Chesty Morgan’s Bosom Buddies (1974 - 1975/with Double Agent 73/Image Blu-ray)/GUMS (1976/MVD DVD)/Waves Of Lust (1975/Raro Video)/True Story Of A Woman In Jail: Continues (1975)/Zoom In: Sex Apartments (1980/Nikkatsu/Impulse DVDs)

 

Picture: B-/C-/C/C+/C     Sound: C+/C/C/C/C+     Extras: C/C-/C+/C-/C-     Films: C/C/C-/C-/C

 

 

Now for some silly sexploitation titles that might make you laugh a bit, but are far from actually erotic and often intentionally dumb.

 

 

The new Chesty Morgan’s Bosom Buddies Blu-ray is a triple feature of three indie films made by director Doris Wishman in 1974 and 1975.  They include Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73 with the very, very, very endowed Miss Morgan and The Immoral Three with the somewhat large and all at-the-time good-looking Cindy Boudreau, Sandra Kay and Michele Marie.  All shot in color, they are interesting curios, but Miss Wishman is not a great director and these are not well written or we could say they are hardly written at all.

 

However, this was the state of indie sex cinema as XXX hardcore filmmaking was starting to take off and in some ways mark the end of an era of soft core productions.  Don’t expect much and you’ll at least find these somewhat interesting.  A gallery of Wishman exploitation art for her films and a bunch of trailers of said releases are included as extras.

 

 

Robert J. Kaplan’s silly, gross and dated GUMS (1976) is a bad counterculture spoof of Spielberg’s Jaws, at least some of the time.  Running only 66 minutes, it is more of an experimental montage of nudity and often bad sex jokes and other items that do not mix very well.  It is now even more of a curio since this features an early music score by Brad Fidel, who later scored the first Terminator, True Lies and the ill-fated Johnny Mnemonic.

 

Three old black and white silent peep show shorts are the only extras.

 

 

Considering it was issued by Raro Video, I was expecting more from the Italian thriller Waves Of Lust (1975) directed by Ruggero Deodato, but instead of a cutting-edge or at least brutal and politically incorrect film, got a formulaic and weak variant on the usual “trapped on a boat” thriller with more nudity and much less suspense than Roman Polanski’s Knife In The Water or even Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm.

 

I even liked the boat and actors, but this just goes on and on with no point, climax or character development.  Where is the tension?  That makes it another curio, but the look is not bad.

 

Extras include a nicely illustrated booklet on the film with Eric Contenas essay and text on the director, while the DVD adds Deleted Scenes from the U.S. version meant to spice up the sex factor, Erotic Tsunami documentary and TV commercials directed by Deodato.

 

 

We conclude with two more Nikkatsu erotic DVD film releases from Impulse that are counterparts to discs we reviewed from them before.  Koyu Ohara’s True Story Of A Woman In Jail: Continues (1975) was released the same year as its predecessor, which we reviewed here:

 

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/11569/Corman%E2%80%99s+World:+Exploi

 

However, it is more of the same and less in total, so it is just a cynical cash in that is not even as good and for fans only.  Yes, they are in prison and bad things happen to them.  This gets thin quickly, even though it was made at the peak of such productions internationally.

 

 

Then we have Zoom In: Sex Apartments (1980) which was issued a year before Zoom Up, as these films became more explicit and these in particular walked the line between soft and hardcore, including thanks to the violence.  You can read about Zoom Up at this link:

 

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/11647/Eros+School:+Feels+So+Good+(1977

 

 

This was actually more coherent than its sound-alike, but not much more memorable and all of these releases eventually become a silly blur.  They are again for fans only and that is why they keep on coming. Extras for both DVDs include nicely illustrated booklets on their respective films including informative text and essays by scholar Jaspar Sharp, while Zoom also has a theatrical trailer.

 

 

The 1080p 1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image transfers on Chesty show their age from the print conditions and other issues, but have usually good color and are easily the best-looking releases here as expected.  The anamorphically enhanced DVDs all have their own problems, including the 1.78 X 1 image on GUMS being the poorest and a really poor transfer from a print that needs some serious work.  Both Impulse DVDS have 2.35 X 1 aspect ratios and despite decent prints and some good color, both are much softer than they should be, though Zoom is the best-looking of the DVDs here.  That leaves the 1.85 X 1 on Waves being softer than we usually get from Raro and could have been better.

 

The DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 2.0 Mono lossless mixes on the three films on the Chesty Blu-ray shows the low budgets of the films and their age, including tape hiss and harmonic distortion throughout, so the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Japanese Mono on Zoom is actually able to compete, which says something.  The lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Japanese Mono on Jail is weaker and ties the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on Waves (in Italian and badly dubbed English) and GUMS (badly acted English) as the worst sound playback on the list.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo