Hardcore (Paul Schrader, 1979)

The only explanation I can come up with to explain why the glass partition in the nudie booth where George C. Scott hooks up with/enlists the help of Season Hubley is so thoroughly jizz-laden, is that the spunk cleaners must have been having some kind of labour dispute. I mean, how else can you explain why the glass, and, I suppose, the floor (some guys are dribblers), was covered with, to quote N.P.H., "love stains"? Unless what we saw was the result of only ten minutes of self-abuse. Think about it, it's 1979, and people loved to ejaculate sperm in places other than their home. Nowadays, no one does anything away from home. They jerk off, they watch movies, they jerk off to movies, they play video games, they read books (or book-like facsimiles) and they consume massive amounts of carbohydrates all within the confines of their own home. In Paul Schrader's Hardcore, however, if your teenage daughter runs off to do porn in L.A., you going to have to physically get on an  airplane (i.e. leave your home) and pretend to be a shady, toupee-wearing smut peddler if you ever want to see her again. Imagine someone doing that today. Actually, if this film was made today, I bet the parents would be the one's driving their kids to audition* for, oh, let's say, "Anal Face-Fuck Fuck-Face Fuckers Vol. 17" -- thanks to E! and MTV, depravity and indifference are in vogue.

And the reason has nothing to do with bad parenting skills on the behalf of the parents. It's because porn is viewed differently today. At the present time, thanks to the internet, porn is everywhere. But back in the 1970s, porno was still seen as taboo. Oh, sure, the climate that created porno chic was a real thing. That being said, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, specifically, its Dutch Calvinist community, porn is the personification of pure evil.

I don't know if this was done on purpose, but the first twenty minutes look like something straight out of one of Lawrence Welk's wet dreams. Meaning, it's extremely square and lame as fuck. Seriously, Christmas caroling, turkey craving, tobogganing... white people in sweaters?!? What is this shit?

Call me callous and somewhat deranged, but I let out a mild cheer when Jake VanDorn (George C. Scott) learns that his daughter Kristen (Ilah Davis) has gone missing. It's not that I want anything bad to happen to her, it's just that I want this small town nightmare to end; it's like watching a greeting card come to life.

Anyway, over in California to attend some kind of church camp, Kristen apparently took off while at Knott's Berry Farm. And like any good father, Jake flies over to L.A. to talk with the police. Since the cops are swamped with cases involving missing teens, Jake decides to hire Andy Mast (Peter Boyle), a sleazy private detective.

I'd like to say, before I continue, that I couldn't help but notice how pervasive Star Wars was in this film. Now, of course, I'm acutely aware how insanely popular the movie was back in the late 1970s, but I had no idea it was this popular. There are at least three separate instances in Hardcore where the film is referenced. The first comes when Jake pokes around his daughter's bedroom looking for clues that might shed some light on her disappearance and we see a Star Wars calendar on her wall. The second occurs when a Star Wars billboard is briefly visible on the side of a building near Jake's hotel. And the third, and my personal favourite, takes place when Jake enters a sex club and we see two strippers mock fighting on stage with light sabers.

What I think I'm trying to say is this: It baffles the mind to think that something that was originally conceived to amuse ten year-olds in 1977 is still being talked about. In fact, J.J. Abrams–yeah, that's right, the guy who did the score for Night Beast–is apparently making a new Star Wars movie. Weird, wild stuff.

Okay, let's get back to George C. Scott's journey into the scummy yet strangely beautiful world of porn, shall we?

Realizing that neither the police nor Peter Boyle are fully committed to finding his daughter, Jake strikes out on his own. This strike out, by the way, is signified by a deep, synthy-sounding synth flourish followed by the sound of a screeching guitar; the film's score is composed by Jack Nitzsche, Cruising (another film with great synthy-sounding synth flourishes).

Of course, who is the first person George C. Scott runs into during his initial foray into the porn world? Why, it's Repo Man's Tracey Walter! Just as Jake is about to start browsing the shelves of an adult bookstore, the clerk (the aforementioned Tracey Walter) informs him that there's a fifty cent browsing fee. Can you believe that? A browsing fee.

The next stop on his foray are a couple of pseudo massage parlors that offer "body-to-body contact." As you might expect, Jake gets nowhere at these places, and leaves with nothing but a bruised face (his failure is punctuated by being thrown face-first into a parked car by a bouncer after getting rowdy).

Deciding to employ a different tactic (and a different wardrobe), Jake pretends to be a businessman from Detroit who is interested in becoming a porn producer. After getting his foot in the door, Jake eventually meets Nikki (Season Hubley), an adult film actress, who agrees to help him, for a sizable fee, naturally.

Even though Season Hubley's Nikki walks the same streets as Princess, her character from Vice Squad, I think her performances are vastly different. And that difference has a lot to do with George C. Scott, who brings out the best in Season. Not to imply that she isn't good in Vice Squad. It's just that Wings Hauser is no George C. Scott. Look at George's body language when he enters the adult bookstore run by Tracey Walter and compare it with the body language he displays when he enters another adult bookstore later on in the film. He was able to convey a change in his character simply by the way he walks. Now that's fine acting.

While the film ultimately has more to do with snuff films (pure fantasy), Hardcore is a pretty authentic look at the porn world pre-videotape. Well, everything except the scene where the show a porn being shot outside at night. Edit: Having recently seen Alex de Renzy's Pretty Peaches, I can confirm that some porn films did in fact shoot outside at night. Nonetheless, I'm sure it's still kinda rare.

* Audition? How cute. Your teenage daughter is making a D.I.Y. version of "Anal Face-Fuck Fuck-Face Fuckers Vol. 17" in her bedroom as we speak. Go check. I'll wait... Pretty rad, eh?

Vice Squad (Gary Sherman, 1982)

In order to produce a truly effective piece of cinematic sleaze, and I mean one that titillates and nauseates in equal measure, you're gonna need to cast actors with names like, "Season" and "Wings." Otherwise, you're gonna end up flailing helplessly in an unsexy, not-so-seedy stew. Don't ask me why you need to cast them, you just do. Okay, you can ask me. But to tell you truth, I have no idea. It was foolish of me to think that I could use the inordinate quirkiness of the names of the film's two lead actors to sustain the narrative drive of the next five, maybe six, paragraphs worth of overstated nonsense. Anyway, the rain-soaked streets of Hollywood are overflowing with damaged souls living on the edge. How far on the edge are these people? Well, let's just say, all it takes is one false move, and bam! You could find your toes sloshing around inside the well-worn mouth of a John with advanced male pattern baldness in no time. A precursor to film's like, Angel, Avenging Angel, and, I might as well list them all, Angel III: The Final Chapter, except this one's photographed by the great John Alcott (A Clockwork Orange), Gary Sherman's Vice Squad takes place in a gritty, sordid universe where sex is cheap, illegal drugs are plentiful, and wire hangers do more than just keep your clothes from touching the ground. In other words, the story unfolds in the kind of universe that I feel at ease in. Quirky fun-fact: Robert Vincent O'Neill, the writer-director of the first two "Angel" films, co-wrote the script for Vice Squad.

Bursting out of the titty-covered barn like a rabid tapir with things to do, the opening montage is jam-packed with gaudy images that scratched me where I itch from a stylistic point-of-view. (Spotting a woman dressed as Columbia from the Rocky Horror Picture Show in the opening montage was like a lighthouse, signaling to me that it was safe to continue watching.) Establishing its time and place, after hours on Sunset Boulevard (a.k.a. The Sunset Strip), the film shows a series of street level vignettes depicting a society drowning in a lukewarm, parasite-ridden pool of its own filth. Of course, I found the decay to be downright charming. If wearing legwarmers, high heel shoes, short shorts, sequined halter tops, excessive eye makeup, studded dog collars and leaning seductively into the passenger side windows of parked cars is against the law, then arrest me at once, because I'm guilty on all counts.

It's not the clothes, the makeup, or the leaning that's unlawful, although you'd think it was judging by the way the some of the authorities behave. No, it's what happens after the skimpily attired citizens get in the vehicles they were leaning on that has everyone's panties embarking on one pickle of a misadventure. You see, there's a certain segment of the population that need to expel seminal fluid in the presence of another human being, and that's where the sex trade worker comes in.

Helping people make a teary-eyed mess since the beginning of time, the sex trade worker induces this mess via a series of physical tasks. Some are completed through external means (the human hand is a gifted mimic), while others are achieved by employing more orifice-based methods. If you carefully examine your body in the mirror, you'll notice that it is covered with these hollowed out passage ways that resemble caves. Well, some people like to insert certain items into them over and over again until a mess is made.

Now you'd think a person, at least in today's lollipop and fishstick bountiful world, would be able to hold sway over the entrances of their respective nooks and crannies. Unfortunately, there are middlemen out there who want to oversee your many holes. You might have heard of them, they're called "pimps," and in Vice Squad, a sex trade worker named Princess (Season Hubley) has to deal with a pimp named Ramrod (Wings Hauser). All Princess wants to do is make some extra cash renting out her vagina (one of her most popular passage ways) to strangers, so that she can take care of her young daughter, and, of course, get to a point in her life where she can wear pink blazers in the suburbs with a modicum of comfort.

Coerced into participating in a dangerous sting operation by a jaded vice cop named Walsh (Gary Swanson), Princess, employing a purple dress you know is covering up a complex array of frilly and smooth delights, lures Ramrod, who, judging by the walls of his high class apartment, is a big fan of Elvis Presley, into a simple trap. The gruff cop wants to nail Ramrod, because that's his job, man. On the other hand, Princess wants to avenge Ginger (Nina Blackwood), a naive peer with terrible taste in pimps (though, to be fair, it didn't sound like she had much choice in the matter).

Well, the ambush goes off without a hitch. Okay, sure, Ramrod ends up using Princess's head as a weapon, but it eventually works out. Roll credits, right? Uh-uh, Ramrod ain't going down without an overdrawn, turquoise cowboy shirt endangering fight. Escaping custody with an alarming ease, Ramrod vows to get revenge on Princess. Blissfully unaware of Ramrod's new-found freedom, Princess inhales a hot dog and goes about her tarty business, which includes fornicating with amputees, performing unclean toe-play with a demure foot fetishist, giving golden showers, attending mock funerals for elderly perverts while wearing a sex shop quality wedding dress (I loved Michael Ensign as the elderly perv's chauffeur), and having lifeless missionary sex with churlish conventioneers.

Feeling somewhat guilty over the fact that he bungled the arrest of Ramrod, Walsh is so determined to stop the sadistic pimp from harming Princess, that he has the entirety of his modestly sized, racially diverse unit working on the case, which include cops with names like, Pete (Pepe Serna, a.k.a. Reno Nevada from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in the Eighth Dimension), Edwards (Maurice Emanuel), Kowalski (Joseph Di Giroloma) and Louise (Beverly Todd).

Never has a turquoise cowboy shirt seemed so menacing as it does on the back of Wings Hauser as the reprehensible Ramrod, the strip's most dangerous pimp. Every scene, whether he's inquiring about the location of an elusive pimp (Fred Barry) or purchasing black market firearms from overly tattooed miscreants (Richard Wetzel), seems to end with him sticking a gun, a knife, or his meaty paws in someone's face. I think it's safe to say that Wings has created one of the most loathsome characters, pimp or otherwise, ever to sully the silver screen.

While all his pimp peers appear comical, almost buffoonish at times, Wings gives his pimp an aura that is pure evil. A refreshing change from what usually passes as pimp behaviour in most mainstream movies. Oh, and I nearly lost it when I found out that Wings also sings the Vice Squad theme song, "Neon Slime." A raucous ditty with some choice lyrics: "Bang! Bang! Shoot 'em up, talkin' about crime! Somebody just bought it in a neon slime!"

Determined to control the spiritual trajectory of every cock and pussy on the planet, I was fascinated by the way Ramrod used vaginal mutilation and scrotal mismanagement to intimidate those who stood in his way. Destroying the genitals he can't have, Ramrod's rein of crotch-based terror must have been long and bloody (I'd say, judging by his track record in this film, he must ruin at least three reproductive organs a night.) Utilizing a switchblade to dethrone gonads of every colour and size imaginable from the relative safety of their fleshy perches and a so-called "pimp stick" to wreak havoc on uterine walls across the Los Angeles Basin, you have to admire the brutal whoremonger's monomaniacal approach to the vile art that is pimping.

Naturalistic, unglamourous, yet never unsophisticated, sleek and sexy, Season Hubley (Hardcore) gives an electrifying performance as the purposeful Princess, a woman so tough, that she's back on the street selling her body mere seconds after being tossed around a pimp's apartment like a rag doll. Sporting short hair (practical and fashion forward simultaneously) and glittery eye makeup, Season has a weariness in her face that most on-screen sex trade workers seem to lack.

The manner in which Season Hubley transformed herself from suburban mom to shrewd streetwalker was a wonder to behold. One moment she's tearfully saying goodbye to her young daughter, the next she's telling a pimp getting his shoes shined outside a bus terminal to basically go fuck himself. You can even see the transformation in the way she walks, as her hips begin to sway more prominently the second her feet hit the street.

The terrifically named Sudana Bobatoon, who plays Dixie, a feather-haired gal who is prone to snitching, Lydia Lei, who shows up as Coco, a side-ponytailed delight in pink trousers, and Kelly Piper makes the scene as Blue Chip, a tough as tent spikes chick in electric blue trousers, all sparkle with purpose as Princess's hooker pals.

Don't avert your gaze for a second or else you'll miss Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith (The Pom Pom Girls) as "White Prostitute," who utters the line, "Whores give it away, stupid," in response to a cop's query about the difference between whores and prostitutes (the way her right eye twitches ever so slightly when she says "stupid" was außergewöhnlich), and the gorgeous, Traci Lords-esque Stacy Everly as "Teenage Prostitute," who gives a haunting performance as a visibly distraught junkie handcuffed to a bench. Actually, you can avert your gaze all you want during the latter's scenes, as she appears twice and spews a respectable chunk of dialogue.

I don't know about anyone else, but I felt this weird sense of concern for the structural integrity of Season's black silk stockings as Vice Squad slithered along. In fact, there were times when I could think about nothing but her stockings. Unconvinced? Well, think about all the stress and turmoil your average prostitute must endure on any given night. Pretty unpleasant, right? Now think about what their clothes must go through. I know, horrifying, ain't it? Every time Princess came in contact with Ramrod, I would get this uneasy feeling, not because he was probably going to make her eat his switchblade, but because he was going to ruin her outfit. Crazy, I know, but that's what happens to a person when they spend way too much time wallowing in the neon slime.

video uploaded by ActionPackedCinema

Special thanks to Jerry over at The Dead Eye Delirium for introducing me to this illuminating slab of unsavoury cinema.

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