It's amazing how innocent Joanna Williams' Little Girls Blue (VCX, '78) feels today. It's like an Afterschool Special with Genitals.A product of the late 70's, and released just after Debbie Does Dallas, it is a much more accomplished piece of erotica than Debbie. Though a notorious "stick film" due to its availability at the time, Debbie is a (mostly) drab piece of pornography with an occasional flurry of fully erect sexuality.
Little Girls begins with a surprisingly arty credit sequence, then launches quickly into its storyline.
Director Joanna Williams (perhaps a pseudonym for a male director?) was responsible for the relatively rough but overpraised Expensive Tastes, another '78 effort released prior to this.
Often referred to as a roughie, Tastes does feature light rape footage, but it's not a terribly visceral affair, and was easily eclipsed by works such as Zebedy Colt's Unwilling Lovers ('77)...
... and Shaun Costello's Forced Entry ('73).
Fans of Don Coscarelli's Phantasm will recognize the location standing in for a girls' school in this film.
Known as 'The Morningside Mortuary' in Coscarelli's surreal horror flick of '79, it is a boarding school for sexual shenanigans in this soft-hearted, hardcore effort.
I say "soft-hearted" because the sex scenes are extremely conventional and affectionate by today's pornographic standards. Although the content is definitely XXX-rated, the staging is surprisingly subdued and playful.
As turn-on material, it's very effective. The lighting is more than adequate and the couplings (and triplings) are allowed to develop and grow. It's refreshing to see a lady gradually losing her garments.
Personally, I can't stand extended blowjob scenes in pornography of any kind, so Little Girls loses a point or two for me for spending so much time on these.Perhaps I'm alone on this matter, but filmed blowjobs do not make for exciting erotic footage. They focus primarily on a man's penis (for a hetero audience), and use up valuable screen time that could be better directed towards oral servicing of a woman's sexual regions.
Do male porn fans really demand on-screen blowjob, or do lazy producers just think they do?
Guys love lesbian porn because it's all about the female parts. Is that not instructive?
This fine frame grab redresses the balance and is an example of the film's superior lighting and naturalistic production design.
Several years later, directors Svetlana and David I. Frazer gave the world a wonderful, highly erotic trio of Hawaiian-set porn movies that included Surrender in Paradise, Hanky Panky, and Pink Lagoon.
This duet, who were also responsible for the great Sex Boat...
... and Bad Girls, had an intrinsic understanding of eroticism that does have its roots in films like Little Girls Blue.Just as films like Saw have, unfortunately, redefined what horror is to some (thus turning them off a genre that is about so much more), so, too, has grotesque gonzo porn (from the likes of Max Hardcore and Rob Black) redefined what porn is to those who always feared the worst. It's a shame because the porn genre has many magnificent classics that could be enjoyed by a much larger section of the population if only it was prepared to take the plunge.
For every Saw VI there's a Grace or The Children.
And for every Cumstains 10 or Rough Sex there's a Little Girls Blue, Buttman's Revenge, Hanky Panky, 3AM, Blonde Ambition, Night Dreams, or Opening Of Misty Beethoven.
