Drive-In Double Feature: Vixens Of Kung-Fu/Oriental Blue (1975/Vinegar Syndrome DVD)/Nuit #1 (2012/Adopt DVD)/Nikkatsu Erotic Films Collection: Horny Diver: Tight Shellfish, Nurse Girl Dorm: Sticky Fingers (both 1985), Sex Hunter: 1980 & Story Of White Coat: Indecent Acts (1984/Impulse DVD Singles)

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

Dealing with eroticism is not easy on film (and not HD digital) to the point that the results are either a joke, revel in their cheapness, get gross or will do anything to be different. Most of these recent releases are just like that, save one that tries for something more.

We'll start with the Vinegar Syndrome Drive-In Double Feature series offering two films from 1975 by Bill Millings that are cheaper than usual: Vixens Of Kung-Fu and Oriental Blue. Vixens has a prostitute who was victimized by a group of men, but a female martial arts expert takes her in and revenge is not far behind, all in only 70 minutes. Blue is longer at 85 minutes and just as awkward and ineffective as a stereotypical Madame of the title (in the Fu Manchu/Dragon Lady stereotype mode despite being set in 1975) has her men kidnap women to victimize them. So we get plenty of female victimization and little plot, story ideas or anything interesting to the point I was surprised how flat and dull these were.

I can see why they were paired up, even if they did not have the same director, but these one-note gimmick flicks just go nowhere and are bad indie curios at best. Anything erotic is slight at best and even shot in color, not very visually memorable either.

There are no extras.

Writer/Director Anne Emond's Nuit #1 (2012) was shot in Canada, is in French and involves a one-night stand that might or might not become more between Nikolai (Dimitri Storoge) and Clara (Catherine de Lean) that is more erotic than anything on this list and as well as much more honest. The language can get as graphic, but then they spend the rest of the 91 minutes (easily the longest thing on this list) philosophizing about sex, sexual contact, the world, life, death and anything else they can squeeze in.

In this respect, it is doing that art house film thing of being artsy to justify its sexual content, which is as cliched as anything we could discuss here. The result is that two leads with chemistry are sidetracked by this European stream-of-thought approach at the expense of character study. Too bad, because this had real potential.

There are unfortunately no extras.

Finally we have the four latest entries in the Nikkatsu Erotic Films Collection. Volumes 17 - 20 include the silly Horny Diver: Tight Shellfish, semi-tolerable Nurse Girl Dorm: Sticky Fingers (both 1985), new installment in the continuing series Sex Hunter: 1980 & also barely passable Story Of White Coat: Indecent Acts (1984) where women usually are in compromised sex situations with usually ugly men, other women and we even get gross moments (using the fetish label does not help in most cases either) resulting in novella films that tend to blur together.

Though more competent than the 1975 films above, most run about an hour (68 minutes for Hunter) and I have now seen enough to say these are definitely an acquired taste if that. In addition, the newer they get, the less cinematic and good looking they become. The flatter look means less visual ambition and they may have helped the studio make a quick buck, but I can see why they eventually came to an end. Hunter is the most ambitious by default and is narrowly the best one of the four. I would start with that one of all of them if you have any interest in the series or see more covered elsewhere on this site. Also note some body parts are blurred out in censorship that makes these censored and edited.

Original Theatrical Trailers and liner notes inside the DVD cases are the only extras in all cases.

All the DVDs are here in anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image presentations save Hunter at 2.35 X 1, Coat at 1.78 X 1 and Nuit with a 1.33 X 1 frame centered in its 1.78 X 1 presentation. Vixens, Oriental and Nurse are the softest presentations here, though all are standard def and could all look a bit better. Vixens and Oriental have the roughest prints as expected, but have some good shots at times, but not often. All offer lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono sound save Nuit in 2.0 Stereo, but tend to be on par with each other sonically as the older films show their age and the newer ones can be quiet, dialogue based or limited sonically. That puts them in line with previous such releases.

- Nicholas Sheffo