Shacking Up

The good news: SHACKING UP was shot by Joe Sarno on film. The really bad news: it's another pointless XXX all-sex clunker.

Previous "reviewer" on IMDb was perhaps intentionally misleading, mindlessly recommending this baby thanks to Tiffany Clark who "shines". Reality check: she has a bit part sucking & humping on screen for less than a minute, period, and Melanie Scott is similarly wasted in the same filler threesome.

Lead actress is in fact Rachel Ashley, whose massive rack was the best thing in the movie. Sarno lamely has Ashley in a white fur coat wandering around Central Park, voicing over the entire "plot" in narration. These exterior shots, shown like clockwork between 9, count 'em, 9 sex sequences, are lovely Manhattan in the autumn visuals, contrasting with the generic indoor porn that makes up the lion's share of the movie.

Rachel as Pam is one of four college girls, three of whom have kept in touch living in Manhattan. Here's the rundown: Jean (Gina Carrera) is a writer, Arden (Karen Summer) is in advertising while Pam our humble narrator started an import/export business specializing in antiques. This is all strictly voice-over -whenever we see the gals they are doing what comes naturally.

The soap operatic bed-hopping is hard to keep up with, though Pam's narration does give us a play-by-play. Fly in the ointment is the return of coed #4 Candice (Amber Lynn, who starred a few times for Sarno but never seems to get any dialog). Candice married a jock, Charles Windsor, but they divorced two years back. Arden caught Candice in bed with her husband Paul (George Payne) and has never forgiven her old sorority mate.

Plot sickens as Arden visits Charles (Paul Thomas) and balls him for dubious revenge. Later she taunts hubby Paul (not Thomas, but Payne -gotta keep these critters straight), who goes and has another tryst with Candice.

Jean and Pam have a lesbian scene, Pam's voice-over blaming it on the "bad influence" of Candice which has apparently driven all the gals over into Sarno's favorite state, nymphomania (I should say second favorite, but there's no possibility of incest in this film's lineup).

An anonymous guy (Sarno barely shows his face for half a second) shows up and makes Jean and Pam into a threesome. I deduced it was a dual role for an unknown actor who later pops up in the movie as Pam's business partner Derek.

Pam next hooks up with Paul (Payne again) in a very poorly acted, slapdash scene. Sarno's commitment to his craft tends to drift away in the later reels of these junkers, and this is a sign he's dozed off.

A group sex scene with Derek follows, featuring the cameos by Pam's accountant Cora Vincent (Tiffany Clark) and her secretary Lu Carson (Melissa Scott). Michael Knight arrives and Pam takes him to the bedroom for some one-on-one. We've already seen Knight in the teaser intro scene where he and guest artiste Jerry Butler (not assigned a role or character name at all) are humping Jean, who keeps her high heels on during sex, another Sarno-ism.

Unbelievably, the next bit of sex quota is filled by Arden and Candice suddenly letting bygones be bygones and engaging in some significant lesbian action. For contrast Eric, described as Pam's direct-mail manager, appears for a group sex scene with 3 blondes. At the finish Pam is fighting her impulses and gives in, heading to join in with the lesbians.

Not much meat on these bones, picked clean so frequently and fruitlessly by Joe in his Wilderness Years of the mid-'80s. It always struck me as disingenuous the way he and wife Peggy would pretend on their DVD commentary tracks to the classic softcore Sarno films that these XXX outings barely existed, but they have survived in all their non-glory to show how threadbare his thematic concerns really were.

Credits include "Joe Black", Joey Silvera's usual pseudonym, but Joey didn't show up for work on this one.

And she shines in this movie. She has ample help from Amber Lynn (always good) and Rachel Ashley to make this skinflick well worth watching. Who do you suppose Jeff La Touche, credited as the Director, really is?