Harry Reems | Through the Shattered Lens

First released in 1974, Deep Throat II (also known as Linda Lovelace, Secret Agent) is the R-rated sequel the legendary X-rated film, Deep Throat. I should, at this point, confess that I have never seen Deep Throat, though I have seen the 2005 documentary about the making of the film and its subsequent cultural impact, Inside Deep Throat. I’ve also read Legs McNeil’s oral history of the adult film industry, The Other Hollywood. Perhaps most importantly, I’ve watched Boogie Nights a dozen times.

Anyway, Deep Throat II….

The star of the original film, Linda Lovelace, returns as …. Linda Lovelace! Linda is working as a nurse for a perpetually turned-on sex therapist (Harry Reems) who, when told that he got laid just last night, whines, “Last night was a long time ago!” Among the therapist’s patients is nerdy Dilbert Lamb (Levi Richards), who is obsessed with black lingerie and his aunt, Juliet. Dilbert has built a giant super computer named Oscar. In its electronic voice, Oscar says stuff like, “Why do you want to talk to me, baby?”

The plot is not particularly easy to follow but, as far as I could tell, the head of the CIA (played by adult film vet Jamie Gillis) is concerned that Dilbert has been compromised by either the Russians or by a bunch of do-gooder activists led by a Ralph Nader-style journalist named Kenneth Whacker (David Davidson). (The journalist’s followers call themselves Whacker’s Attackers.) The decision is made to recruit Linda Lovelace to investigate because Lovelace apparently has a mysterious technique that she can use to get men to tell her anything.

When Linda is first approached by the CIA, she thinks that she is being drafted into the Army so that she can fight in Vietnam. “But I have asthma and I need new reading glasses!” she says. Hey, me too! Anyway, Linda is relieved to discover that she will not being going to Vietnam and that her new codename is Agent — wait for it — 0069. (Just in case you were wondering what the level of humor was in this particular film….)

Despite the film’s cast of veteran adult performers and the fact that it’s a sequel to the movie that some people went to jail for transporting across state lines, Deep Throat II is an incredibly tame movie. The film is edited so haphazardly that it feels as if at least half of it was left on the cutting room floor. At first, I assumed that I was watching a heavily edited version of the original film but a few minutes of research online revealed that I was watching the original. (Apparently, director Joe Sarno directed the film so that more explicit scenes could be directed by another filmmaker and inserted into the action but, for whatever reason, those scenes were never filmed. Sarno was usually one of the more aesthetically interesting and thematically daring of the directors working in the adult film industry. You would not necessarily know that from his work on this film.) The actors struggle to keep a straight face while delivering their lines, Harry Reems enthusiastically jumps up and down in almost every scene in which he appears, and Linda Lovelace seems to be trying really hard but she just has a blah screen presence. Unlike Marilyn Chambers in Rabid or Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience, Linda Lovelace does not come across as having been a particularly good actress.

That said, there is one interesting aspect to Deep Throat II. Kenneth Hacker worries that Oscar could become smarter than the human being who programmed it and that the computer’s creation could be the first step to the creation of a permanent surveillance state, one in which even private thoughts will be used against the citizens of the United States. In the film, everyone laughs him off. 50 years later, it no longer sounds that fanciful.

14 Days of Paranoia:

Fast Money (1996)

To All A Goodnight, a holiday-themed horror film from 1980, opens with a particularly macabre hazing. One teenage girl runs through a mansion, eventually ending up at the edge of a balcony. A bunch of other teenage girls surround her, in what I assume is meant to be a sorority initiation. Over the edge of the balcony the first girl goes, plunging to her death. AGCK! Actually, it would perhaps a bit more effective if not for the fact that the shot of the girl plunging to her death was shot with a very obvious dummy.

Two years later, on the Friday before Christmas, none of the students at the Calvin Finishing School For Girls seem to remember or care about the accident that led to the death of one of their classmates. Instead, they are too busy getting ready for Christmas break. Most are heading home but a few are planning on staying at the school. One of the girls explains that her superrich boyfriend is going to be flying his private plane to the school and he’s bringing along a few of his friends. Yay! Everyone gets a date! They just have to make sure that they’re not caught by the housemother (Kiva Lawrence) or Ralph (Buck West), the weirdo handyman who spends a lot of time telling the girls that something evil is going to happen.

The plane lands. (Viewers will want to keep an eye out for porn star Harry Reems, playing the pilot.) The boys invade the school. Guitars are played. Love is made. Philosophies are discussed. And it turns out that Ralph was correct. Evil things happen. Someone has dressed up like Santa Claus and is committing murder! The girls eventually call the police and Detective Polansky (Sam Shamshak) leaves behind two other detectives to keep an eye on the place. For whatever reason, it never seems to occur to anyone to just leave the school and maybe stay at a hotel or something. I mean, the plane is right there!

To All A Goodnight is a fairly generic, low-budget slasher. The acting is stiff. The lighting is so haphazard that it’s actually a challenge to keep track of whether a scene is taking place during the day or at night. There are several character but none of them have enough of a personality to really make an impression. It’s a challenge to keep track of who is who. More than a few times, I found myself saying, “I thought she was dead.”

There are two things that make this film memorable.

First off, To All A Goodnight was released on January 30th, 1980. That was a month too late to take advantage of the holiday connection but, at the same time, that also makes it the first slasher of the 80s. Friday the 13th would not be released until May. Much like the first Friday the 13th, To All A Goodnight is basically an American version of an Italian giallo film, with the emphasis on the whodunit aspect of the plot.

Secondly, To All A Goodnight was the only film to be directed by David Hess, the songwriter-turned-actor who was best known for playing Krug in the original Last House On The Left. (Fans of Italian cinema, of course, know him for his turn as the main psycho in The House On The Edge of the Park.) With the exception of one nicely surreal moment in which one of the students has a nervous breakdown and starts to dance during the film’s final confrontation, there’s nothing particularly memorable about Hess’s direction. The film was obviously shot quickly and for little money so it’s not easy to say whether Hess would have improved as a filmmaker with more time and a bigger budget.

To All A Goodnight was one of the first of the Santa Claus slasher films but it would certainly not be the last. Something about jolly old St. Nick just seems to bring out the macabre in certain filmmakers.