I never saw her during her heyday as a soft porn movie star, but catching up with dozens of Marsha Jordan performances some 40 years later I'm hooked. She is definitely the doyenne of her genre.
HER ODD TASTES is a quite successful movie made by her frequent director Don Davis. It's a sequel to a lost film titled ODD TASTES, and judging from the AFI Catalogue's synopsis it would seem to be almost a remake (or rebooting) of the earlier project.
Film opens with a bang, with Jordan as Christine Hunter and a gal pal Lisa (luscious Capri) having a sensual lesbian scene -the battle of the blondes & busts. After implied cunnilingus (with Capri delivering a screaming orgasm worthy of a Joe Sarno actress), Jordan writes in her journal the revelation that this was incest -the duo are sisters!
She's left town and started a new life as a cordless vibrator saleslady, door to door. (This sounds comical, but the film is played straight.) She visits the house of Charles Odman (sinister protagonist of the first film, ODD TASTES), and when he tries to rape her at knife-point she accidentally stabs him to death in self-defense.
Jordan delivers full-frontal-nudity as she runs away, clad only in a loose bathrobe, getting a lift from good Samaritan John Franklin (Michael Perrotta, an effective character actor). He turns out to be a publisher, and volunteers to remove any incriminating evidence from the scene of the crime. He returns with Odman's journal, requesting that she continue the dead man's lifelong research concerning the ultimate in pain & pleasure. Jordan chooses to emphasize the pleasure aspect, but this is an obvious foreshadowing that pain will ensue in due course.
She embarks on a globe-hopping journey to retrace Odman's steps, courtesy of some obvious stock footage, all of Jordan's scenes being shot on cheap, generic studio sets. (It is amusing that the 1976 AFI Catalogue was apparently bamboozled, listing half a dozen countries where the first ODD TASTES was supposedly shot.) First stop is Hong Kong, where lovely Sandra Wing (an actress who looks like she might be Japanese rather than Chinese) plays a brothel madam who oils up Jordan for massaging and makes love to her.
Next stop is South Africa, where she unwisely gets picked up at a bar by porn vet Steve Vincent, leader of a satanic cult. Jordan attends a party where she is doped and gang-raped on an altar by 10 or so members of the cult including several women (featuring mixed-combo action). Most familiar player here is gap-toothed blonde Terri Johnson, in one of her first feature roles.
Jordan wanders through California fields & forest pretending to be the Bush, ending up in the camp of a great white hunter and his son Mark. She plays MILF to young Mark and when daddy spots them humping, he decides to rape poor Jordan. Mark shoots his pop, another case of "accidental homicide" I guess.
Jordan travels to Tunis by way of Nairobi and hooks up with a local sheik, a bearded bloke who looks a bit like Gabe Kaplan! The sheik's European wife does a sexy belly dance, and there's a threesome, with the cast sensually covered in oil.
Back home in L.A. she narrates from her journal how depraved she's become. Davis's script wasn't proofed very well, as Marsha refers to her "incestual" relationship with sis Lisa, rather than incestuous.
After a pleasant bubble-bath, she checks in with publisher Hamilton, and they make love. I won't spoil the film's finale, with thunder rumbling on the soundtrack, but suffice it to say that Davis's twist ending includes sadism.
Jordan is terrific throughout the picture, and despite its very chintzy sets it plays well. Unlike most pornographers, a high proportion of Davis's movies are quite good, and I hope someday to catch his magnum opus, currently a lost film, THE DAISY CHAIN.
