Certified Mail

Sort of a followup to BADGE '69', Leslie Murray is back in CERTIFIED MAIL, playing second banana to Sandi Foxx. Murray was a NYC cop on the beat having sexual adventures in the first movie while this time, wearing virtually the same cheap costume, Foxx is a lady mail carrier having sexual adventures.

Film is available from two competing DVD companies, on Vol. 112 from Something Weird's Dragon Art Theatre series as well as a three-pack from After Hours Cinema. The AHC edition stupidly letterboxes the movie, thereby removing about 20% of the image at top & bottom of frame, in the usual hucksterism that promotes fake "widescreen" to appeal to folks impressed by the new shape of TV screens.

On a very fake and cheap studio set pretending to be an alley, two rapists grab Foxx in the opening scene and laboriously have their way with her. One is Don Allen while the other guy is an unidentified short-short black actor, so Don makes fun of his height.

Their purported "highlight" proves to be a bungled double-penetration scene where the mismatched closeups show only a single penetration, namely the black guy having anal sex with her. Payoff is relatively disgusting, as after the real money shot another closeup is inserted in which poor Foxx's posterior has been "painted" with excrement, apparently taking a leaf out of Pasolini's creative use of milk chocolate in his landmark finale SALO. I shudder to think how lowly a job working as production manager on a XXX porn film must have been.

A seemingly unrelated scene has Murray doing a smooth karate move on Marc Stevens an another unidentified guy who try to rape her in a cheap, under-dressed exercise studio. However, no sooner has she thwarted them, she's balling them. Unusual aspect of this typically slapdash Leonard Kirtman NYC production is cross-cutting between both women performing fellatio on two men at once, not in the patented weird body configuration method of Shaun Costello, but rather just straight ahead mouth cramming. Like the rest of the film it's not sensual or erotic, just mechanical sex.

The gimmick knitting together these and subsequent vignettes is Foxx doggedly making her appointed rounds, showing up at each location where we see sex performed. She arrives in due course at the karate studio and joins in for a foursome. Foxx next delivers a package for a mom who is absent, so she humps the young son instead, in a room filled with vintage porn posters. Similarly, masturbating guest star Ultramax takes on her grocery delivery boy, Jack Webb from the earlier BADGE '69' film, and I was able to finally pin him down by his distinctive Sandy Dempsey-style butterfly on thigh tattoo.

Their sex scene is interrupted by Foxx, delivering a package containing a dildo to Ultra. Foxx has a lesbian scene with Ultra and then Webb surprisingly balks at joining in for a threesome, claiming he didn't want to do a "fag scene", then explicitly connoting lesbianism as the "same thing". With that pay check from Kirtman hanging over his head he relents and the result is one of the film's many fake money shots.

Ultra gets tongue tied and badly flubs her lines, declaring "We have a female lady", with Foxx having to correct her, "you mean a female mail lady".

This adds up to a pretty tedious quickie, typical of NYC porn but poorly made. As a Murray fan I was clearly disappointed, and it was a mistake to give Foxx, usually relegated to bit parts, a leading role. For example, Foxx with a crappy streaked wig played Annie Sprinkle's mother (!) in a non-sex role in Doris Wishman's Satan WAS A LADY, and could barely handle that minor assignment.

Soundtrack is cornily filled with thematic songs, all pirated, such as Elvis warbling "Return to Sender", the standard "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter", the Beatles singing "Please Mr. Postman" (why settle for the Marvelettes when you can get the Beatles for free), doo-wop hit "Why Don't You Write Me" and just for pointlessness sake, Stan Getz performing his hit "Desafinado". Most of these are played several times as filler.