The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill

Lord- where do we begin? A Hollywood "B" movie with softcore pretensions tries to take on the English aristocratic tradition- and the result is a cinematic road accident.

Why do Americans trying to emulate that the English upper classes sound so kitsch? The general effect is listening to a violin with a broken string playing to an empty auditorium. Let the Brits do the Brits- please! Anyway, this appalling little number fails on almost every level. There is certainly no class, no acting of any description- nor sufficient nudity or naughtiness to make this worthwhile. There was a modest budget for which we are all grateful.

So I can't recommend this film on any level. Do not confuse it with the racier other "Fanny Hill" outpourings which came out over the following 20 years. This is just dull. Even for 1966.

The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966)

1/2 (out of 4)

Kissey Hill (Stacey Walker) is the daughter of the notorious Fanny Hill and she plans on following her in mother's footsteps as she opens a prostitution house where she tries to cater to the richest of rich men.

THE NOTORIOUS DAUGHTER OF FANNY HILL is a softcore film that I'm sure made a lot of people happy back in the day since it allowed them to see some beautiful women naked and in color no less. With that said, the film holds very little interest today for a number of reasons but the biggest is the fact that the film is deadly dull and its 74-minute running time seems about ten times that length. Even worse is the fact that the movie really doesn't have anything going for it outside of its star.

Looking through her credits on this site, it doesn't seem that Walker stayed in the business for very long. From the range of her films it seems as if she showed up in the big city, worked in films for a year or two and then left. She's certainly the best thing about the picture but sadly she's given nothing to do. Just check out the early sequence where she flirts with a man while the two of them eats. This scene is just so long and so boring and it never comes close to being erotic.

The nudity picks up as the film moves along but by the time it really starts to flow I'm going to guess that most people will have already hit the eject button or at least fast-forwarded through the film. The color does look great as does Walker but that's about all this thing has going for it.

I love Something Weird Video and its vast panoply of strangeness. That said, this DVD is not amongst their best. When I watch a movie that I know is bad, I want the sort of bad movie that my friends and I can sit and mercilessly heckle. And certainly this movie is very bad. The problem with "The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill" is that it is not quite bad enough. It is low budget, fairly tame, but moderately competent softcore semiporn. Skin flicks on Cinemax are racier than this dated outing. What this film really accomplishes is being really magnificently boring.

The second offering in the DVD, "The Head Mistress" is somewhat better at being bad to the point of funny, but still mostly manages to be exhaustively boring softcore. The DVD is also loaded with extras and the trailers here came the closest to making me feel like I didn't waste my money. But overall, I believe this DVD is not worth the effort. Instead pickup the endlessly entertaining "Beauties and Beasts" Box Set.