Love Is Where It's At

Listed as Sidney Knight's first film as a director, the generically titled Love Is Where It's At leaves considerable room for improvement. It is poorly lit, the dialogue haphazardly post-synched, and the sloppy editing has shots placed in the wrong order. Result is of interest only to those completists wading through the entire Something Weird Catalog, one title after another (like me).

The credits are painted in live-action on the bare torso of actress Mary Cleave. She later washes them off (!) in the bathtub, and we know we're in for trouble when the soapy footage is so crudely edited together that the credits reappear on her after they've already been cleansed away. This is beyond a simple continuity goof -it reflects the familiar "who cares" attitude of so many pornographers towards their audience.

Minimal storyline has Sylvania hiring private dick Kane to find her ex-con husband Rick before he can kill her. Kane beds down with her and practically every other woman he encounters before heroically confronting Rick.

The female cast is unattractive, and poorly selected, as Sylvania in her fake wig looks way too much like another character May (in her fake wig), more confusing than interesting. By the time this baby was released, full frontal nudity was appearing in sex films (see the Findlays' efforts for example), but director Knight was way too timid here, having the actresses contort themselves to avoid showing their private parts, and having lead Alastair Burr keep his pants on even during the simulated sex scenes.

Apart from the novel credits' sequence, the only fun moment is when Burr mugs at the camera during a sex bout, almost a "Tom Jones" type of wink at the audience. Otherwise this is a boring, unerotic exercise featuring poor acting and awkwardly staged action/shootout scenes.

I thought Knight did a decent job with his later I Feel It Coming feature, and highly recommend his final hardcore assignment, the nasty (and experimental) The Debauchers. His fake documentary Sexual Customs in Scandinavia is a total clunker.