The California Connection

The California Connection (1973)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

A young woman is kidnapped so Peter Galore (Rick Cassidy) goes after her and quickly finds himself in the middle of a lot of sleaze. No matter where he goes to search for the girl he finds someone willing to do a little bit of the naughty with him.

Before making this low-budget porn film, director Frank Q. Dobbs had previously made ENTER THE DEVIL, which would become somewhat of a cult title after it was placed on the Video Nasties list. As far as this film here goes, I'll be honest and admit that there really wasn't a very detailed story and in fact at times I didn't know what was going on.

If you want some story with your porn then you'll certainly be disappointed but if you're just looking for a bunch of random sex scenes then there are plenty of them here. The only problem is that I found all of them to be poorly shot and there's no doubt that none of them were overly erotic. Cassidy gets to be the lucky one as he is featured in the majority of the scenes and the director at least managed to get him some attractive women to bang.

The film attempts to be an action movie as well as the porn but it doesn't do a very good job with that. The director made a rather interesting film in ENTER THE DEVIL but this sophomore effort is rather forgettable.

Other than the hambone antics of William Margold, I enjoyed THE California CONNECTION, a low-budget porn effort that tried to inject some action footage and storyline into the XXX proceedings. Especially for Rick Cassidy fans it's a must.

Cassidy is the super stud here, playing a hero named Peter Galore who, when not screwing every girl in sight, is valiantly trying to save a kidnapped young girl Miss Atwater. Villainess is ably played by Tallie Cochrane as Glory Hole, working for creepy Bill Margold - an idiotic mustache-twister of the old school, who likes to bark out orders. His moronic, uniformed minions are very unappealing male sex performers, leaving the entertainment to Rick.

Among the real beauties on display are Cyndee Summers (very attractively styled) and Barbara Bourbon. The fight scenes and action footage of Rick hopping into his car and racing around are very poorly done, but at least they tried (compared to the usual 1-day claustrophobic wonder).

Since Rick is involved in many, many sex scenes he doesn't do any money shots, with the recurring motif his ability to go from flaccid to erect over & over under the tutelage of different actresses. With recasting of the other male roles (especially jettisoning the annoying Margold) and pumping in a decent budget this could have been a real winner.

Filmmakers are anonymous, but one unsolved mystery is camera-work credited by IMDb to Jesse Wayne, a veteran Hollywood stuntman. He apparently worked on a handful of porn projects, but it would be interesting to find out about the crossover (in general) between the mainstream and XXX divisions of the entertainment biz as evidenced by his odd participation. Certainly he would not want to take credit for Rick's stunt work!