: ‘Aaron Loves Angela’ (1975) ★★ 1/2

With the recent passing of Irene Cara, I thought I’d check out one of her earliest film roles, director Gordon Parks, Jr.’s 1975 movie Aaron Loves Angela, made when she was just 15 years old.

Aaron (Kevin Hooks, age 17 at the time) is a Harlem teenager being pressured by his father Ike (Moses Gunn) to become a basketball phenom (Ike measures his son daily to see if he’s grown any taller), while his pimp neighbor Beau (Kevin’s real-life dad, Robert Hooks) taunts Aaron for even dreaming of earning any money legally. Aaron’s more concerned about his present, however; specifically, making Angela (Cara), the cute Puerto Rican girl at his school, part of it. He expresses his infatuation through graffiti, tagging walls with “Aaron likes Angela.” Angela knows her mother wouldn’t approve of her dating a Black boy, but she can’t resist Aaron’s charms, or his graffiti. It’s not long before Aaron’s spray painting “Aaron loves Angela” (title drop) on tenement walls.

What drives a wedge between the two teen lovers isn’t racism, however, but Aaron absconding with a briefcase full of cash that he gets through a series of thoroughly contrived events.

This one’s a mixed bag. Parks makes good use of his setting, showcasing the griminess of 1970s NYC without making it seem totally bleak, and there are some effective slice-of-life moments between Aaron and his father and between Aaron and his best friend Willie (Leon Pinkney). Helping the movie immeasurably is its soundtrack, supplied by José Feliciano. But the movie fails as a blaxploitation retelling of Romeo and Juliet, with neither the Super Fly director nor screenwriter Gerald Sanford having much interest in the central teen romance. There’s a bit more attention paid to the animosity between the African American and Hispanic communities—standing in for the Montagues and the Capulets—but even that is fleeting. Parks and Sanford seem more invested in shoehorning a subplot involving a scheming pimp, his good-hearted ’ho and ruthless mobsters. You know, the usual blaxploitation shit.

The acting is decent, at least. I’d like to say Cara makes an impressive film debut (we won’t count her bit part as a dancer in the comedy Apple Pie), but she and Kevin Hooks are merely adequate, with the adult performers—especially Gunn—making bigger impressions. The only truly awful bit of “acting” is from Walt Frazier as himself. In his brief cameo the “NY Knicks basketball legend” (per his Cameo page; I know nothing about sports and care even less) delivers his lines like he’s taping a PSA encouraging kids to stay in school. Though in Frazier’s defense, his dialog is written as such.

Overall, Aaron Loves Angela is enjoyable despite its unfocused storytelling and uneven tone, but it’s no must-see like Gordon Parks, Jr.’s classic Super Fly—or the camp classic (and beginning of Cara’s rapid descent) Certain Fury.

He Should’ve Let It Ring

The 1984 paperback edition of Eyes
teases a different novel than the
one Felice Picano wrote.

Though it’s difficult to believe now, there was a time—before smartphones, before voicemail, and when answering machines were still priced as a luxury item—when people felt obligated to answer a ringing telephone. To just let it ring was simply never considered. It’s true: the past was fucking awful. So is the present, but at least we can block unwanted callers. 

It’s during that barbaric time when we blindly answered our landlines, with no caller I.D. to warn us of who was on the other end, that Felice Picano’s 1975 novel EYES is set.

That impulse to answer a ringing phone is what kicks off the story proper, when Stu Waehner, a twenty-something, New York City social worker, returns from his workday, after a shittier-than-usual subway commute, and hears his phone ringing on the other side of his locked apartment door. Thinking it might be his semi-estranged girlfriend Jennifer, Stu is positively desperate to get inside to take the call, yet he has as much difficulty unlocking his apartment door as a teen-aged girl has trying to start a car in a slasher movie:

“Coming,” he said, and fumbled in his pocket for his key chain.

The phone kept on ringing.

“Don’t hang up yet, Jenny. I’m coming…”

He had to switch everything to under the other arm—these locks had to be opened left-handed.

The phone was still ringing.

“Don’t hang up yet.” One lock. Now for the top one. It squealed, then seemed to be stuck. There it was. Now the long key for the police lock. There! The door swung inward, then abruptly stopped short after opening a few inches.

With the impact, everything under Stu’s arm fell to the hallway floor.

The police lock was stuck.

The phone kept ringing.

And the phone keeps ringing, until Stu finally makes it inside his apartment to answer it. It’s not Jennifer, but a woman asking for Bill. A fucking wrong number. Yet the woman calling doesn’t just apologize and end the call. Instead, she belligerently asks if Stu is sure no Bill lives in his apartment. Stu insists she has the wrong number, and then the woman takes issue with his justifiable annoyance. Remarkably, Stu does not just hang up, but continues arguing with the woman, who calls him a paranoiac and recommends a stay in Bellevue. The conversation just as quickly de-escalates, with Stu apologizing for yelling and the woman apologizing for having the wrong number, and readers just wondering why the hell didn’t either of them hang up the moment it was realized the woman misdialed.

But the woman hadn’t misdialed. Her whole plan was to get Stu on the phone and keep him on it. That woman is Johanna, a freelance editor, also in her twenties, who lives in the tenement across from Stu’s building, and who has a perfect view into Stu’s apartment from hers, and, with opera glasses in hand, has been watching him intently. She’s also struck up a casual friendship with Gladys, the retiree who lives in the unit below Stu’s, to get some insight and gossip about Gladys’ upstairs neighbor, and even encourages the old woman to badger Stu into adopting a stray cat/plot contrivance. She keeps a journal as well, detailing facts she’s learned about Stu—including his previous address and current employer—and her observations gleaned from spying on him (“He seems to have no close friends of ether gender.”)

For all Johanna’s learned about Stu, she is unprepared for him to have a girlfriend, and is dismayed when Jennifer, who had been touring with her dance company since before Stu moved into the apartment across the street, returns. Stu is a little disappointed, too, but for different reasons. Jennifer’s affections for Stu have cooled significantly in the time she’s been away, while her love for her career has intensified. Women’s Lib may have been in full swing when this book was written, but Stu still has a chauvinistic mindset, viewing Jennifer’s dancing more as a hobby than a career, not to mention he’s suspicious of her constantly praising her choreographer Caspar (he dismisses Caspar as a romantic rival, however, later referring to him as looking like “the Fairy Godmother”).

In Stu’s defense, Jennifer is a bit of a pretentious twat, always bitching about how small the apartment is and often taking shots at Stu for his lack of ambition. No wonder he’s receptive when Johanna, now using a voice changer and adopting a British accent, calls back. Stu pushes for a name (“You know my name, why not tell me yours?”) Johanna tells him to call her by any name he wants, horrified when he settles on Joan (Joan was so close to her own name, so uncannily close. As if… he’d intuited it or somehow knew and was teasing her.) Still, she endures the moniker as long as Stu keeps taking her calls.

Inevitably, Stu and Jennifer break up, leaving Stu’s evenings free to take Joan’s calls. “Does she get real dirty? You know, breathy and hot, all that kind of stuff?” asks Bill, Stu’s coincidentally named co-worker, after Stu tells him of his mysterious caller. Alas, she does not, and Stu never pushes their conversations in that direction, either. Though Johanna is romantically fixated on Stu, she’s not overtly horny for him. In fact, the one other time she’s done this phone-stalking thing—with the previous occupant of Stu’s apartment, a Texas dude named Colin—she presented herself in person shortly after establishing a rapport over the phone, appalled to discover that the guy immediately wanted pussy. Because of that unpleasant experience, Johanna wants to keep Stu at a safe distance, determined to establish not just an emotional connection, but a co-dependence as well.

That distance is jeopardized when a Joan slips up during one of their phone conversations and remarks on the whereabouts of Stu’s cat, revealing that she is, in fact, watching him. Stu, predictably, wonders from which of the many windows across the street Joan is spying on him.

Stu later brings home a young hippie chick he met a nearby park and doesn’t bother to pull down the shades before they do the nasty. He senses Joan is watching and is briefly troubled by the possibility before deciding, hey, if she wants to watch, he’ll give her a show (regretfully, said show is not explicitly described). Joan/Johanna is not pleased. “I’m very disappointed in Stu,” Johanna writes in her stalker journal. She later laments that she can’t even complain: Did she expect him to be faithful to strange woman on the telephone whom he never even met? It was her fault. She was the one who set the limits.

That all changes when Johanna accompanies her horny best friend Alice to the Hungry Hat, a restaurant/singles bar, to meet-up with Alice’s coke dealer, Bill, who’s sitting at the bar with his friend from work...Stu! Alice, who’s made Johanna her project (she’s already goaded Johanna into getting new clothes, updating her hairstyle and accepting a full-time job with a book publisher), sends Stu over to chat with her reclusive friend while she and Bill take care of their transaction. A mortified Johanna says she must leave, but neither Alice nor Stu will let her escape that easily. Ultimately, Johanna thaws enough to give Stu her work phone number.

To Johanna’s amazement, Stu is genuinely attracted to her, and a real, in-the-flesh romance blossoms. It’s a fantasy come true, but it’s also a problem. What to do with Joan? Things get especially awkward when Stu wants to discuss with Joan the wonderful new woman in his life: Johanna. Johanna decides the best way to dissolve this phone friendship—as well as find out what Stu’s true feelings are— is for Joan to become a jealous bitch, shit talking Stu’s new flame at every opportunity (“She didn’t strike me as being the picture of glowing femininity, but, after all, she’s probably just fine for a little therapeutic sex.”)

Joan’s snarky comments about his new girlfriend aren’t enough to drive Stu away, nor are they enough to kill his curiosity about her identity. It’s that curiosity—with help from a horny tomcat and one of Johanna’s neighbors—that’s going to get one of them killed.

Not the Book It’s Marketed As

Though it drags here and there, I found Eyes to be a fairly engaging read (I’ll forgive Picano’s inclusion of a feline ex machina). However, I was also mildly disappointed and for that I blame the book’s marketing, which teases a much different novel. “There are many ways to satisfy desire,” reads Dell Publishing’s teaser copy on the front cover of the 1984 paperback. “Some people dream. Some people watch. Some people kill.” My expectations were further manipulated by the ellipses-heavy synopsis on the back cover:

Day and night, a mysterious woman called, a voice from the darkness telling him she was all alone… that she wanted to talk to him… needed him…desired him…

Day and night, the eyes followed him, no matter what he did, whom he held, whom he kissed. And what the eyes saw would lead to love…and fear—and then to terror.

Because of the cover text, I was expecting something much more salacious: Joan/Johanna would be a dangerous psychopath. Her calls to Stu would be unsettling, even threatening, not to mention obscene. Stu would be more of a player, and all the women he brought home would ultimately end up dead. And when Stu discovers his new girlfriend Johanna is not just his harassing caller but the one who’s killed all the other women in his life, it would lead to a more intense confrontation.

Also, while the model used for the book cover suggests that
Stu looks like Frank Stallone (left), going by Stu’s description
in the book, he more closely resembles the
1979 Playgirl model on the right.

Instead, Eyes is much more subdued, barely qualifying as a thriller. The body count is low—a mere two deaths, one from natural causes—and the calls Stu receives from Joan, while at times testy and irritating, are far from threatening. Johanna is not a psychopath, she’s just a sad, lonely woman with some serious self-esteem issues. She does not, as some other reviewers claim, have dissociative identity disorder; she’s well aware of the persona she’s creating when she calls Stu, hence the voice changer and fake accent. Joan is the confident woman Johanna wants to be. What she’s doing is the phone-based equivalent of catfishing, except the real person is as desirable as the fake one she’s presenting herself as, she just doesn’t realize it.

Stu, though mildly chauvinistic and a bit of a homophobe, is also more nuanced than expected. He’s good at his job but not entirely sure he wants to make it his life’s work. When he and Jennifer break up, he doesn’t immediately hit the bars looking for sex (his sole hookup prior to meeting Johanna happens when that hippie chick casually offers herself, no strings attached, because 1970s). What Stu wants more than sex is someone to talk to, someone to be in his corner, and Joan fulfills that need.

Felice Picano wrote a few more mainstream thrillers after Eyes, his second novel, before becoming a prominent name in gay literature, publishing the queer-centric novels Late in the Season and Like People in History, as well as the memoirs Men Who Loved Me: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel and Nights at Rizzoli. He even co-authored The New Joy of Gay Sex. Nearly twenty years ago I heard Picano speak at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival, and among other topics he talked about the trap of writing genre fiction solely for commercial viability. Interestingly, I don’t recall him bringing up any of his work in genre fiction. I learned about that through the Too Much Horror Fiction blog. I haven’t read any of Picano’s gay books (well, I did skim through The New Joy of Gay Sex a few times at various bookstores when I thought no one was looking, but I was too deep in the closet at the time to even consider doing something so brave as buying it), but I was immensely curious about his early horror and thriller novels. Does the fact that I bypassed Picano’s acclaimed LGBTQ books in favor of what I thought (hoped) were his stabs at tawdry mainstream horror make me a self-loathing homo? No, just taste impaired.

I don’t think Picano is ashamed of his earlier books, nor should he be, but he clearly didn’t want to risk becoming a hack horror writer, and for a CisHet audience no less. Not that anyone would mistake Eyes as the work of a hack. Rather than the trashy erotic thriller Dell was hyping, Eyes is a more thoughtful story about loneliness, restlessness and alienation. That’s to the novel’s credit, but it’s also its biggest letdown.

BTW: According to his Wikipedia page, Picano wrote a screenplay adaptation for Eyes in 1985. The movie was never produced (1978-81 would’ve been the ideal time to have made the pitch), and now, thanks to technology rendering its primary device irrelevant, it likely never will be.

Gorilla Handjobs, Pickled Heads and Edible Dildos

The poster photo of George Kuchar and
Marion Eaton makes it clear that this ain’t
Deep Throat.

2022 has no shortage of worthwhile Halloween viewing: X, Pearl, Nope, Barbarian, Fresh, Hellraiser, the news. Terrifier 2 is so extreme it reportedly has audiences vomiting.

But none of those movies leave audiences fearing where the cucumbers in their salads have been. So, this Halloween, let’s check out director Curt McDowell and screenwriter/star George Kuchar’s 1975 underground epic, THUNDERCRACK!

Six travelers are making their way across Nebraska on a proverbial dark and stormy night. There’s Bing (Kuchar), a high-strung circus employee driving a truckful of exotic animals, grumbling to himself about how much he hates the children in the audience—but not his beloved gorilla Medusa (“Gorillas are different than children. They have more hair.”)

Elsewhere, bisexual hitchhiker Toydy (Rick Johnson) gets a ride from Sash (Melinda McDowell, the director’s sister) and her sharp-tongued, perpetually horny girlfriend—and Brooklyn Community College Grad—Roo (Moira Benson). Roo asks—demands—to see what Toydy is working with. “Oh, honey, I’d give you the formula to the atomic bomb if I knew it,” she says when the hitchhiker takes out his cock. Toydy responds: “Didn’t they teach you that stuff at Brooklyn Community College?” But then an argument erupts between Sash and Roo, and their tussling sends the car careening off the road, resulting in a fiery explosion.

Chandler feels up Bond.*

The fire is witnessed by two other travelers: another hitchhiker, Bond (Ken Scudder), and, at the wheel, Chandler (Mookie Blodgett, a.k.a. Phillip Heffernan), widower of the late Sarah Lou Phillips, the heiress to the House of Phillips Unlimited girdle empire. However, the two men have other things on their minds than the source of the fire. Chandler asks his passenger if his admiring glances at Bond’s “rather extravagant torso” have made him ill at ease. “Well, no,” Bond responds. “It’s just that all you’re doing is just looking.”

The guys are interrupted when they’re flagged down by another traveler, Willene Cassidy (Maggie Pyle), virgin wife of country rock star Simon Cassidy. She also saw the explosion in the distance, and she urges Chandler and Bond to go investigate its source. Chandler wants to keep going to Waco, where he plans to burn down the House of Phillips factory. “You scare me, Mister,” Willene says. “You’re talking like some kind of beatnik.”

“Supposing I am,” Chandler replies. “What have you got against beatniks?”

“Well, for one thing, their bongo drums.”

Bond ultimately convinces Chandler to go investigate the scene of the fire, suggesting he’ll let the bi-curious Chandler have full use of his body if he does. Willene then goes to a nearby farmhouse to call for help. 

Prairie Blossom: An artist's representation.

The lady of the house, Gert (Marion Eaton), may not be much help. When Willene pounds on the door and calls out, the inebriated Gert gasps: “My God, that was a human voice. A woman’s voice!” The shitfaced widow rushes to fix herself up before opening the door. Since she’s wearing only a slip and high heels, one would think she’d simply put a dress on, or maybe a robe, but instead Gert puts on a wig and draws on dark, asymmetrical eyebrows (a Kuchar trademark). Realizing she’s too drunk to receive visitors, Gert sticks her fingers down her throat, but, uh-oh, her wig falls in the toilet just as she’s blowing chunks. No worries. Gert just shakes the vomit off her wig, puts it back on her head and finally lets Willene into the house. 

 

Gert gets ready to receive visitors.

Willene helps Gert cum clean.

Willene politely listens to Gert stumble through the history of Prairie Blossom, the house she and her late husband Charlie Hammond built, before guiding the poor thing into the bathroom to bathe her. “Would you mind washin’ me a little lower, please?” Gert simperingly asks. The seemingly naïve wife of country rock star Simon Cassidy obliges, getting a grateful thank you from Gert when she gets the widow off with a vigorous scrubbing.

Bond and Chandler arrive with Roo, Toydy and Sash, who conveniently escaped their wrecked car before it exploded. Everyone is irritable, but Gert, revivified from her recent bath and orgasm (as well as being more than a little nuts) welcomes everyone with a bright smile and opens her closet to her cranky guests, urging them to help themselves to some dry clothes. They must change clothes in the bedroom at the far end of the hall and, she urges them, be patient as each person takes their turn.

Things Get Weirder. And Filthier.

Chandler prepares to fire up the penis pump...

From this point forward the movie gets delightfully dirty. The bedroom at the far end of the hall—once her son’s—is a veritable shrine to sex, with a large assortment of sex toys, tubes of KY and rubbers to choose from. Its walls are decorated with pages from skin mags; stills from hardcore porn movies, both gay and straight; and erotic art (including a cartoon by the director). One poster that stands out is a generic portrait of George Washington, yet because it’s so innocuous, no one bothers to inspect it too closely. If they did, they would discover Washington’s eyes are cut out, allowing Gert a clear view through two peepholes drilled into the kitchen wall.

... as Gert watches.

And Gert gets a lengthy show as her weary and horny travelers give in to erotic temptation. Chandler avails himself of a very loud penis pump (seriously, it sounds like a rotary rock tumbler), while Roo uses a vibrator with a dildo attachment. Toydy fucks an inflatable sex doll while jamming a dildo up his ass, with some difficulty (“Get up there, goddammit!”). Only Sash—who, remember, is played by the director’s sister—takes a partner while in Prairie Blossom’s X-rated bedroom, boning Bond, who wears a novelty rubber for the occasion. (In the documentary It Came from Kuchar, Melinda McDowell-Milk mentions that Curt always wanted to celebrate sex in his work yet frustratingly never mentions how she felt performing in Thundercrack!’s hardcore scenes while being filmed by her brother. She was instrumental in getting the film restored for a Blu-ray release, so she clearly wasn’t traumatized by the experience, but I still wanted to hear her account of filming.)

Willene enjoys a refreshing snack.

While she watches from the kitchen, Gert masturbates with a rather long peeled cucumber. She’s barely finished with the cuke when Willene enters the kitchen, looking for a snack. She plucks the well-lubricated cuke from the bowl of fruit where Gert tossed it (“This looks refreshing”) and takes a bite, because you just knew someone was going to eat it. According to this movie’s IMDb’s trivia page, actress Maggie Pyle was, unbeknownst to her, eating the actual cucumber that had been up Eaton’s cooch, as payback for being a pain in the ass (i.e., showing up for filming drunk or otherwise fucked up). Kind of makes you wonder how many suspicious salads these people have been served while on set.

There are quite few more sex scenes to get through (the movie is almost three hours long), including Toydy fucking Bond. There are also a lot more secrets, like who’s pickled head is that down in the basement? What’s behind that locked door in the living room? And what does Gert mean when she insists that her son is not dead, he simply “no longer exists”? 

Dinner is served!

But before any of those questions can be answered, the house is surrounded by circus animals. A frantic Bing is let inside, and he has some secrets of his own, mostly involving his complicated relationship with the gorilla, Medusa. “Don’t minimize the danger, Mac,” he tells Toydy. “Medusa didn’t get that name for nothin’. One look at those blazing, red eyes surrounded by that black, matted hair can freeze a man to a block of stone on the spot. She made me hard one night.”

Cue a flashback sequence featuring underground filmmaker George Kuchar getting a hand-job from a gorilla (or, rather, Curt MacDowell in a gorilla suit). At this point, though, we’d be surprised if someone didn’t have sex with a gorilla.

Hardcore, But Not Necessarily Porn

Thundercrack! was originally conceived as a porn cash-in by McDowell and composer Mark Ellinger (both credited with Thundercrack!’s story), but the script written by Kuchar, who had been making underground movies with his twin brother Mike since the late 1950s, took the project in a different and wonderful direction. “I knew it wouldn’t make any money, because anything I work on is a financial disaster,” says Kuchar in the It Came from Kuchar documentary.

And Thundercrack! wasn’t a cash cow, either, but that doesn’t make it any less of a masterpiece. Sure, it’s not the most polished movie, with iffy sound and scene compositions that are at times more stagey than cinematic. And, sure, it doesn’t need to be nearly 3 hours long, but it’s not a problem that it is. You won’t be bored, no matter how many times you watch it. I’ve watched it several times and I always discover something I missed from previous viewings. Kuchar’s script has so many great lines that to include them all in this post would mean transcribing the movie’s entire script.

Chandler enjoys the show.

Eaton’s tour de force performance as Gert is another reason to seek this one out. Eaton was already an accomplished stage actress when, in her 40s, she decided to enter the world of adult films. The first adult movie she made, Sip the Wine, was produced by Heffernan, who told her about the auditions for Thundercrack! McDowell reportedly interrupted her during her audition to tell her the part was hers. And it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role (though Georgina Spelvin would’ve been a good second choice). Eaton’s performance is at once sincere and a drag parody. Gert is an outrageous character, but Eaton doesn’t let us forget her humanity.

Kuchar gives the movie’s other standout performance, though after watching the documentary about him I’m not entirely sure he was acting. Scudder, who appeared in numerous porn films from the mid-1970s to the mid ’80s, one-and-done Johnson, and Heffernan, are all better than average, and Pyle is effective as Willene (not sure if her being drunk/stoned helped, but it didn’t hurt). The weakest performances are from Benson and (sorry!) Melinda McDowell, who, bless her heart, struggles the hardest to get out the mouthfuls of dialog required of her.

Thundercrack! is hard to categorize. It’s a send-up of old, dark house and hag horror tropes, but it’s not exactly a horror comedy (though it is very funny), and it’s certainly not a porn parody. In fact, though it has a lot of hardcore sex scenes, I don’t really consider it a porno at all. In the context of Kuchar’s script, the intention of the sex scenes is to shock rather than titillate. Thundercrack! is its own glorious thing. You may not be turned on, and you definitely won’t be scared, but you won’t fucking forget it.

*Don’t judge the movie’s cinematography by the quality of the stills in this post, which were photographed from my computer screen while the Blu-ray was paused.