Jeanie's Magic Box

Lame and fleeting storyline of JEANIE'S MAGIC BOX has a crackpot professor/magician wearing phony mustache and fright wig playing with a tiny magic box, which with a puff of smoke conjures up the lovely Becky Sharpe. No, it isn't "Vanity Fair" time but just the umpteenth takeoff on Barbara Eden's TV series.

She grants the prof a wish and brings forth Helen of Troy, in the form of Joannie Bunns. Joannie has a fabulous figure but can't read lines to save her life, and after giving him a blow job is rejected by the prof.

He exiles her to the bedroom to service his nerdy assistant, a goof who looks about 15, while Muzak-ized "Aquarius" plays briefly on the soundtrack. A second blond nerd, also looking underage enters for threesome action and a double penetration. These two guys may look like minors but they deliver the goods in Peter North money shots.

The prof only has eyes for Jeanie, but she warns him against sex with her, instead bringing forth Lady Godiva, an unidentified actress who is not exactly a paper bag case but is homely with a lousy build. She is immediately sent to service the nerds by the picky prof.

Frustrated genie goes to the future next, bringing in Suzanne Fields as Futura. She's got a terrific overall tan and is oiled up to boot, but prof sends her to the peanut gallery too, for nerd sex in the bathroom, including in a full bathtub.

Predictable payoff has Jeanie finally condescending to service the prof herself, hampered by the anonymous filmmakers' penchant for repeating footage to stretch and pad this junker. After all of Jeanie's blather about some unspecified danger, we get a non-ending.

After Hours issued this from a nice quality print, but apparently did their usual Weinstein-style tinkering. Many musical cues start up throughout the film but only play for about five seconds each, with the musical track removed, apparently since the AHC weenies have a much-publicized fear of copyright infringement litigation (hey guys, it never stopped Mike at Something Weird who you're copycatting in dredging up all this generic porn). So what we have is dead silence plus some ultra-fake groaning and porn-talk dubbed over.

Fields and Sharpe make it worth watching, as well as seeing Bunns' spectacular rack. However, the moronic geeks cast as pretend youngsters were a major turnoff for me. They should have just hired John Seeman and Keith Erickson like everybody else did in this time frame.

As a big fan of _lor's reviews, which I think provide a valuable chronicle of some of the lower dregs of American pornography, it's rare that I feel the need to offer up a corrective. However, he gives JEANIE'S MAGIC BOX an oddly unfair shake. While little to write home about – the film is, admittedly, a pretty by-the-numbers storefront programmer – JEANIE is nevertheless a goofy and amiable enough sex flick, hardly meriting the oddly specific savaging he gives it on account of its male cast.

The film's threadbare plot finds a professor (played by a young guy in a silly gray wig affecting a ridiculous German accent) somehow conjuring a genie via his experimentations. Though granted presumably infinite power over reality through his wishes, the professor nevertheless wants the only thing Genie can't give him – some time alone with her. To compensate, she summons a host of beautiful women from the past and future, each of whom the professor turns away. So much the better for his bumbling assistants, who have gotten into another of the professor's experiments and are now each sporting indefatigable hard-ons…

While profoundly idiotic, JEANIE is still at least loopy enough to be entertaining. Both assistants' performances, while consistently grating, are nevertheless trainwreck-captivating in their deliriously non-PC affectation of mental retardation, and the performers are all game and deliver some surprisingly arousing sexual encounters. Unlike _lor, I thought it was nice to see some decent looking male woodsmen for a change. There's only so much John Seeman one can take.

To top it off, the soundtrack (unfortunately scrubbed in the AHC release – sadly the only version that appears to be available at this time) is also great, featuring a number of excellent purloined tracks: "Those Were the Days," "Aquarius," "The Fool on the Hill," "Lady Godiva," "You've Had Better Times," "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" (in a nice cover by Linda Ronstadt), and The 101 Strings Orchestra's "Love at First Sight."

By no means a masterpiece, JEANIE nevertheless delivers solid sex, a good (stolen) score, and enough loopy weirdness to make for a decent time-killer. Probably shot over the course of a fun weekend by a bunch of silly film school grads, it seems unfair to fault it for featuring young bodies or a youthful sense of vigor.