Pornhound Goes to the Movies
42nd Street Pete’s 8MM Madness Vol. 6:
Beyond the Busty Stags
After Hours DVD (region 4)

42nd Street Pete is the dealer you need to get back up to speed in the grindhouse of bong high jack-off degeneracy – the Hunter S. Thompson of the peep show circuit, bong at the ready, toke on the go: on with the projector… and on with the show! 

Following Pete’s release of the John Holmes Collection and its noteworthy inclusion of the rarely seen Dear Pam, on comes (no pun intended) Beyond the Busty Stags.  This time Pete is so high he’s packin’ his trusty glass scarlet bong in a spaceship somewhere in orbit… flying high amongst breasts the size of planets – must be in the Milky Way.  No 2001: A Space Odyssey mysterious monoliths orbiting in Pete’s world – but then Pete’s world here is all bust: women’s busts.  And big, gorgeous busts they are too, and such lovely women: all smiles, playful and teasing in the manner of classic black and white stag movies celebrating the female nude as desirable, too innocent perhaps to yet be a commodity.

The stag loops here date back to the 1950s and Battle of the Burlesque Queens, where a women’s boxing event turns into an all-strip showdown, its participants nicely introduced by the reliably degenerate historian Pete. 

To the accompaniment of classic burlesque music, the stag loops on Beyond the Busty Stags emerge as a fascinating chronicle of the representation of the female form, always the prerogative of the stag film, a genre with a distinct and unusual evolution as lovingly evidenced in this anthology of vintage 8mm film loops.  Ranging from restrained to playful, these loops chronicle nude sporting events (archery, wrestling, pillow fighting), mild lesbian fantasies and even features an erotic vignette involving Santa Claus.  1950s and 60s stag loops rarely featured women of color and Pete’s inclusion of the Afro-American beauty in Wrong Side makes for a genuine cultural curio.

Pete introduces each loop, which he individually titles and describes in a well-researched fold-out collector’s booklet, and gives a rundown of any known performers – usually known burlesque artists – appearing in them.  The introductions are brief and to the point, set-ups for the erotic attractions that follow.  Many of the behaviours and situations documented here have become familiar through successive decades of stag film and porno interpretation, but seeing them in a vintage context makes for a rewarding journey through erotica from a time in American history long before the sexual revolution freed American morality to embrace porn and the world of the grindhouse.  Without explicit porn and with camera positioning that is careful to avoid revealing too much about women’s genitalia, the loops here look back to a vanished era in American erotica – the domain of gentlemen’s magazine mail order catalogues. 

What is interesting to note in the succession of loops are the differences as much as the similarities: particularly between those loops with women posing and those loops which are more inclined to observe behaviour, legal nudie films. 

Hence, the detached camera observing the nude archer in The Archer, the lounge room reclining model of Alice’s Sofa (making eye contact with the camera) and the sunbaking beauties of Switcheroo contrasts to the coaxing pornographer convincing his model to bare it all in Wrong Side, a film with a hint of characterization if not exactly narrative (always a rare quality in the stag film before it segued into the pornos of the early 1970s).  There is even an odd variety in filmmaking techniques in evidence here, although always minimalist: Blonde on Both Ends is an almost abstract contemplation of a woman’s body, completely absorbed in her curves, lips and motion as she lies down, the camera filming her from a variety of angles.

The light bondage loops – Leather Fem Dom, Rosie and Mary Whips and Nude Spanking (a once under-the-counter requested fetish loop) – are always playfully consensual and introduce a note of the exotic, although such is always restrained in these amateur 8mm films: though the unrelenting whipping in Rosie and Mary Whips suggests a darker side than much of the material here, being mild B&D.  Women dance, pose, play, display and smile throughout this collection, with much proto-lesbian encounters – touching, undressing and stroking, though always careful not to reveal too much.  These women seem to enjoy being filmed and looked at and their exhibitionistic enthusiasm is sometimes intoxicating, as in the gorgeous, smiling Brandy Long in black lingerie in Brandy Long.  A teasing quality runs throughout this collection as the women delight in showing off their ample figures.  The most elaborate stag loop in this collection is Surprise for Santa, a narrative about four slumbering women awoken by an intruder – Santa and his bag of sexy clothing and toys.  Rounding out the collection is a simulated sex film, one of the very few to glimpse a male presence.

A bonus disc contains a few extra stag loops including a short with famed burlesque artist Pat Hall, nude baseball, an instructional movie 7 Ways of Love and a classic slice of 50s nudist way of life extravaganzas, Nudist Desert Safari. 

Gorgeous women, an appropriate soundtrack of striptease lounge music and a fine assembly of vintage erotica ensure that Beyond the Busty Stags is a stimulating delight bound to rouse the willing male viewer’s desires.  The loops here are examples of legal erotica, in contrast to some material collected by Pete in other volumes of his anthology work for After Hours Cinema’s vintage erotica range although the material here follows on from the earlier Busty Stags Collection release: thus… as Pete says, “stay sick.”