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Released by: After Hours Cinema
Released on: June 13th, 2017.
Director: Various
Cast: N/A
Year: 1973/1971/1971
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The Movies:
Three dirty movies on one DVD, transferred from original 1970's film prints? Yep. Here's what you get, (each one introduced by Pete himself)…
Fade To Red:
Our first feature, which runs just under an hour in length, was made in 1971. It starts off with a scene where female is raped and tortured by some men - it turns out that this is the Spanish Inquisition at work! Some scuzzy music that'll sound familiar to anyone familiar with the films of Duke Mitchell plays in the background as this poor woman is forced to go down while a narrator claiming to be an expert in sexual studies rambles on about the secret and repressed sexual urges of mankind!
Cut to a San Francisco suburb where our narrator tells us of a woman who got off on wandering around her neighborhood and peeping in throw windows shortly after she got married. This woman, Claire, takes over the narration as we see her spy in on her neighbors going at it before the movie then shows us all of that. As her obsession grows and becomes even more consuming, we see more bumping and grinding and soon enough she starts diddling herself while watching them.
From there, we learn about The Cycle Devils, a biker gang that 'three years ago rode their way into a hellish reputation of violence, sexual assault and even murder.' We meet them as they rape some poor woman, ripping off her polka dot smock and tying her to a bed. Their leader? Mose Anderson! Yeah, then he rapes that girl. As the movie goes on, a female peeper reminisces about her former schoolmate Annie Conway, who we see messing around in bed with some dude. Annie would also go to bed with girls, which intrigued out subject. Our narrator asks her about this and then we get to see some more random action. From there, a girl named Suki gets conned into having a sex orgy out of fear of losing her job, ol' Anne gets high on drugs and commits suicide, a woman named Darla meets a man at a cocktail bar and then goes back to his place only to get tied up and raped, girls play around with vibrators, Claire gets off on watching some skin flicks and then has her first lesbian experience (“It was unreal!â€), and then another troubled woman picks up a guy and bones him while being humiliated, which our narrator tells us is what she wanted in the first place.
Goofy, goofy stuff but definitely entertaining, Fade To Red has enough straight sex and kinky sex to keep things interesting. It's quick in its pacing, chock full of screwing featuring cast members of varying levels of attractiveness and genuinely, though unintentionally hilarious thanks to the stoic narration courtesy of the doctor and our pal Claire. It was shot fast and cheap and might be made up of previously existing footage but if you like grubby low budget sex films, this is worth a watch. Funny ending too.
Peeping Detective:
Our second feature runs just shy of an hour and it clearly features some more modern music laid (and title card) over what may have been some copy written material used in the original movie without permission. This lasts a minute or so and then we see a blonde, Esther, wish her southern accented boss, a private detective named Blade, a good morning. All he wants is coffee - they sit in the office and he laments the absence of clients. She's got some money put aside and offers to help but he's got his pride. He's rather kill himself! She decides to cheer him up by undressing and screwing him but just as things start to get hot and heavy a client shows up.
Esther heads out to meet the client, George Rogers, who asks for Blade. From there, he tells him what he needs - his soon to be cheating ex-wife is going to take him for all he's got! Blade busts out his trusty infrared camera and tells him he'll help him out, for a fee. They come to an agreement and Blade heads out to see if he can get any evidence of Mrs. Rogers' cheating to get his client off, but not before giving Esther a little loving only to be once again interrupted by the arrival of a potential customer. This time it's a woman, Joan, who is planning to divorce her husband but wants to get evidence of his cheating to make it easier on her. He makes her the same offer.
With that out of the way, Blade finally gets to bone his secretary and after that, he gets to work. He heads to an apartment and gets some shots of George fooling around with a pretty brunette. After that, he heads to a house in the suburbs where he captures evidence of Joan going at it with some shaggy haired guy. The next morning, back at the office, Esther arrives to find Blade passed out on the couch. She wakes him up and he tells her about how he got the pictures and then, as the morning evolves, he meets with George and then with Joan, trying to cover for each one while still managing to give them what they want in order to get paid, all of which, of course, leads to a legitimately wacky ending.
This one is HORRIBLY acted but it is pretty funny, sometimes unintentionally so but sometimes on purpose. There's no style to the camerawork and we get about fifteen minutes into the fifty-nine minute feature before anyone actually has sex, but the girls are all rather attractive and everyone seems to be having a good time here. This one isn't deep but it's a pretty fun watch, even if the story is ridiculously cliché and predictable.
Peeper Creeper:
The third and final film on the disc runs sixty-one minutes, and it too would seem to have some substitutions made to the soundtrack. It starts off with a scene where some pervy guy looks in through the window of a balcony as a couple make sweet, sweet love. They finish up and he splits, heading through a courtyard and past a pool to his next stop and peeps in on another couple going at it. From there? His next stop - another window where he watches two women and some lucky dude having sex from afar. The cycle repeats itself - another balcony, another viewing party, this time an orgy. After that, he a woman masturbate before pleasuring her man, and then a few more couples - one with some pantyhose action, one that go at it on shiny silk sheets, and one that's into whips. In each one of these sequences, our peeper (who the back copy on the DVD says is too shy to ask girls out) inserts himself into the male role, at least mentally if not in reality.
But then, when he's all done peeping for the day, he comes back to what we presume to be his home to a delightful surprise in the form of a cute dark haired hippie chick who just can't wait to get it on with him!
There's no story here and the location photography is nothing to write home about but the movie does at least deliver some decent variety in terms of what it shows and who it shows doing it. This one definitely delivers on the voyeurism in much larger quantities than the first two movies do and most of the girls are cut, even if pretty much everyone in this film looks like they could use a shower.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Each of the three movies is presented in anamorphic 1.78.1 widescreen and transferred from film prints. They haven't been fully restored so expect a fair bit of print damage and plenty of visible scratches but that doesn't really detract from the experience much. Colors are faded and black levels all over the place but if the elements are in rough shape, at least the disc is fairly well authored and not plagued by compression artifacts or edge enhancement problems. It'd be nice if After Hours started using progressive transfers though, and on top of that the image here is clearly cropped from 1.33.1, which results in heads being chopped off now and then and other 'aesthetic' problems.
The audio is on par with the video, in that it's rough but serviceable considering the origins of the films and the materials available to work with. Each of the three English language Dolby Digital Mono tracks has some hiss and some audible cracking in spots but most fans of this material won't mind so much.
Extras? Not much here, but we do get a quick intro to the disc from Pete that runs eight minutes and allows him to talk up each of the features on the disc in his own inimitable way after discussing the demise of 42nd Street and the theaters that inhabited the area.
The Final Word:
42nd Street Pete's Peeping Tom Triple Feature offers up three legitimately obscure vintage adult films in watchable but unremarkable condition. As to the movies themselves? The first two are genuinely funny for various reasons and the third delivers a whole lot of bang for your buck. Issues with the presentation aside, there's fun to be had here if low rent seventies porno movies are your bag.
