Who payed the critics

Some things I liked some I did not.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Porn comedies in the late soft-core/primitive hardcore period have not stood the test of time - even the crummiest melodrama survives as interesting, while unfunny slapstick humor presents a hard slog (same is true of '40s movies -compare film noir with boring lightweight fluff rom-coms many decades later).For details on this film see the detailed IMDb UGC synopsis, but basically it resembles a loop carrier as the bumbling would-be comic heroes (Michael Finn and Tony Lane) have random and uninteresting misadventures that mock censorship but are ultimately an excuse for slipping XXX porn into the mix.It seems that timid pornographers would often use extraneous material such as closeups of hardcore still photos in magazines, to introduce objectionable material into an otherwise soft-core movie. Here there are many loops, especially in the second half of the film, that feature stars like Suzanne Fields and give the fans what they really want (then and now it would seem) - explicit sex -forget the comedy and story!Early on there is a marquee of the Adam Theatre playing a triple bill of hardcore Matt Cimber white-coaters (another marquee has soft-core double bill of Warhol's hit TRASH and almost mainstream THE CHRISTINE JORGENSON STORY, and a key character of a vice squad chief shows the boys XXX 16mm footage, as we see how hypocritical he really is.Nora Wieternik, wearing huge diving goggles, is prominently featured in the sex-tease new footage, with a traveling sex van figuring in the slapstick as Mick & Tony work up plenty of flop sweat in their failed quest for yocks. I've seen filmmaker Ken Stewart's equally trivial Matinée WIVES, but he has a currently "lost" movie CASTING CALL which based on its cast looks to be more interesting and hopefully will surface from one of the surviving (ABA, SWV, AHC, Vinegar Syndrome, etc.) porn labels.