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GRINDHOUSE HOTTIES:
RENE BOND ROUGHIES TRIPLE (1971-1973)
After Hours DVD (region 1)
d. Jimmy de Knight, various; pr. G. King, various; scr. various; cast. Rene Bond, Rick Lutze, Patti Snyder, Steven Sommers, Rick Cassidy (180 mins)
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From Live Sex Show Stunner to the Queen of the Roughies
Rene Bond was a busty, long-haired brunette with a curvy figure who made the porno circuit – often referred to as the “grindhouse circuit” – in the early 1970s before disappearing, presumed dead.
With her partner, Ric Lutze, she appeared in live sex shows at Los Angeles’ Ivar Theatre and dozens of one-day wonder porno quickies, termed “roughies” because of the minimalist aesthetics and the often disturbingly explicit connotations of sexual violence. Three of Bond’s roughies are collected in the two-disc Rene Bond Roughie Triple Feature released now on DVD. With an informative and well-researched collector’s booklet and fully restored transfers, this anthology of porno obscurities is a valuable addition to the growing archival collection of generally disreputable pornography from After Hours Cinema, here through their “Grindhouse Hotties” selection of obscure 1970s cinema.
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The Violent Collision of Patriarchal & Matriarchal Socialization Stereotypes
The first Rene Bond roughie here, Rendezvous in Hell is a grim sex fantasy of the collision of opposing worlds: all male violent outlawry and all female girls’ dormitory, which the girls nickname Hell.
Four armed men rob a gas station and hightail it to the dormitory where they beat the girls (including Rene Bond) mercilessly with belts and then have their way them in a variety of sexual positions. Rendezvous in Hell is a strong example of the roughie genre, the most notorious example being of course Forced Entry, though perhaps Gerard (Deep Throat) Damiano’s obscure Waterpower could match it. The initial scene of violence is non-sexual and the sex that follows has no suggestion of rape whatsoever, despite this being logically the case if the premise is accepted. Much of the violence is bloody, but the style too lethargic for dramatic tension before the film gets back to some individual, clearly consensual couplings (one in a bed under a sign which reads “make love not war”).
As far as theme goes, once the girls start fighting back, the film seems to suggest masculinity as a contaminant that has violated their ideal.
Though without actual scenes of dramatized violation – as found in some roughies, as in, say, A Dirty Western’s explicit pack rape scenes – Rendezvous in Hell lacks the trippy sexual violence that also distinguished the roughie, but ends with the same weary, bleak nihilism that made the roughie the most disreputable of all peep show cinema genres. Interestingly, the original soundtrack was a medley of songs from the seminal hippie rock musical Hair, suggesting the film intended as a mockery of the same “make love not war” ideal it evokes: although the Hair medley is not present on the DVD, removed for copyright reasons, the misanthropic intent remains throughout this one-day wonder sex film, making it a genuine curio.
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Suburban Disaffection & the Pollution of Industrialized America
Polluted, industrial America gives way to affluent middle suburbia in The Partnership, the second roughie on this collection of three.
When one of two business partners realizes he is being screwed by his partner, he takes revenge by screwing his partner’s wife. Living with the cuckolded partner is a house-pet of sorts, sexy Rene Bond boasting her new surgery-enhanced bosoms, who indulges her desires with a head servant (Lutze) until finally a group orgy results. This roughie spends a few minutes establishing its high-finance plot before settling into haphazardly edited sex scenes, with close-ups and a distinct lack of continuity in its filming of genital and oral action. There are again a variety of positions but the naturalistic lighting and camera position often obscures genital detail, though fellatio is always clear. It’s a fairly rudimentary sex film, establishing a plot but unable to develop a theme, unlike the preceding Rendezvous in Hell and is devoid of any violence or rough stuff really in comparison.
Pimply asses and hairy twats were the order of the day in cheapo peep show jack-off cinema, and The Partnership is an example of this staple sex cinema fodder in the early 1970s, long before the clean up the streets campaigns from Christian moralizers – ridiculed by pornoteur Roberta Findlay in the sly porno film Dear Pam (also released by After Hours Cinema as part of the 42nd Street Pete John Holmes Collection) – forced the grindhouses to close. Such films are all consensual sex play, usually between friends, shot with one camera in a day, dubbed afterwards and distributed on 16mm to porno theatres in primarily New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
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Modern Masculine Identity Relative to the Manipulation of Women
For the third and final roughie in this collection there is The Heist. The Heist was shown in 1971, though may have been filmed earlier, before hardcore close-ups of genital action became the norm in this disreputable form of sex movie, and is what is known as a “softie”: the sex is genuine but the camera is kept at a distance and the editing avoids explicit close-ups of genital action.
Rene Bond plays a warm-hearted prostitute who gets involved in gangsterism and stolen money when her session with a client is interrupted by hoodlums. Under pressure to recover lost funds, as the hoodlums force sex on Bond and her friend at gunpoint, the client decides to make a porno movie, soon holding auditions for hopeful young starlets, one of whom is the Mob boss’ daughter!
The Heist is a film about a guy under pressure: the protagonist treats Bond with kindness in comparison to the gangsters – accepting it when she says she does not give blow jobs, a preference the gangsters disregard as she is forced to give oral sex at gunpoint.
In desperation, he retreats into what he thinks will be easy money – making porno. Morality is relative here – consensual prostitution is considered a norm, the protagonist though established as a man who would not use force is quite prepared to ply his potential porn starlet with booze and promises of stardom in order to get his way. The manipulation of women is considered an innate part of masculinity, although the film clings to a distinction between coercion and rape, seeing humour in the former and at best ambivalence in the latter, as the “rape” is again play-acted by consensual adults and thus fantasy despite the grimy low-budget, grainy realism of the one camera shoot. With much attention to plot, character and set-up in the first half, The Heist again descends into sexual tableaux, foregoing its coercion subtexts for a celebration of female sexuality, with Bond in particular an enthusiastic and endearing performer, well deserving of her cult status. As a portrait of a pornographer by pornographers, the film has a definitive curiosity appeal although does not significantly probe the issues facing pornographers.
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Violence, Coercion & Rape in the Most Disreputable of Adult Genres
The DVD release of the Rene Bond Roughie Triple Feature makes for an interesting and rewarding glimpse at perhaps the most disreputable of film genres.
The material here, replete with violence, coercion and allusions to rape, is precisely that which attracted the ire of feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon who did their best to have this kind of film banned in the USA as a human rights violation. Now that enough time has passed to see these films as social documents in erotica’s often problematic transition into hardcore pornography, the three roughies here reveal the concern for gender power dynamics and the role of Patriarchal violence in male sexual fantasy even though the subtext of women responding consensually and even enthusiastically to rough treatment and forced sex is problematic from a hardline feminist perspective. Still, it was the roughie alone that sought to examine male fantasies of rape and coercion, making these films, especially Rendezvous in Hell and The Heist, interesting relics of pornography’s forbidden past.
The After Hours DVD release also contains a bonus mini-poster of the DVD cover and an assortment of promising trailers from the 8MM Madness (the world of 42nd Street Pete), Storefront Feature and Grindhouse Director series.
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