As he admits in the interview on the DVD release, THE EROTIC MR. ROSE was made by Nick Millard as an imitation of Russ Meyer's breakthrough hit THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS. Why it took him 5 years to come up with this desultory knockoff is a mystery, but its poor quality is typical of Nick's work.
Using the pseudonym "Philip Miller", and with his dad as associate producer, Nick apparently thought that random black & white footage of comic Hermie Rose acting silly could be appended to several color "solo" peep show loops of beautiful women, and the resulting package serve as suitable filler at adult theaters and burlesque houses of 1964. "No Refunds" posted at the door was a mandatory warning due to the existence of junk like this.
The formula of shooting MOS, adding jazz background music, plus an annoying voice-over narrator, served Nick's purpose for dozens of pseudo films for over a decade, even though his previous film, NUDES ON CREDIT, actually had acting, dialog and a storyline. Nick did not return to those niceties until switching to action and horror films over a decade later, also with underwhelming results.
The narrator is the devil, complaining that despite his overwhelming success in creating sinners to stock Hell, he has failed to corrupt one Herman Rose, played by burlesque comic Hermie Rose. Rose is a prude, a one-man San Francisco crusader against filth, not just in movies, live shows or girly magazines but in department window displays of lingerie, newspaper ads for brassieres, you name it.
We see him doing unfunny slapstick, trying to catch imaginary butterflies in the park, attending dirty shows, an "art" studio to photograph models, and movies (including a theater advertising NUDES ON CREDIT as well as NUDE LAS VEGAS and the unknown CHRISTINE KEELER GOES NUDIST) where he can get disgusted, and blacking out any offending photos he sees on display. His clowning is relentlessly asinine and ultimately tedious, yet Nick brought him back for two more films, NYMPHO and CANDY'S LUSTFUL NATURE, neither of which has made it to video yet for perusal by us masochistic Nick fans.
The girls in color look like Starlite loops, one even having telltale "holes" perforated in the film as if indicating a reel end, but Nick with a straight face maintains he shot them specifically for this film. The devil appears in a cheap outfit with horns, a couple rungs down from what Ricky's might sell these days for Halloween, and succeeds in corrupting Rose, mainly by turning the guy into a drunk. Both of them exit through a door in the sidewalk, used to make deliveries to stores.
Distributor Media Blasters/Guilty Pleasures, part of the NJ empire known as Seduction/After Hours Cinema, has the gall to trumpet this DVD with stern warnings like "Contains Sexually Explicit Material". The topless shots are barely worth an R rating, but this sort of fraudulent come-on would probably warm the heart of Nick's late, great dad, a pioneer in roadshow exploitation.
