If you want to explore the nether-regions of cinema, you have to be prepared to sit through some rather unusual viewing experiences. I would certainly place Lee Frost's A Climax of Blue Power in this category! I don't plan on turning Girls, Guns and Ghouls into a porno site, but I am completely willing to place a review amongst these pages if the film in question shows an imagination, an oddball take on reality, or is simply ground-breaking in some way, shape or form. Director Lee Frost produced a startling variety of films. One needs only a casual interest in grindhouse cinema, and you'll strike his work at some point. With pieces like House on Bare Mountain, The Defilers and The Thing with Two Heads on his curriculum vitae, he's a prominent fugure in the cult pantheon. Still, having viewed "House" and "Thing" didn't prepare me for this one. What we've basically got here is a twisted, urban drama with stylized 'roughie' sex scenes, and some pretty off-putting hardcore inserts. What made me want to watch the film at the outset was the presence of Uschi Digard - the archetypal Russ Meyer actress - and also "Loveable" Bob Cresse, who turns up in bumbling, amusing roles in "House" and also The Erotic Adventures of Zorro. Well, on these two scores I got gypped, but still emerged from the viewing with something worth writing about.
There isn't really all that much plot, as you may half-expect. Thirty-something Eddie (Jason Carns) seems to be a policeman on the beat. As he cruises around the darkened city streets of what looks like Times Square in New York, we hear his voiceover and how much he hates prostitutes. Eventually he entraps one and drives off with her into the country. At first he seems like a normal cop, reading her the standard rights. Then he offers the reluctant woman freedom in exchange for a blow-job. This soon turns into forced sex in the back of the car. We get to see one of many hardcore inserts of what look to be completely different (and kind of grubby-looking) people having real sex. It begins to rain. Eddie then forces her naked out of the car at gunpoint and makes her masturbate and crawl around in the mud. Cue more inserts of masturbation. Finally, Eddie has had his fill of sadism and throws the hooker her clothes, making her walk back to town on her own. He drives off.
Later we get a clearer picture of things. Eddie's not a policeman at all, just a low-rent security guard with fake panels and police-lights on his car, dressing up as a cop to dominate his victims. Later, after lying on the beach for a while, he witnesses a couple arguing and fighting in a house. After the man chased the woman up some stairs with a gun, he soon fell back dead, shot by accident by the hysterical woman. Eddie runs off, but soon becomes obsessed by bringing the young woman to justice. Listening to police broadcasts and keeping track of the news, he realises that she's going to get off scot-free.
In his civilian persona, Eddie visits a massage parlour. The owner, a microscopic cameo role for Bob Cresse, explains some of the deals on offer. We see Uschi Digard for about two seconds - she's clothed - and then move to the next inserted hardcore scene as Eddie has taken up the deluxe "fifty dollar option" with two women. Once we're through the standard two women, one man stuff, Eddie rips off the Brothel by pretending to be a cop again, and threatening them with calling the boys. This was where we miss out on Uschi - in the stills section of the Alpha Blue DVD I viewed, we see Miss Digard in all her glory in the brothel scene. She was edited out for the hardcore - hardly a fair exchange.
Later, Eddie dreams/fantasizes about dominating the "murderess" and watches pornography from a projecter in his seedy room. In his mind he strips her naked and chains her to his car, thrashing her with a belt. He has sex with her on a bed while strangling her. His fantasies are all in sickly green-o-vision but the hardcore bits aren't quite correctly coloured. Finally, obsessing more and more, Eddie returns to the woman's house in fake-cop mode. Knocking on the door, she answers and he claims to be the new officer on the case. She soon realises he's not, and is in reality a dangerous lunatic. It's too late though, and he ties her up for the confession. As Eddie says, it's "time for the matron to give her a bath". He dissapears and returns in blonde wig and evening dress, then proceeds to give the shocked woman a bath. We then get the obligatory insert of various bits being fingered. Eventually this turns to coerced (but very clean) sex and a light thrashing with a belt. The woman confesses her crime but explains in desperation that it was an accident. At the last moment, she turns the tables on her tormentor and manages to shoot him. He drives off as her boyfriend turns up. The police, who have been trying to find their impersonator, take off in hot pursuit after the wounded deviate...
A Climax of Blue Power is not really that much fun to watch. I would have appreciated it a lot more if the ugly hardcore bits weren't so clumsily spliced in. The sex actors don't look anything like their softcore counterparts, most of the time. The film would have definitely stood up as a softcore feature on its own. Still, I guess films such as these weren't made for the Merchant Ivory crowd. Jason Carns tries pretty hard as Eddie, and in some scenes pulls off the psychopath he's meant to be. Lee Frost, credited as "F.C. Perl", has created quite the sick little drama with this dark, generally unknown little beast, and you can occasionally feel some discomfort being inside Eddie's head, even in the non-explicit scenes when he's just alone and ranting against the world. It does seem that some attempt was made at art, of a sort. Of course, any storylines, drama and character development quickly vanished from sex cinema as the years went by, so maybe films as unique as these need to be viewed and appreciated on some levels.
I still feel ripped off about Uschi, though.
© Boris "Rent-a-Reviewer"
Lugosi, 2006.
Review written: 02/14/2006 10:16:23