THE EMBRACERS marks the directorial debut of Gary Graver(also the film's male lead), who went on to become a big cheese in the adult film industry, and was also at the helm of a few sub-B drive-in horror pictures. Rather surprisingly, he also collaborated with the iconic Orson Welles on a number of unrealized projects.
The print of this film which I viewed was heavily edited, clocking in at a full seventeen minutes shorter than the complete film's running time. I think it's safe to say the missing scenes featured mature-audience content, because this IS supposed to be an erotic/sexploitation film of sorts. What's left after the naughty bits have been shorn is a freeform and utterly pointless scribble which vaguely illustrates a budding romance between two undependable losers in the craggier environs of Hollywood...he, a down-on-his-luck thespian, and she, a spirited but pretty flaky case of human wreckage. Their ill-starred affair seems to mark the center of this beggarly amateur effort, speciously presented in a "slice of life" naturalist style replete with coffee-house beat jazz. This loose-narrative structure struggles to imitate superior "arthouse" films of the period...just a random cluster of non-ocurrences strung together willy-nilly with credits at either end. Our woebegone protagonist, for instance, is forced by hunger to take a housecleaning job overseen by a coarse and heavily imbibed dwarf. It's weird, and corresponds to nothing in the film beyond the fact that every other scene is equally extraneous. There is a method to this messiness, mind you...similarly crafted films have, at times, been met with high praise. You can't shoot a guy for trying, I suppose...be it bad or good, art is art.
I bet those missing scenes were awesomely hot.
3/10.