Until high-gloss 35mm productions stole the stage during the mid-1970s, 16mm hardcore features were usually screened in storefront “mini-cinemas” containing only a handful of seats and echoing with the muffled groans of amplified pleasure. These were the days before home video, when film prints were scratched and damaged by shoddy projection and when porn consumption was a public act requiring a certain reckless fortitude, an indifference to public hygiene, and a trench coat placed over your lap.
Despite modern conveniences like streaming video and baby wipes, however, there is still a certain ambience to 16mm smut that only films of the period can truly recapture: a time when porn wasn’t just trashy, but really dirty; when the thrill of taboo was as pungent as the aroma of sex and there was as much shag on the coozy as there was on the shag carpeting.
After Hours Cinema “Storefront Series” presents porno at its most graphic – when the girls were groovy, the seats were sticky, and the guy sitting next to you was wheezing like a warthog. Enter if you dare…and bring your own raincoat.
Disc 1:
Diary of a Nymph
Tracy is a middle class housewife suffering from that most dreaded of uterine maladies, sexual frustration.
Diary of a Bed
The premise evokes Diderot’s Les Bijou indiscret: a hoary old brass bed (animated through the device of a post-dubbed male voice) attempts to attract a “lady” mattress by regaling her with tales of the various trespasses that have jangled his aging springs.
Disc 2:
Diary of a Schizo
Rene stars as Sarah Bennett, another dissatisfied California housewife on the verge of succumbing to furor uterinus. The film begins with a fantasy sequence in which Sarah and her neighbor (played again by Susan Fause, this time with dirty feet) double-saddle a mysterious, supine stud. Back in reality – sort of – we are introduced to Sarah and her husband Dexter by a white-coated narrator who suddenly appears in their dining room, his horn-rimmed glasses reeking with clinical authority. “Schizophrenia is one of the oldest and most perplexing maladies,” he informs us, and although she does not realize it, Sarah is about to submit to the evil urgings of an “alter ego.”
Disc 2 also includes:
– After Hours Trailer Vault
– Joe Sarno Trailer Vault
- NTSC Region 1
- 2 Disc Set
