Watching "Super Sex" I felt like a baseball player breaking out of a prolonged batting slump. After going about 0 for 20 viewing stinkers directed by Troy Benny aka Carlos Tobalina, I put this new Vinegar Syndrome DVD into my player and was pleasantly surprised (almost flabbergasted) by a high-quality porn film.
Nice aspect of Tobalina owning his own filmmaking equipment and studio is that the 1986 feature is shot on 35mm film, rather than the videotape then an industry standard. This also means that starlets of the time, such as Melissa Melendez and Shari St. Clair, are preserved at least once on motion picture film.
Simple format has 2 shrinks (Sasha Gabor plus a familiar face who isn't credited) listening to the sex problems, usually disturbing dreams, of pretty female patients, in a series of crisp, thankfully brief (by modern standards) XXX vignettes. The sex scenes are well-performed by the gals, often with the shrinks or other actors, and thankfully missing is Tobalina's usual contrived, stupid stories. Film's simplicity, without action scenes or various locations, turns out to be a big plus - for once the prolific director doesn't bite off more than he can chew.
Movie chalks up 10 distinct sex vignettes, some with repeat patients. Some stars are uncredited, including St. Clair as a horny receptionist who listens in via the office intercom to the patients' lurid tales and masturbates; she also joins in with the doc for additional "therapy".
Jeannie Pepper, the most popular Black star of this period, is uncredited as a patient who is hypnotized by Dr. Rosenberg (Sasha Gabor) to imagine she is actually having sex with the movie star she dreams about. Tobalina's joke is simple but quite effective, since the shrink Rosenberg trades in his bad grey-dye job hairdo for Gabor's usual black locks and presto change-o! It's Burt Reynolds!
There's also an interesting incest fantasy as a big-breasted blonde patient Nicolde relates her dream about having sex with her parents, when they were 20 years younger, and we're treated to a hot threesome involving mom Trinity Loren and dad Robert Bullock. This quality scene is ruined by a typical Tobalina failing (he doubled as cinematographer) as the first half of the sex action is blurred (just a tiny oval in middle of frame crisp and visible) with a clouding effect to represent it being a dream. This gimmick is arbitrarily dropped for clear vision in the second half, but shouldn't have been employed at all.
Another typical flaw is easily overlooked, namely Carlos editing a sex scene out of sequence involving a repeat patient -he is never very careful about his footage as long as it delivers the daily requirement of explicit sex. Best thing in this movie is the total absence of his usual boring orgy.
This film apparently sank like a stone, coming out after theatrical domestic use of porn had been supplanted by home video. It's ironic that one of his best films is among the least known while famous stinkers still attract modern interest via their name recognition, but thankfully Vinegar Syndrome seems to be releasing everything. I hope they get access and issue his earlier work, mainly soft-core, which at least on paper is of more interest than his assembly line orgies -I'm thinking of rarities like "Infrasexum", "Sexual Ecstasy of the Macumba", "Tonite I Love You", "Last Tango in Acapulco" and "Sexual Kung Fu in Hong Kong".
