All Rise...

Judge Daryl Loomis has a hard time being attracted to anybody not dubbed.

Editor's Note

Our review of Honey (2004), published June 25th, 2004, is also available.

The Charge

Infidelity: a new kind of ball game.

The Case

Let's travel back in time to those heady days of the mid 1980s, when cable was still young and channels scrambled to show whatever programming they could get. Those late weekend nights, particular stations carried very interesting programming for horny insomniacs nationwide. In Scrambled Sex: Erotic Cinema of Early '80s Cable, Secret Key takes us through some of the more desperate of these nights, bringing us four films that are nothing less than terrible.

Honey
A frustrated screenwriter shows up at a producers house with her script and a gun, determined to make him read it. To prove he's read it, she makes him do it out loud, and we're treated to the brilliant story of a young woman who shows up at a hostel to find hot men, lusty women, and a whole new lesson in sexuality.

Loves of Lady Chatterley
After an accident leaves her husband handicapped and impotent, the young Lady Chatterley (Malù, Lady Emanuelle) has become bored with her cushy villa lifestyle. To help combat her ennui, her husband hires a new groundskeeper, a young man fresh out of prison with whom she has a steamy past. As they wander the grounds, their relationship starts to rekindle, but can they make it happen under her husband's nose?

Sorry, Wrong Bedroom
A tyrannical strip club owner drives away his girls with his behavior, so he sends his three remaining workers on a trek through Germany to find the hottest women to come work for him. On their way, they find beautiful frauleins, sexy escapades, and all around German wackiness.

Moonlighting Mistress
In what really has no business in this collection, Jan (Harald Leipnitz, Death or Freedom) is tired of his wife, Angela (Ruth-Maria Kubitschek, Madame and Her Niece), but not her money, so he can't divorce her no matter how much his girlfriend, Gina (Véronique Vendell, Barbarella), wants him to. Instead, Jan hatches a plan to kill Angela, make it look like a suicide, and he'll fly away with Gina with no consequences. The plan goes wrong, though, and Angela disappears, so Gina must impersonate Angela until Jan can come up with something. There's one problem: where's Angela's body?

There are only two things that connect the four films in this collection: they all appeared on pay television at one point and their general collective terribleness. Secret Key has scraped the bottom of the barrel to bring us these films, and thanks, I guess. Fans nostalgic for the old days of late-night cable will have a little fun with these movies, but casual viewers looking for some cheap thrills will walk away frustrated with themselves for having sat through something they knew deep down would be awful.

I remember Honey from the old days, and it's the only film in the set that I had seen. I wasn't exactly looking forward to revisiting it, but it's still the best the collection has to offer, which says something pretty sad. It's the only one that really fits into my memory of what the set's title advertises, and maybe that's why it seems more tolerable, but the other three films reach completely different levels of stupid.

The Loves of Lady Chatterley is the most pathetic of any of the many adaptations of D.H. Lawrence's novel. The story makes the most logical sense of anything here, though that's not saying a lot and the film is a serious failure otherwise. It teases at erotica and feels severely cut, but I don't see a lot of hope, even in an uncut version.

Sorry, Wrong Bedroom features the most outright sex of anything on the set, but don't get too excited. If you've ever seen a German sex comedy, you'll get what you expect, and it isn't pretty. A pathetically awful script mixed with grating pratfall humor and ugly, ugly people, this belongs in horror more than in comedy.

The final film in the collection, Moonlighting Mistress, fits right in with the rest when we compare quality, but the subject matter has little to do with the rest. A murder thriller with little erotic content, it's hard to think where this fits on late night cable. If it actually aired, it must have really disappointed viewers, because it doesn't pretend to be sexy in any way. The serpentine plot doesn't hold water, but it seems like they were trying to make a fairly serious movie. It's mystifying that it's here.

Secret Key has gone about as bare-bones as they could with Scrambled Sex: Erotic Cinema of Early '80s Cable. The four films are presented over two double-sided DVDs in full frame with mono sound. The images are as poor as they could possibly be; there has clearly been nothing done to improve how they look. The sound is adequate, but no better than an average VHS copy. All we have for extras is a trailer vault, mostly advertising sets from Secret Key just like this one. Barely worth writing about.

The Verdict

Scrambled Sex: Erotic Cinema of Early '80s Cable is for die-hard softcore fans only. If you've never heard of any of the selections and wonder whether they might be worth something, wonder no more; they aren't.

Guilty.

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