Inside Amy

If you really hate boring, garden-variety sex films like I do, you should check out this early directorial effort by cinematographer Ron Garcia. This one isn't as surreal and bizarre as his wonderfully weird "The Toy Box", but it is just as disturbing. "Inside Amy" is the cautionary tale of a schlub lawyer who convinces his beautiful wife to join him on the swingers circuit. He turns out to be a dud, however, while she is very popular with both the husbands and the wives. This no doubt really happened many times in the 1970's and resulted in many a messy and painful divorce--this being a movie, however, our hero reacts quite differently (hint: an alternative title to this movie is "Swinger's Massacre"). The theme of this movie would be played for laughs in 80's comedies like "Eating Raoul" and "Terrorvision" and treated more seriously in recent retro-70's films like "The Ice Storm", "Boogie Nights", and "Auto-Focus", but it's refreshing to see it addressed here in a film of the time(even if in a rather implausible and exploitative manner). Aside from the mass murders in the last half of the movie, this is actually a very realistic sex film. It's not one of those hilariously moralistic exposes about the "consequences" of sex (abortion, disease etc), but unlike the typical brain-dead sex flick, it's also not afraid show the negative aspects of sexuality--jealously, insecurity, loneliness, guilt, remorse. (If it weren't for these things, real life probably would be a lot more like a porno movie). It's not a movie for everybody perhaps, but it's a lot better than your usual plot less, emotionless, and meaningless schlup-fest.

Swingers Massacre is the cinematic equivalent of a cocktail party that turns into a bar fight-it doesn't know whether to seduce you or punch you in the face. On paper, the concept is a corker: a sex-fueled revenge thriller with enough moral ambiguity to make your popcorn blush. But in execution? Let's just say it's more Basic Instinct 2 than Fatal Attraction.

The acting is a surprising highlight, with characters who feel more layered than you'd expect from a genre that often settles for cardboard cutouts. The direction is competent, particularly during the more suspenseful moments, but when it pivots to the sexploitation side of things, it's like a student driver trying to parallel park-awkward and a bit painful to watch.

The real problem is identity. Is this a steamy expose of swinging gone wrong or a gritty tale of vengeance? Neither the script nor the direction seems to have decided, leaving the film stranded between erotic thriller and grim crime drama. It's as if the filmmakers forgot that genres can mix if done with care-Kill Bill and Body Heat proved that.

Ultimately, Swingers Massacre swings hard but misses the mark, leaving viewers titillated but mostly bemused.

Inside Amy (1974)

1/2 (out of 4)

This here is a really awful movie about a husband who wants his wife Amy (Jan Mitchell) to join a swingers club with him. She doesn't want to but pretty much gives in after the husband begs. Once at the party Amy begins to dig all of the sex and soon every guy is wanting here, which doesn't sit well with the husband. Before long various swingers are being murdered.

Before making this picture, director Ronald Victor Garcia made THE TOY BOX, which was one of the strangest sexploitation movies ever made. I'm not exactly sure what he was thinking going into this movie but it's a complete and utter disaster. The worst thing you can ever do in an exploitation film is make it boring and that's exactly what this thing is as there's really not a single good moment from start to finish and there's some really questionable direction as well.

Most people probably became familiar with this under its alternate title SWINGERS MASSACRE or reading about it in Stephen Thrower's NIGHTMARE USA. What really is amazing about this movie is the fact that it's really, really tame. I'm not sure if the director was trying to make a legit movie but it's a complete bomb from start to finish. The sex scenes are all rather lame. Most of the violence takes place off screen. I think that the film was trying to be some sort of Hitchcock-like thriller with erotic undertones but it fails horribly.

What's more shocking is that Rene Bond, Uschi Digard and Marsha Jordan were cast in the film. All three are sexploitation legends who appeared in countless soft and hardcore films. All there are here yet for some reason none of them get naked! Why on Earth would you hire these three and then do nothing with them? What's even more shocking is that this mess clocks in at 105-minutes, which is about sixty-minutes too long. The incredibly slow pace and the awful performances are just the icing on the cake.

Not content to grind out junk, many pornographers attempt to "go straight" and fashion a real movie, but INSIDE AMY misfired terribly. Director Ron Garcia wisely didn't quit his day job, and remains a respected cameraman, most recently grinding out episodes of "Hawaii Five-O" and "Numb3rs".

But way back when, he took a flyer and produced, directed and edited this extremely dull opus. A parallel might be found in Robert Vincent O'Neill, also latterly in TV after directing drive-in movies and most like this one, THE PSYCHO LOVER. But he never had the temerity to hand in an exploitation feature running a whopping 103 minutes, approximately 30 minutes over the limit.

I caught this at a Cleveland drive-in back in the '70s, but had no memory of it other than a notation in my screening diary. The DVD reissue is dullsville.

AMY boasts a cast of top XXX & softcore starlets, not getting down. So what is the point of making fake porn? Is it merely an ego trip, or an attempt to widen one's horizons. Failing (miserably) at the latter, I have to chalk this up to Garcia's ego.

Case in point: INSIDE AMY features Rene Bond, Marsha Jordan and Uschi Digard, and none of them even remove their clothes, yet they are all cast as swingers, attending a nightly ritual of wife-swapping parties. Go figure. Story is pre-Viagra, as James R. Sweeney pressures his lovely wife Jan Mitchell to go with him to swingers' parties, to spice up their love life. He suffers from premature ejaculation, as we see in an early scene where he shoots his (softcore, implied) wad after humping wifey for a total of about 10 seconds.

They meet innumerable swinging couples at Filthy McNasty's nightclub, named for the classic 1961 Horace Silver hit introduced "Live from the Village Gate" on his Blue Note LP "Doin' the Thing". But we hear instead a rather catchy but unrelated song "Filthy McNasty" from a vocal group with organ led by a female singer, evidently created for this movie.

Many plot gimmicks fail to amuse, beginning with Sweeney inevitably striking out when they go to there first party. Wifey is a huge hit, humping all the guys there in succession, while Sweeney can't get it up at all with Marsha Jordan and just downs his sorrows with booze the rest of the evening. Humiliated he vows revenge and starts murdering all the other swingers.

This unpalatable premise throws the film into standard thriller mode, but minus the thrills. James R. Sweeney's flat performance in the central role is completely incompetent, and his miscasting merely becomes more & more evident: it would be comparable to casting Peter Riegert or Michael Lerner instead of Michael Rooker as HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER. The only explanation is obvious: vanity production.

Making the film worse is the tiresome and frankly idiotic procedural details of the cops on the case. Sweeney has painstakingly been shown from the beginning to be chums with them, so even these stupidos finally figure out that he's the mass murderer. I was completely bored out of my gourd by the time we belatedly reached the final freeze frame and the band came on screen to sing us out with a reprise of "Filthy McNasty".

There is a lesson in all this: don't hire Rene Bond and Uschi Digard to cameo in your movie with their clothes on!

Husband is bored and want to do some wife swapping, but when the groovy swinging life turns on the wife and not the husband. The husband goes out and kill the guys she slept with. No suspense, and no mystery. Just a string of sex scenes in this early 70's grinhouse film. Not recommeded.