China Doll

The director himself points out on IMDb that CHINA DOLL is notable as Vanessa Del Rio's film debut. Other than the usual Costello fetishes, this is a minor opus.

Opening features his usual stealing of the CHINATOWN theme by Jerry Goldsmith to introduce this non-adventure of private eye Mickey Flynn, a very poor ancestor of Costello's Dan McCord gumshoe. The search is for a missing china doll taken from a store. In the DVD-R reissue by Something Weird on Vol. 67 of its Dragon Art Theater series, there's a big bait & switch: the doll has been taken by a beautiful young blonde woman, who goes topless but never gets involved in any of the sex scenes. Original version was reportedly half an hour longer.

Vanessa Del Rio pops up as Nadja, part of an erotic dance team. She displays Costello's favorite fetish, performing fellatio on two guys at once in a position SC loves to film but which oddly never caught on with other filmmakers. Shaun likes this gimmick so much he repeats it later in an orgy, namedropping (or wishful thinking) at Peter Max's pad. Vanessa also has a double penetration scene, quite a debut.

General silliness and in-jokes include the doll supposed to contain $250,000 worth of "dilythium crystals" - I guess Shaun was a trekker.

This film does point up a key difference between softcore and hardcore porn, probably unintentionally. The visuals are basically "cock-centric", in that even though there are some attractive women in the cast the focus is on the male member most if not all of the time. I recall this being a big issue back in the day, as a large segment of the male audience was more interested in concentrating on the female anatomy, as is inevitably the case in softcore cinema.