I blow hot & cold regarding the spate of silent porn films released 40 years back, when shooting MOS and adding narration was a common practice. RAQUEL'S MOTEL is a good example of the format.
I found it far superior to the many MOS movies of pornographer Nick Millard, who made the mistake of adding pretentious, flowery purple-prose voice-overs to his work.
The anonymous director of RAQUEL'S MOTEL opted for a more interesting and effective strategy. Each cast member, instead of doing a dumb play-by-play, accompanies the sex scene with anecdotes recalling earlier sexual experiences. The writing approximates that of an old "stroke book" or men's magazine porn fiction, designed to arouse the viewer imaginatively by telling a suggestive story. The visuals provide the soft porn optical stimulation.
Uschi Digard, whose voice-over is that of an all-American girl Raquel (no accent) used her inheritance to buy the title L.A. fleabag hotel. Newlyweds John (Ron Darby) and Barbara (Nora Wieternik) ask her for a room, and get down to humping, with voyeur Raquel outside their window peeping.
Both male and female full-frontal nudity is shown, with Darby sporting a hard-on. All the sex is simulated, though the Something Weird Video runs seven minutes short of the AFI Catalog 1961-70 reported running time, and there are jarring splices at crucial moments, particularly during the simulated fellatio footage.
Raquel returns to her room to masturbate in front of her mirror, definitely worth the price of admission for her fans. Her voice-over is fairly dirty, recalling watching her mom sluttishly seducing her dad.
Next day she meets Barbara outside and they go for a walk, stopping off to buy a foot-long hot dog for some suggestive "eating from both ends" action. I was surprised to see the dog with relish & pickle priced at 55 cents in 1970; it's inflated only 3 or 4 times in 40 years when so many other staples, ranging from a gallon of milk to a carton of eggs to the price of college tuition, have gone up 20 times or more in price. (I'm not even counting a pack of cigarettes!)
Back at the hotel, buxom chambermaid Maria Arnold gets John worked up as she bends over to make up the room, cueing some heavy duty marital infidelity, only one week into the marriage. This hot & heavy action is cross-cut with Raquel and Barbara having a lengthy lesbian sex bout back in Raquel's room, with effective first-person intimacy of Barbara's closeups staring straight at the camera.
John's voice-over is all about incest, recalling seeing his 16 and 18-year-old sisters making love one night, and then entering their room to have them teach him the finer points. The gals come in and see John humping the chambermaid, and join in for a satisfying orgy finale. Maria gets to take over the narration and recount how she was gang-raped at age 14 by bikers. Sloppy filmmaking has one of her story lines repeated by mistake on the soundtrack.
Oddest touch here is John wearing one black and one brown sock during his sex scenes with Maria and then the group. Film ends suddenly, likely due to the extant print getting chewed up in the projectors long ago.
Maria, Uschi and Nora are all the same type -dark, huge-breasted and alluring, so having all three together starring in a movie is fairly spectacular.
This was released circa 1970 by Distribpix, which oddly enough is now planning to reissue some of its ancient catalog on DVD, including various Joe Sarno titles. I hope they come up with a full-length, better quality version of this baby.
