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HOT BUTTERED BLUES (1997)
METRO DVD (region 0)
d. Jace Rocker; cast. Steve Hatcher, Misty Rain, Julian, Louisiana Guitar Red, Alyssa Allure, Devin, Sunny, Rick Masters, Ron Jeremy, Fabulous Ray and the Blues Bastards, The Blues Burners
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The Low-Budget Humour of Crude Nostalgia for Adult Cinema's bygone Era
Prolific director Jace Rocker was a regular contributor to adult features throughout the 1990s, making often light and genre-aware pastiches.
These films sought to bring back the kind of crude fun of a bygone era in contrast to the increasing sophistication of the porno chic movement of such directors as Michael Ninn and Andrew Blake. Perhaps conspicuously, many porn films that ventured into light fun sought to accrue the label of “raunchy comedy” and to delineate a kind of adult feature which was less a message than harmless laughs and frolics with explicit sexual content. Hot Buttered Blues is one such work, openly courting the nostalgia for the 1960s but strangely reluctant to address its social changes in any other terms except related to those of the expected free sex variety. However, Hot Buttered Blues does have one unusual gimmick: the casting of Alabama bluesman Louisiana Guitar Red in a leading, but non-porn, role. Guitar Red was a self-taught guitar and harmonica player who soon developed a styled of explicit, barbed and often autobiographical stories all sung in his gruff voice. Since 1981, Red had been living in Germany but tried a comeback tour in the USA beginning in 1997. His appearance in this adult feature thus marks the re-launch of an original Delta bluesman into American popular culture and it is a shame that the film does not achieve anything substantial with this opportunity.
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Synopsis (contains spoilers)
It is Los Angeles circa 1969. An old African-American bluesman (Guitar Red) performs on the street as a friend (Steve Hatcher), also a musician, pulls up and reminisces.
Their chat is interrupted by a local policeman (Julian) who instructs them to disperse. They leave as they have been told to do. Meanwhile, at a low-rent blues club, owner Ron Jeremy is counting his lack of profits as his waitresses encourage him to take in more appropriate blues related acts into the club. One of these waitresses (Misty Rain) suggests Red but Jeremy is sceptical and declines, believing instead that he has the solution in a gimmick guru act. Rain returns to her boyfriend, the cop. Hatcher has been booked into Jeremy’s club (Blues Lemon) and is there rehearsing with another musician when one of the waitresses proves an avid groupie. After his show, Hatcher is collecting his monies from Jeremy when he also suggests that Jeremy take in better acts. Soon, Jeremy’s latest act shows up, an Indian Maharishi and his assistant and they retire with two bar customers, both of whom are dedicated groupies. Their sex act ends with them falling out onto the stage and being booed by the crowd, which Jeremy must then appease with free drinks. Now Misty calls up Hatcher: in return for providing him with more groupies, she wants him to introduce her to Guitar Red whom she now wants to play at Jeremy’s club in the hope of saving it.
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Civil Rights Era Music and Mores
Hot Buttered Blues is a middling disappointment of a movie and a sad missed opportunity to do something creative and unusual within the genre respective to its guest cast member.
Although its credits sequence evokes the turbulent Civil Rights era blues houses and culture and its subsequent design and color tones indicate the influence of pop-art psychedelia, the film hopes to achieve a union out of the otherwise disparate blues and hippie nostalgias. It is thus full of reverence for the veteran black performer but otherwise reveals a casual racism that is rather insulting. With no miscegenation, except for a Native-American / Asian woman in the tepid lesbian number, the film relies on the gentle lampooning and indulgence of racist caricature for a lot of its humour: hence, the fun at the expense of the Jewish boss Jeremy and the two faux Indian guru performers. This racism is not unknown to Rocker (who similarly tackled racial caricature in Thai Me Up) and seems a deliberate ploy for humour. However, this merely displaces attention away from the truly horrible legacy of segregation and the Civil Rights concerns which the film began by evoking. As a result, the lampooning of ethnicity is dangerously close to being merely bigoted in a context which ironically elevates the old black musician to the status of folk hero and living legend. The unresolved racial caricature and the over-compensation unbalances this middling movie.
Perhaps Rocker’s intent was to fuse the black and white traditions as rather mutually inter-dependent in the 1960s.
Hence, the club is a symbolic site of a burgeoning American record of musical culture and its fate is assured only when it gives time to the black musician (who works with the white hippie) who in turn draws the appreciative audience. Although this brief smattering of an allegorical cultural assessment is there, it seems embryonic rather than truly examined as a theme in what is finally a very superficial and innocuous movie too concerned with its own sense of fun than in what that fun may actually be about or involve. The racial humour is thus without undue malice, jokes in a film which wants to lampoon the cultural fads of the 1960s in a beguiling way. But in turning away from the larger issues, the film reduces its nostalgia to merely quaint banality. In such a context, not even the presence of such a performer as Louisiana Guitar Red lends much gravity to the work, which instead seems to be concerned with integrating blues into the sex film aesthetic but unsure as to how best to go about this. Finally, it seems that the cultural task the filmmakers had set themselves with the central casting gimmick proved to be beyond them and they merely settled for a routine sex film with some throwaway humour and a few blues numbers in the hope that that alone will compensate for the lack of creative solutions to the aesthetic dilemmas.
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Evoking the 1960s in Set design and Costume
The visual transfer is competent enough in fullscreen, preserving the shot-on-video raw look of this production.
Set dressing is riddled with posters and other artefacts of the 1960s in the hope of suggesting the bygone era and the use of colored filters increases in the latter stages. Only towards the end is the psychedelia of the era even remotely suggested in the visual design. The main costumes are colourful, with symbolic use of the way Hatcher’s character balances hippie and blues suits and humour again made out of the faux Maharishi. The sex is always functional at best, dissolves being used in the opening sequence to good effect. Punctuating the sex are musical numbers although these only coincide in one sex-scene, a three-way between Hatcher, his fellow musician and a barmaid (Dallas). The blues numbers on stage are filmed indifferently, with a kind of as it happens aesthetic rather than any real pre-planning in evidence: as a result they look and feel decidedly home movie like – a camera at a venue. Although unpolished, this does preserve the intended raw spontaneity of the events themselves within the context of the drama. Some compositional tricks are deployed during the lesbian number but otherwise the staging of the sex numbers is rote and perfunctory. The filming on makeshift locations – someone’s garage and a cheap-rent club – ensures that there is little real exploration of place.
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The Zestful Foregrounding of Rock and Blues Lore
The sound transfer in Dolby Digital Surround is competent once again, at best with the blues musical numbers.
The script endeavours to be funny and has some effectively stylized moments with competent delivery. Music is either backgrounded during the sex scenes or is foregrounded during the Guitar Red numbers towards the end of the film: either extra-diegetic or diegetic. The non-diegetic scoring has some variation from sex scene to sex scene, from blues to rock to faux sitar music to more psychedelic rock and blues again whilst the diegetic music is mixed with more fullness and is always blues-laden. The sex scenes are replete with the expected moans of pleasure, although again these seem rote rather than passionate, with the possible exception of Alyssa Allure who alone seems enthusiastic during the Maharishi number if not in the following lesbian scene. The background score is allusive to the musical fads of the 1960s but content to evoke rather than parody or develop them uniquely and thus is never more than the background it sets out to be. Longish dialogue bursts set-up the sex scenes which then abandon talk again until the end of the respective scene, but at least some scenes go on beyond the expected money shot. A lot of time, some fifteen to twenty minutes, is devoted to the concert venue footage of Guitar Red and these are musically engaging as a document of the performer’s risqué approach to the blues.
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Treats for the Pornhound & DVD Collector
In the way of special features are an original trailer, biographies of the female principal cast members, a photo gallery of stills, a “quick tour” linked function, website details and some corporate information for Metro DVD. There are also previews for Zazel, Breeders, Babes Illustrated 6, Makin’ Whoopee, Blue Dahlia, Bite the Big Apple, Red Vibe Diaries, Thai Me Up, A Little Piece of My Heart, Risque Burlesque 2, Sexy Nurses 2 and Justine. On the B-side of the disc are housed some 32 previews, accessible by menu although each one cuts back to a preview for the gang-bang movie The Houston 500 unless fast-forwarded to the next menu item. In addition to these previews is a promotional computer graphic film-clip for online sex site amazingsex.com.
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