Scent of Love

Hardi Burton's SCENT OF LOVE, recently added to IMDb database when Alpha Blue Archives reissued it on DVD, is a particularly poorly made example of the wall-to-wall sex genre on the cusp of turning hardcore.

Gimmick is a crudely dressed setting for a lab (looks like they spent about $3 on it) where scientist William Howard (very familiar soft porn actor) and his idiotic assistant Jack (played by one-namer Jim, a truly incompetent performer whose dialog emissions here are beyond bad), working on an aphrodisiac potion that will turn women sex-crazy. Hardly an original porn premise, run into the ground here by Burton and producer partner in crime, Richard Z. Evans (I dig the Z in his name, perhaps the only creative aspect of the movie).

Film also has a hallway for some transitions, a storage closet and a bedroom, and the second half of the feature is non-stop MOS simulated sex, tedious in the extreme. The presence of Kathy Hilton (unflatteringly made up and photographed but intrinsically sexy as always) and an athletic if ill-used Casey Larrain gives us fans some excuse to sit through it.

What might have been wild antics or at least something interesting never happens. Basically Jack steals the flask of experimental formula and gets laid as a result, while Howard hams it up worrying about toxic side effects and trying to perfect his creation.

An unidentified actress in a lousy wig is the first aphro victim: after a sniff she starts masturbating in a storage room where our two stalwart non-heroes peep at her through a hole in the wall and pointlessly listen through headphones to who knows what? She gets so horny that she grabs a scrub brush (looks like one meant for cleaning toilets), licks the handle and applies it to her vagina, though actual insertion is not visible on-screen. This comes perilously close to hardcore.

Though male genitals are shown, the sex is strictly dry humping and as boring as can be.

Oddest touch, which I presume is unprecedented in the history of piracy of intellectual property, is the use of a Jimmy Smith organ/guitar jazz track early in the film, followed by an extraneous, even cryptic scene of Hilton looking through LPs and fetching the Smith album to give to Howard on his request - so we can see (blurred) its cover. Stealing music for porn soundtracks is a time-honored if illegal tradition, but actually acknowledging the source and sort of giving it a James Bondian product placement plug is beyond strangeness.