Hot Erotic Dreams

I liked HOT EROTIC DREAMS, a not very well made soft porn film from the NYC school of the '60s which has escaped the notice of most fans. I'm not recommending it, but my description should let the potential viewer know if it holds any points of interest.

The film is unusual in that the dominant contrast throughout is an excellent original jazz score credited to "Al Cotton" (a pseudonym). The lengthy jazz tracks (opener runs 12 minutes and is repeated late in the film) run on regardless of the action. It's the opposite of "real film" scoring, where the music underscores the footage -here the jazz plays overlapping scene to scene, oblivious to what we're watching.

Creaky format has an attractive young woman Gina, who reminded me (and only me) of Dianne Wiest, buying a sex book entitled "How to Do" at a quaint Manhattan bookstore, whose bearded, British-accented owner breaks the 4th wall and introduces us to the story conspiratorially. The rest of the film consists of her dreams and daydreams, all of an erotic nature, loosely tied together by almost random reminders of her real life, whether it be masturbating in bed, having lunch on a park bench or returning to the bookstore. Had more care been afforded to planning and properly editing the film, I would call it a winner.

These fantasies are generally mundane, such as a swinger (who seems to have been a Playboy mag subscriber) seducing her at his bachelor pad, or a tame orgy where she's in a group watching stag films and then watching a girl, who's barely 4 feet tall, do a striptease dance. Two odd dreams consist of a boor who talks her ear off about a gangster movie they've just attended (evidently a comment on the escalated violence since BONNIE AND CLYDE was released), who paws her unsuccessfully; next dream has him clad only in tights in a white-on-white room barking orders at her, culminating in his getting an off-screen blow job.

Film is surprisingly timid for porn, as there is a light bondage dream wherein a busty, no-nonsense (but appealing nonetheless) lesbian undresses Gina and is about to have sex with her when we get a fadeout instead.

Overall mood of the film appealed to me in an abstract way, and the jazz was stimulating throughout. It's played by a quartet led by an alto saxophonist, but adhering closely to the sound of early '60s John Coltrane Quartet, before his more adventurous work (right down to the alto player quoting "Out of This World", the '40s movie standard that Trane so beautifully made his own). On one track the pianist does the most accurate McCoy Tyner imitation I've ever heard -McCoy was then and now a seminal influence on jazz piano, but all of his followers, from Stanley Cowell and Lonnie Liston Smith to John Hicks and Jimmy Hopps, developed their own styles, but the track here is just carbon copying.

Tech credits suffer from some lighting problems and bad matching scene to scene, typical of an extremely low budget outing. The final credit card is unusual, reading: "THE END, c1968 Cosmos Films, New York City, USA". Yes, there was plenty of indie production in the Big Apple way before the current indie movement got rolling in the '80s.