Eighteen and Anxious

No one accuses the porn industry of subtlety, and Exihibit A for its "in your face" approach is EIGHTEEN AND ANXIOUS, a cautionary incest tale.

Key element is casting balding Jake Teague as heroine Betsy's daddy Harold. He was amusing doing a geriatric sex scene in THE PERFECT POSITION, and is introed here making love to wife Gretchen Ray, but in voice-over all he can think of is balling his daughter instead.

Teague looks really old and had quite a career in tasteless porn films, as well as joining R. Bolla/Robert Kerman on location in the occasional Italian cannibal-gore movie. I don't know what the fans thought back when, but I guess he was an embodiment of dirty-old-man wish fulfillment.

Second scene has him getting his wish, fingering and then mouth-humping poor sleeping Betsy. He skedaddles before she wakes up, or so we thought...

Her parents throw an 18th birthday party for Betsy and daddy Harold is mighty irritable, forbidding her to go out with her friends. He even slaps her down when she objects, cuing Betsy to pack her bags and run away from home.

At this point the film wanders into cloud cuckoo land, as the anonymous filmmakers experienced an acid flashback or something, and the story goes off the rails. Busty Marcia Minor as Chelsea befriends Betsy on the street and initiates her to the glories of female wrestling (!).

With black partner Shirley (played by Verna Quick), the girls practice wrestling holds under the tutelage of Coach Biff (Dave Ruby, NY-based porn's lookalike equivalent to Ed O'Neill). He has a memorable scene servicing Shirley and Chelsea simultaneously, that combines sex with athletics.

Naturally, Betsy has a lesbian sex scene with bosomy Chelsea when not attending to her wrestling education.

Returning home Betsy finds daddy all forlorn; mom has had a breakdown and is in a mental home. Betsy reassures dad not to worry, that things will be back like they used to be with the two living together.

SPOILERS ALERT:

She has sex with daddy and then the SWV print shreds to unintelligibility, but there are enough frames extant to show a semblance of a violent twist ending. (Subsequent to writing this review I saw a newer ABA DVD version which has the original ending intact: suffice it to say that her wrestling training paid off when it came time to permanently settle the score with daddy for abusing her back when.)

Erica Havens as Betsy is not particularly attractive, cast here for her ability to look borderline underage, and for me she pretty much sunk the film in its tracks. She made many films (e.g., title role in THE PITFALLS OF BUNNY), under many aliases, but I don't see why she kept getting cast. Certainly Marcia Minor sticks out in the underwhelming cast, and it is nice to see she has an IMDb following, namely the knowledgeable Brussels-based retro porn devotee.

Music track is a mishmash, including Francis Lai's now hard-to-take theme from A MAN AND A WOMAN, Nino Rota's THE GODFATHER theme and TV's theme from S.W.A.T. Something Weird's DVD-R on Vol. 88 of its Dragon Art Theatre series titled EIGHTEEN & HORNY runs a scant 49 minutes, but didn't leave me wishing to sit through a longer copy.