Quite ambitious but not entirely successful -that estimation sums up much of Damiano's later works like this one and BEYOND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS. As has been said of other innovators like Fellini and Bergman, even a misfire from such an influential talent as Gerard Damiano is more important than any of the best work of his lesser contemporaries, so NIGHT HUNGER deserves to be seen and re-examined 30 years later.
For me the film was quite uneven, but aiming high at the tail end of the Porno Chic era, just as video production was about to take over. His structure starts with a Bunuelian cover story, amazingly folksy and targeted to draw in a beer- guzzling, "let's go see a dirty movie" audience of guys. Chubby, amiable rural barkeep hands customer Jerry Butler a series of tall tales about the local Blair Mansion, not haunted but notorious for the sex-crazed family that lived there through three generations.
Embedded monochrome flashbacks within flashbacks illustrate his stories, beginning with the partriarch Eric Edwards, working in tandem with wife Honey Wilder in the Victorian era; then daughter Sharon Mitchell running a brothel in the house during the Depression, and finally grand-daughter Sharon Kane as a vocalist with a band using the home as a music studio. Present day it's turned into a convent of sort for cloistered nuns, but oddly enough Damiano doesn't show that incarnation at all. Film ends cryptically with Butler in a phone booth making a mysterious phone call, apparently taking these b.s. stories as intel for some project he's working on.
After the ending we are treated to a brief, cute, fictional "behind-the-scenes" vignette where Damiano impersonates himself giving Candida Royalle direction on some future movie - removing the fourth wall. I recall hating this finale when I first saw the film three decades ago.
At times HUNGER conjures up the best of Damiano's work as in MISS JONES and MISS AGGIE a decade before, with purple-prose dialog (often unsettling in its explicitness) and pushing the boundaries performances by the leading actors. Edwards as papa Blair has the affliction of satyriasis which he hands down to his offspring in the form of nymphomania. The seriousness with which Damiano treats this topic is amazing, and the three talented actors give performances that, just like Georgina Spelvin as Miss Jones, deserve to be studied and admired by mainstream thesps.
Mitch is the most definitive, and one of her career highlights, while Kane has a field day, incorporating a split personality (named respectively Slut Pig and MaryLou) enacted via CCTV for the alter ego, insatiable sexuality and even singing a song, as well as incorporating quite amusing stream of consciousness cultural references.
The team of Edwards and Wilder is less adventurous, but quite polished in presenting Victorian personages that are believable rather than quaint.
Verging on high camp at times, based on Damiano's often over-the-top dialog, film's greatest asset qualifies it for my recently concocted Jazz Porn genre, with Eric Bouchet's varied keyboards musical score constantly changing to fit the scene and always invigorating -virtually a classic underscore that deserves separate recognition.
Like Orson Welles, Damiano's later career has been largely ignored, but films like this one plus his better-known video work like ALPHA BLUE, cry out for consideration. It is unfortunate that the most prominent archival video companies of the past two decades have focused on porno hacks instead of key figures like him, giving a highly misleading presentation of the genre's history (currently Stevens and Tobalina are all the rage with their assembly-line junkers).
