Carnal Olympics

Carnal Olympics (1983)

** (out of 4)

Herschel Savage is a pervert masquerading as a magazine representative who cons Gail Sterling and Lynx Canon into performing in a "Carnal Olympics" to see who is the better porn star.

CARNAL OLYMPICS is another "gem" from the prolific Carlos Tobalina who some consider to be the Edward D. Wood, Jr. of the adult cinema. I personally wouldn't go that far but his movies are certainly weird and cheap to say the least. This one here, much like the rest, has a lot of group action going on and it ends with a major bang, if you will.

I was really let down by this film because a sexual Olympics could have been made rather fun but that's not the case here. I thought the first couple "games" were all rather stupid and including scenes like the woman seducing a police officer. Yawn. The finale happens with dozens of men are lined up on the side of a pool and the ladies must finish them with their "money shot" going into a little red bucket. You'll certainly never see red buckets the same way.

CARNAL OLYMPICS certainly wasn't awful as it at least kept me watching but I do feel that the story was just boring and there wasn't much life in the sex scenes. I guess the huge gang bang at the end has the same entertainment level as a FACES OF DEATH movie where you know you really shouldn't be watching but it just keeps drawing you into looking.

Clever bastard Herschel Savage convince Gail Sterling and Lynx Canon to go head to head in s sex competition. This sets up a series of group scenes that are the typical dire, lackluster stuff that Tobalina is notorious for. Aside from the three cast members mentioned, none of the other performers are anything special, and not even the core cast aside from Savage get much to do. This would be completely forgettable, if not for the final poolside orgy that kind of has to be seen to be believed. This isn't a recommendation, more of an acknowledgement that even the worst Tobalina can manage to stand out.

Pornographer Carlos Tobalina steadfastly believes that orgy scenes are the epitome of eroticism, but he went one step further in CARNAL OLYMPICS and MAI LIN VS. SERENA to celebrate sperm per se. I'm afraid the guy had/has? a screw loose.

Watching this mechanical, deadly movie reminded me of a long-forgotten debate regarding male images in pornography made for a hetero consumer. Both magazines (I recall Club Intl. as a ground-breaker in the '70s) and to a lesser extent films were reluctant to feature men in pictorials alongside the beautiful female models. Stag films had always explicitly spotlighted the man and his member as part of the shock value, but men using mainstream porn to fantasize about sex and women typically did not want the (competing) male image to interfere.

The conversion of cinema from soft-core to hardcore content circa 1970 made the films (and many but clearly not the majority of magazines) relatively cock- centric, raising the question at that time whether this was an appeal, not very subtle, to a gay or at least closet gay audience. In a traditional sense, now the male was the sex object and the woman often elevated to a pedestal, though conventional wisdom and experts continued (probably to this day) to focus on the female as the exploited party. My point is that introducing the man as a sort of disembodied dick is objectification way beyond what was applied to the female model (with her fan club & following, makeup/wig and other beautifications).

Since Tobalina's experiments in this new genre in the '80s there were a few gang-bang stunt videos produced, all of a gross-out nature. Watching Annabel Chong take on hundreds of guys one after the other or the famous HOUSTON 500/620 is a grueling undertaking, and such product is popular (to my way of thinking) in the same way a fringe audience has grown up around pseudo- documentaries like the FACES OF DEATH series -the analogy being the little death (ejaculation) vs. real death as entertainment. In both cases eroticism is wholly absent, with fetishism and documenting "this is real" (the pernicious fallacy of the cinema verite movement, forerunner of current ersatz "Reality TV") substituted.

My lengthy preamble to this review now segues to addressing CT's film specifically. Its one-joke premise is simple (and typically repeated a second time verbally verbatim for the slow-witted viewer): Herschel Savage poses as a magazine rep staging a sex contest to determine who is the hottest starlet in the Adult Industry, randomly selecting Lynx Canon (she won in my book) and Gayle Sterling. Why these two only Tobalina knows, but in a sense it is irrelevant because he gives them teams of a few other miscellaneous (unidentified) women as helpers, or almost co-equals, in the contest.

Winner gets $50,000, loser only $2,000. These "olympics" consist of stupid competitions, retroactively similar to an equally stupid and unentertaining Score Group video pitting various surgically enhanced models like Minka and Maxi Mounds against each other 20 years later in MEGABOOB OLYMPICS.

After tons of filler, poorly photographed in Tobalina's usual master shot orgy stagings, the movie literally climaxes in a staging outdoors of four mattresses set next to a pool where Gayle, Lynx and two femme partners hump literally dozens of guys. The men, some famous (like Jon Martin and Michael Morrison) stand around stroking their own dicks in lieu of the fluffers employed for the modern video versions of this nonsense, and CT even has closeups panning their limp dicks admiringly. Clearly this is homo-eroticism snuck into a "mainstream" porn feature under the radar.

Savage brings out two orange pails and rather sloppily (no more sloppy than Carlos's film technique) the guys ejaculate on the women or hopefully towards the buckets to determine a winner. It's no surprise when everybody is worn out that Savage announces with a smirk that it was all a joke and that he's punk'd the two starlets. They get mad and in long-shot (CT loves those cheap masters) pour the buckets of white fluid over Savage's head and storm off in a huff. Final gag is Savage improvising along the lines of "I'm a masochist" wanting the girls to beat him up, not satisfied with the on-screen fake humiliation of being doused with I don't know what the production manager or assistant director devised as substitute (prop) semen.

Fans of this junk will undoubtedly argue, along the lines of followers of MONDO CANE and its hundreds of imitations, that it is fun to watch what depths of self- debasement humans will sink to in order to make a buck. And not just the humans on screen, but particularly the humans, like Carlos Tobalina and his faithful South American Indian companion Fernando "Tonto" Fortes, behind the camera.

This modern, or perhaps post-post-modern, attitude is best expressed in the witty asides submitted to IMDb by CT's '70s East Coast peer Shaun Costello, who considers working for the Mafia, recruiting girls off the street to appear in a porn movie, and delivering intentionally mocking-the-audience entertainment was fun and something he's proud of. I'm frankly ambivalent about Shaun's achievements, having randomly enjoyed some of his work (watched in theaters without a clue as to who the auteur was) back in the '70s. I can't say the same about Tobalina, a certifiably untalented but stuck-up (in his own mind) pornographer.