Joe Sarno | 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)

Released in 1964, Sin In The Suburbs is probably one of the best films that you’ve never heard of. The fact that it is also an unapologetic product of and for the grindhouse does nothing to change that fact. Well-acted and telling a disturbingly(and occasionally amusingly) plausible story, Sin In The Suburbs is a masterpiece of exploitation cinema.

As you can probably guess from the title, the setting here is the suburbs. To the naked eye, it’s a perfectly normal and placid neighborhood. However, to the housewives who are expected to spend all of their time in their identical suburban homes while their husbands head into the city for the day, the suburbs have become an existential prison, a world of sexual frustration and repressed desires.

Everyone finds their own way to handle living in the suffocating atmosphere of suburban perfection. Lisa Francis (Marla Ellis), for example, deals with it by sitting around her living room in black lingerie and waiting for various salesmen to come and knock on her door.

Geraldine Lewis (Audrey Campbell) isn’t quite as blatant as her neighbor, though Geraldine does find the time to dance with a teenage boy who comes by looking for her daughter, Judy (Alice Linville). Geraldine does not know how to deal with her developing daughter and, as a result, Judy starts spending more and more time with another neighbor, Yvette Tallman (Dyanne Thorne).

Yvette and her creepy brother Louis (W.B. Parker) run an interesting business on the side. They set up suburban sex clubs, where everyone wears a robe and a mask and gets to engage in anonymous sex with their neighbors. While Louis is certainly creepy looking whenever he puts on a mask that he himself describes as being “demonic,” director Joe Sarno goes out of his way to make this sex club look about as unsexy as possible. The film’s characters may think that they’re being terribly sophisticated but Sarno undercuts their fantasy by playing up the seedy desperation of the sex club’s masked meetings.

In fact, it’s easy to laugh at the Tallmans’ ludicrous little club until the film’s final ten minutes, at which point a case of mistaken identity leads to one of the most downbeat endings ever.

Joe Sarno may have specialized in making what the rest of the world considered to be exploitation films but the fact that he was an artist at heart is obvious from watching Sin In The Suburbs. Even before I decided to embark on this series of melodramatic film reviews, I had already seen a countless number of films about the what goes on behind closed suburban doors and none of them are quite as dark (or authentic) as the suburban Hell that Sarno portrays in Sin In The Suburbs. There’s a seediness to the film that, while not exactly pleasant, is also so all-pervasive and convincing that it becomes oddly compelling.

As opposed to a film like Peyton Place, which gave us small town sin in glamorous technicolor, Sin in the Suburbs is filmed in drab black-and-white and takes place on sets that are notable for their minimal decoration. The only time the film truly comes to life visually is when everyone is wearing a mask and hoping to conceal who they really are. But even then, Sarno refuses to glamorize his characters. Instead, he intentionally plays up the absurdity of a bunch of middle class suburbanites trying to convince themselves that they’re actually decadent free spirits.

If Jean-Paul Sartre had abandoned No Exit to instead write a grindhouse sex film, the end result would probably look a lot like Sin In The Suburbs.