Lusting Hours

Made to look like a documentary and narrated with a bombastic voice. A waste of time, everything is false, unconvincing.

Infrequently appraised,'The Lusting Hours' remains an esoteric, modestly titillating, strangely enjoyable trip into the decadent midnight movie milieu of deviant peccadilloes, rustic, insalubrious love shacks, lacklustre burlesque, and theatrical, uproariously camp-looking cat fights!!! This hyperbolic, pseudo-docco roughie is narrated by the altogether mysterious, and quite magnificently monikered, 'Gun Gun Sharper'. This stark, not unduly lustful, joyfully jarring, frequently unlovely collage of bawdy B/W imagery is jarringly juxtaposed with a hilariously didactic voice over which endows this grubby grindhouse 'expose' of the sensual aristocrat, the degenerated, lavatorially languorous, permanently peeping pornographer, and spank-happy call-girl an additional frisson of weirdness!!! While the erotic gratification gleaned watching such an antique, luridly exploitative work is, of course, entirely subjective, the outlandish entertainment quotient proves vertiginously high, again, due in no small part to the sublime narration skills of the singularly sardonic voice artiste, Gun Gun Sharper!

'The time is now! Not yesterday or tomorrow! While the body is young and the brain can still be dulled by alcohol!'

This faux documentary manages to be dull and interesting at the same time. Interesting more because of the way the various aspects of paid for sex are presented rather any clever insights (of which there are none) but dull because of a seeming total lack of interest in certain sections. This is split into three segments, House Girls, Street Girls and Call Girls and some rather decent shots of Times Square add a little much wanted colour throughout. Also throughout is a pompous, seemingly serious narration, by Lem that is absolutely hilarious. The two directors also produce, edit and film the proceedings and Lem, as well as narrating plays the stills photographer, with a prominent part in the first segment and more significantly the hustler's 'girlfriend'. The amount of time devoted to the hustler/male client in the second section comes as a great surprise and when we see him back at home preparing to be whipped by none other than good old Lem in drag we begin to wonder where this might go next. However despite a series of close ups of whips and the narrator rambling on about a pit of despair we simply cut to a guy being massaged, badly. The Findlay's are also involved but whilst this promises to get rough it doesn't really go down that road. The pious narrator would never allow it.

Maybe someone thought it would be a good idea to use a documentary style to cover their sexploitation. If so, they missed the mark as this was way more documentary than sexploitation.

It covered the sex trade in rural areas, streetwalkers in the city, and call girls. It was interesting in the variety of services it covered, but there was nothing that my granny would object to watching.

I was surprised when I saw that Michael and Roberta Findlay were involved; not as directors, but as actors. Maybe if Findlay had directed, it would have been a more titillating experience.

A real disappointment.