Honey
Buns (1973/Impulse
DVD)/Skin Deep
(1983/Umbrella Region Free PAL Import DVD)/SX_Tape
(2012/Well Go USA Blu-ray)/Two
Moon Junction
(1988/Samuel Goldwyn Company/MGM/Umbrella Region Free Import Blu-ray)
Picture:
C/C/B-/B Sound: C/C+/B-/B- Extras: D/D/C-/D Films:
C+/C+/D/C+
PLEASE
NOTE:
The Skin
Deep
Region Free PAL Import DVD and Two
Moon Junction
Region Free (though listed as Region B, it is not) Import Blu-ray are
now only available from our friends at Umbrella Entertainment and can
be ordered from the link below.
It
has only been a few decades where sex has been openly dealt with in
cinema and other media, from the new freedom of hardcore XXX releases
circa 1972, to the peak of that movement in the early 1980s giving
way to flashier variants, to the decline of such images. The
following releases show us that trajectory...
James
Chiara's Honey Buns
(1973) wants to jump on the Deep
Throat bandwagon (I know
anything I write here is going to be unintentionally funny, but I'll
ignore that) by mixing sex with humor and puns. A lack of realism is
also here as any sex fantasy is purposely underscored by a goody plot
where a magician helps sexless Harry get sex, but the women disappear
(!?!) as soon as they are done. Running 74 minutes with no major
names in the business, it is a curio with an amusing cover, ideas and
a few good moments that work, but it is as much a time capsule as
anything. At least the sex is naturalistic and uninhibited enough.
There
are no extras, though it would have been interesting if there were.
By
the time Langman Joffe's Skin
Deep (1983) arrived, TV
was able to address sex more easily if not as explicitly and this one
has a soap opera context from Australian TV set in the fashion
industry. The cast is mostly known only for work in Australia, but
this one is a curio because a young, then-unknown Nicole Kidman (Eyes
Wide Shut) plays one of
the models. Of course, sex is more inhibited here, the people are
cleaned up, more dramatic and any sign of a feminist movement is
washed away by the suds. We'll get more to the change in the ten
years between these two releases below, but it is not bad as a
Dynasty
variant.
There
are no extras.
Bernard
Rose's SX_Tape
(2012) is from the director of the original Candyman
and that was barely memorable (now was its sequel), but this is the
nadir of all involved, though the producers of the lame Paranormal
Activity and Insidious
films participated, so they are working at their usually low level to
begin with. After the Porn Chic of the freewheeling 1970s and new
wave sex of the 1980s, the idea of the erotic on film was getting
very played out, cynicism set in and the reactionary 1980s suddenly
meant if you had sex, you deserved to die, with slasher films beating
the AIDS crisis by mere months in this respect. This mess has a guy
taping his girlfriend and they start to have sex here and there, but
it is never authentic, sexy and even when she is naked (and she has a
nice body), it is never sexy and even desexed by shooting,
circumstances, purposely bad dialogue and dumb situations.
So
if the slasher trend is long over and there is not any honest sex
here, what will happen? Torture porn and a horror show. Yawn! This
is almost like a propaganda film that tries to desex everything about
sex one could think of, the reactionary 1980s finding its nihilistic
end and this is just a stupid mess to the last scene, which is so
obvious in its stupidity that you can see it coming a light year
away. The hype ad says that some tapes shouldn't be made. Well some
people should not try to make anything about sex or issue Blu-rays
about them. Not a sex or horror film, but an exercise in hate and
self-hate.
Extras
include a Trailer and Making Of featurette.
So
how did we get to unsexy sex where people kill, mame, hate and
mutilate? The late Zalman King's Two
Moon Junction (1988) is
not a bad film, but he (and Adrian Lyne) introduced a new style of
sex that looked like TV commercials, fashion print ads and
immediately, music videos which were still very new at the time. It
also sent a message that all that great open sex in the 1970s was
dirty, caused AIDS, was futile and only clean consumer types who
looked and dressed a certain way deserved pleasure, especially sex.
Sherilyn Fenn is the object of desire, looking sexy in almost every
shot and as sexy as her 1970s counterparts, about to marry that guy
her parents expect her to and she thinks she wants to until she meets
Perry (Richard Tyson, looking like a slightly buffer, yet clueless
cousin to Val Kilmer) who is fired up to work and have sex. Note if
he was not a working man, he might not be potent and none of the
cleaner, allegedly AIDS-proof sex would be possible here.
Of
course, they get involved in several sequences (that all look like
Music Videos) in what became a formula. As a result, the film is not
that good, often predictable and not even the best of its kind, but
that is still better than bad, cheap Internet XXX and SX_Tape.
Also, Fenn being here makes this a major curio, but fortunately for
her, David Lynch was ahead of almost everyone else in understanding
what was going on here, found her and made her into a star beyond the
confines of a formula work with a propagandic edge. Louise Fletcher,
Burl Ives, Kristy McNichol, Herve Villechaize and even a young Milla
Jovovich also star, so it is Lynch weird on some level. See it just
to see what they did.
There
are sadly no extras.
The
1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Junction
is the best image performer here with ease from a decent print with
few flaws or limits, yet the style still shows the age of the
production, but we get some nice shots just the same. The 1080p 1.78
X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Tape can look as
bad as tape, intentionally, but the lack of fidelity intended to make
this authentic is so contrived and cliched that it backfires like
most of the production itself. The
1.33 X 1 image on the DVDs are softer than I would have liked, with
Honey
having more scratches than expected and Skin
looking like an older transfer master.
As
for sound, both Blu-rays have DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) lossless
mixes, with the 5.1 on Tape
trying to sound like location audio, but it is one of the worst
attempts to do so I have ever heard in my life, so the 2.0 Stereo mix
on Junction
was an Ultra Stereo analog theatrical release and has less distortion
than such films usually have, so playing it back with Pro Logic gives
us some surrounds that sound better than the Blu-ray of a release 24
years later. Both DVDs are here in lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 sound
that is not strong at all, with Skin
in simple stereo and Honey
in Mono that is a bit brittle.
To
order either of the
Umbrella import Blu-ray or DVD releases above, go to this link:
http://www.umbrellaent.com.au/
-
Nicholas Sheffo
