Roger Caine | 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)

When I say “George Romero,” you probably immediately think of zombies. And why not? Night of the Living Dead is perhaps the best known zombie film ever made and Dawn of the Dead is perhaps the second best known. Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead both have their fervent admirers. Without the work of George Romero, there would be no Walking Dead. Without the zombie films of George Romero, countless children would have never grown up to become horror filmmakers. Without George Romero, there would have been no Italian zombie films, which means that I would never have fallen in love with Italian horror and I wouldn’t have been tweeting about it that day in 2010 when Arleigh asked me if I wanted to be a contributor to this website.

Seriously, we all owe a lot to the zombie films of George Romero.

And yet, interestingly enough, Romero’s best film was one that did not feature a single zombie. In fact, it’s a film that, despite the delusions of some of its characters, does not feature a single supernatural element. It’s definitely a horror film but the horrors of the 1978 film Martin are the horrors of the human mind.

Martin (John Amplas) is young, nervous, socially awkward, and enjoys drinking blood. The sun makes him slightly uncomfortable, though it does not make him burst into flames. He has frequent black-and-white flashbacks, in which he sees himself pursued by villagers carrying torches and pitchforks. Occasionally, Martin calls up a radio talk show and has actually gained an audience of listeners, who only know him as “the Count.” Martin believes himself to be a vampire. Of course, he’s not. Instead, he’s just a creepy and mentally unbalanced necrophiliac.

Unfortunately, for Martin, his extremely religious uncle Tateh Cuda (Lincoln Maazel) is also convinced that Martin is a vampire. Martin’s parents have died and Cuda has agreed to allow Martin to live with him in the dying industrial town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. As soon as Martin arrives, Cuda greets him as “Nosferatu” and tells him that if he kills anyone in Braddock, Cuda will pound a stake into his heart.

(Of course, what Cuda doesn’t know, is that Martin already murdered a woman during the train ride from Indiana to Pennsylvania.)

Upon arriving at his new home, Martin works at Cuda’s butcher shop and, defying his uncle’s orders, gets to know his cousin Christine (Christina Forrest). Martin finds himself torn between his fantasy life as a vampire and the chance to lead a normal existence in Braddock. He meets a bored housewife, Mrs. Santini (Elyane Nadeau), and soon is having an affair with her but he still finds himself driven to search for blood.

Meanwhile, Cuda watches and continues to sharpen his stake…

Martin is a dark and grim (and yet, at times, darkly humorous) portrait of two people living under a shared delusion. Just as Martin gains satisfaction by imagining himself as being a supernatural vampire known as the Count, Cuda feels that his purpose in life is to protect the community from bloodsuckers like his nephew. Both of them need the other to function but they’re equally destined to destroy each other. Amplas and Maazel both give excellent performances and Romero captures a tragic sort of beauty to Braddock’s decay.

Martin may be one of Romero’s less known films but it’s also one of his best.