Review of Memories Within Miss Aggie

Gerard Damiano's third fiction feature after DEEP THROAT and THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES is a dark and chilly fable, intended, he says, to carry on the story of the latter's heroine, Justine Jones, had she not committed suicide. In a secluded farmhouse in snow-bound Pennsylvania sometime in the 'thirties, an aging Miss Aggie (Deborah Ashira) describes to a companion Richard (Patrick L. Farrelly) a series of youthful sensual experiences, with her character played in each case by a different actress. Played by a young blond Kim Pope, she chooses to lose her virginity with Eric Edwards in a sequence notable for its extended,carefully observed foreplay. Edwards then visits a whore (Darby Lloyd Raines) who inflames him with a long episode of masturbation. And finally a girl (Mary Stuart), having excited herself by masturbating with a small doll, seduces a delivery man (Harry Reems). After each recollection, Richard questions Aggie's veracity. It's finally revealed that she is insane. The Richard to whom she speaks is the ghost of her first and only lover, whom she murdered when he threatened to leave her. Now, PSYCHO-like, his corpse shares the lonely house with her, a truly captive audience for her erotic ramblings. MEMORIES WITHIN MISS AGGIE decisively dispels Linda Lovelace's picture of Damiano as a talentless hack. The location shooting and staging are assured, the direction of actors both in the erotic scenes and the framing story skillful, the music unassertive and atmospheric. It ends, in what must surely be its only use in a porn film, on a few bars of the hymn AMAZING GRACE. MISS AGGIE was shown in the market at that year's Cannes Film Festival and became the most widely circulated of all Damiano's early films.