The Swinging Genie

Most early '70s porn quickies tend to be slapdash, as is this one, but at least there's an attempt to have a script and try to create some amateur special effects for the semblance of a "real" movie. Not adding up to much it is an OK showcase for some pretty actresses.

Wearing a hairpiece that looks like it was willed to him by Moe Howard (the leader of The Three Stooges), Keith Erickson toplines as Marsh, a "swinging" guy who talks in a very '60s hip manner, but comes off as having studied the movies of Bing Crosby to get that cool patter going. If Der Bingle had been allowed to talk on screen about pot and other drugs I'm sure he was exposed to, this dialog could have been delivered in the '30s.

He gets to make wishes courtesy of a nondescript genie (non-actor in the role is terrible, reading his dialog from cue cards apparently on the floor, as he keeps looking down to see what to say), and of course he wishes for pretty girls to appear and have sex with him. The idiot writing a pointless blow-by-blow booklet description for the film to be included as an "extra" with the DVD claims the genie being male is evidence of homo-erotic subtext; hey, the genie conjures up WOMEN, you don't need a female genie in porn, clown, just because Barbara Eden once played one.

Erickson wishes for a magic carpet ride and through the magic of no-budget filmmaking, a jump cut later he is back, dressed in Arab gear, scene carefully omitted.

This nonsense is basically Keith talking as a mister motormouth, with XXX footage the key visual. White smoke covers the frame for "magical" transitions (it actually works at this level of Z movie), and a cute but ultra-cheap animated credits sequence sets the mood. Orgy involving lovely harem girls helps eat up much of the less-than-an-hour running time.

Two competing video companies have reissued the film, using nearly the same materials. The Alpha Blue Archives version is slightly longer, but of inferior visual quality, evidently just a DVD created from a VHS in the usual blur-o-vision. The After Hours Cinema edition has the opening credits messed up but provides a sharper image.

Unfortunately, the AHC honchos (quite proud of their preservation efforts, per a short documentary on same they included on one of their videos) have issued the GENIE in letter-box format, losing image at both the top and bottom of the screen. I can't believe so-called professionals don't understand the difference between 1.33/1, 1.66/1, 1.85/1 and 2.35/1, the main ratios used for real films over the years, and think they're doing the viewer a favor by imposing a roughly 1.78/1 or 1.85/1 image to everything. Even 8mm stag loops are issued by AHC in their crude 42nd St. Pete videos, trumpeted as "first time in widescreen", as if anybody ever shot "widescreen" in Super 8!

It's all insulting marketing hype, on the level of spoon-feeding the contents, scene by scene, sex act by sex act, in condescending summaries. Porn fans back in the day were perfectly able to enjoy cinema without explanation or annotation, so I don't see why even a retarded generation of retro-fans needs such asinine instruction. I guess it keeps a few itinerant bloggers in pin money as self-appointed "historians" shilling for this or that video outfit.

My favorite Annette Michael has little to do but show off her huge breasts and hump Erickson as a harem girl, accompanied by the beautiful Jill Sweete and in a not-well disguised dual role, Sandy Dempsey. Dempsey is cast in a lead role here as Joy, but to save a buck she is also a fantasy harem girl conjured up by the genie wearing a veil. Her butterfly tattoo gives away the game, and later she removes the veil to hump Erickson, and is merely wearing a different hairdo than her short-cropped styling as Joy.