User Reviews

Joe Sarno does a who-dunnit -- the mind boggles! Well maybe not so much, since his normal tactic as a screenwriter is to gradually reveal hidden relationships and cruel intentions through discrete dialog scenes and bedroom liaisons. Here given slightly more resources than usual, Sarno probably decided to try something new -- certainly the mise-en-scene is much richer than in his more minimally budgeted pictures. Every once in a while, his usual melodramatic pattern is unexpectedly jarred by splashings of film noirish devices, such as a point-of-view shot of the murderer spying on the protagonist from a darkened alcove. Unfortunately, like Robert Altman, Sarno doesn't really know how to cut for action, and as a murder-mystery, the show is less than successful. His take on the hypocrisy of bourgeois society and the crude world of sexual politics, however, is as riveting as ever, while the nudie scenes are intentionally crass and artless.

The trailers for Joe Sarno's MY BODY HUNGERS posit a cutting-edge soft porn film, promising an unprecedented rape sequence, "raw & naked", and "bold & frank as the law allows". The tepid film itself is porn circa 1965 to be sure, but disappointing as Adult Cinema fodder.

I emphasize this aspect, namely delivering the sexy goods, because a latter-day cult of sycophants has grown up around Sarno (in the video era) taking his work overly seriously and pretending it's not pornography, even inventing a phony euphemistic category Sexploitation to cover it. This is merely rewriting history -these films, and latterly scores of XXX videos, were made by Joe for adult viewing, never intended or distributed to mainstream audiences.

Here, Sarno's dramaturgy is deficient at almost every turn, with a cast of bench warmers failing to rise to the occasion. Apparently shelved for a couple of years before release, picture simply isn't exciting or arousing enough to pass muster.

Gretchen Rudolph, who had a very effective starring role in Barry Mahon's RUN SWINGER RUN!, stars as Marcia Teel, a 19-year-old who hitch-hikes to Anderson, a small town in New England, to get a job working with her estranged older sister Janet.

Character actor Joe Santos gives her a ride, and the fans are immediately in trouble when their sex scene is completely omitted, an elliptical effect perfectly suitable in a "real" film but pure cheat in soft porn.

When she arrives at the roadhouse Lodge she discovers her sister's been murdered. So Marcia, taking the pseudonym Marcia Finch, gets a job there as a hostess/B girl pushing drinks, cornily trying to find out who killed sis.

This tired plot hook opens the door for a myriad of characters, but Sarno fails to flesh them out in interesting fashion, especially compared to his other (and better) films of the '60s featuring better talent. Marcia's busty blonde roommate Lynn is played by Sarno regular Patricia McNair, but she literally has nothing to do. Tammy Latour as the roadhouse manager and featured vocalist Joan Reynolds is blank and unemotional in her walk through. The cop on the case Lt. Rod Loring is played by John Aristides whose career appears to have been solely in Sarno films, but despite his Ricardo Cortez visage (both romantic and evil looking), he delivers zilch.

Sarno badly bungles the "roughie" elements of the script, beginning with the rape. This sequence, used as a selling point for the film, is inept start to finish, from the rapist slipping an "I am waiting for you in the hallway" note under Marcia's door, to the absence of anyone coming to see what's happening as she screams at the top of her lungs endlessly. We don't see the attacker at all during the rape, just Marcia's breasts as something is happening to her out of frame. It's all a cheat, and a dumb red herring to boot.

Even worse is a later sequence where she is attacked and choked by seemingly the same black lace garter belt used to kill her sister. It turns out to be wielded by the mom (untalented Bella Donna) of sis's fiancée, and Marcia is saved by said fiancée George, who now has eyes for Marcia, too. He alibis mom, and minutes later we hear a mysterious voice and Marcia is choked again by the garter belt. This time it's the real killer. These back-to-back nonsensical scenes are ludicrous, the dominant contrast being a swarm of moths who are on the set and make it pointlessly (and amateurishly) into the finished print.

The cops arrive and a car chase ensues, poorly staged and leading to a desultory ending. Only point of interest for me here is that the killer's identity (which I won't spoil) is not the killer explicitly specified in the AFI Film Catalogue 1961-1970 synopsis, presumably taken from the press kit.

Other than some topless footage by Rudolph and her gal pal/masseuse Joy Durden (who unconvincingly doubles as the house pianist at the lodge) plus some after-hours prostitutes and dancers-with-pasties Olga and the Oomphettes, Sarno delivers zero sex scenes and very little to warrant the required "Adults Only" tag. Cinematography by Anthony Lover is okay, but hardly propitious for an apparently unlucky auteur whose career over the next forty years (after 15 minutes of fame as co-director of the immensely popular Bergman spoof De Duva) is spotty to say the least.