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"Too much of a good thing can be taxing," admits Mae West, Marilyn Chambers in the midst of the orgy begs to differ. (The director’s choice of a W.C. Fields exclamation, "Godfrey Daniels," for his nom de porn adds to the circuitous allusion.) It starts in the realm of (wet) dreams, the young heiress is a famous actress and a dedicated sensualist, "little miss rich bitch" to her first lover and "some kind of woman" to the friend who bears witness to subsequent dalliances. An ordinary day finds her romping in the hot tub with a Tinseltown starlet, racing her convertible but stopping long enough to enact the old siphon-tube gag with the world’s oldest Boy Scout, and flashbacking to her maiden tryst on a pool table with a rough gardener. After embodying Cronenberg's venereal tremors in Rabid, Chambers' return to explicit erotica is shaped rather poignantly as a guiltless, traumaless carnal utopia, wrapped by Stu Segall in swathes of California sun, gauzy views of London, and the star’s own cooing soundtrack ("Sometimes love ain’t nothing but a misunderstanding between two fools"). Just as the tiniest hint of melancholy threatens to darken the heroine’s X-rated idyll, she proves her mellow hipness by letting her gal pal (Jesie St. James) have John Leslie all to herself and is rewarded with an extended oneiric gangbang. Out of the darkness steps Special Guest Wang John Holmes, engorged like a Minotaur to attempt to quench her, and still Chambers continues to writhe in unfinished ecstasy, gazing straight at the camera with Messalina’s endless cry on her lips: "More! More!" With Richard Pacheco, David Morris, Mike Ranger, Joan Turner, and Robert Pennard.
--- Fernando F. Croce |