Touch Now, Pay Later

Grinding out 1-day wonders in the porn industry must have been a tedious way of making ends meet, as there was no upside -these junkers came and went without notice, and it was only decades later that the video revolution eventually resurrected them. This annoying example was reissued on Vol. 49 of Something Weird's Dragon Art Theatre series.

Basically it's a dumb joke stretched to nearly an hour's duration. Three guys check into a motel and one of them, Barry (played by familiar porn face Marc Brock) heads down the road 1/2 a mile and finds a makeshift brothel at another hotel. Lolling around their motel room, the four hookers lament a lack of customers, understandable since they're on a second floor balcony with a little "house of ill repute" sign on the door no one can see from afar. The madam is a blonde imitation of Candy Samples who takes Barry and his assigned girl Tina to a bedroom, does some softcore prep with him and lets Tina do the rest.

Joke is that even though $50 is listed as the fee right on the door, Barry is not charged a dime, but instead given $100 by Ms. non-Candy for being such a good customer, hoping for repeat business (!).

He relates this tale to his two buddies in the form of a shaggy-dog joke and they actually believe him, so the rest of the film is all three heading to the brothel and getting serviced. While Barry was given the deluxe treatment (pink champagne and caviar included) the first time around, the trio seems to be getting the bum's rush on the second trip. However, as is typical with these splicey old prints there is no resolution to the non-story's minimal mystery, as film ends before we find out what our heroes were charged, other than the prescribed $150 (which would still leave the girls in the red, netting $50 for four sex bouts).

This lame excuse for a time-killer even scrimps on the explicit sex. Most of the sex footage is shot softcore, with only occasional shots of the real deal. While I happen to be a softcore fan, when a film is of the all-sex, hardcore variety like this one, it lacks the interesting elements of a softcore opus. What we get here is mainly an incompetently made XXX film where you can't see what's happening.

I'm paying attention to the soundtracks on these films to unearth the wealth of pirated material that was prevalent in the early '70s. For this clunker, there is virtually NO music, just tedious, mainly simulated sex scenes accompanied simply by moaning & groaning that go on and on and on. It's a test case that demonstrates how even the most banal or inappropriate background music did serve a purpose.