Unreleased for 23 years, this staged
documentary by Carl Gurevich took the premise of inviting ten
average Americans to a remote country manor in upstate New York
and asking them to play out any sexual fantasy they want with a
professional film crew and a company of actors. It's a little
hard to watch, due to the zoo of sexual-revolution hipsters, in
their Afros and leisure suits and peasant dresses, who actually
performed in it. We didn't really wanna know what's going on
inside their heads. Take Roberto, the guy who can only get
excited about his own body as a sex object. The producers try to
help him out with a room full of mirrors, a wig and a frilly
nightgown so that he can transform his "other self" into a woman,
but the effect is somewhat distorted by his bushy black beard and
mustache. The moment when this fantasy succeeds is one of the
best arguments for censorship in the history of film. Whoa!
Fortunately the producers passed on the fantasy of the Angela
Davis lookalike who wanted to elaborately torture and then bury
alive several men. But they come close to that with the scene of
Robert Kazmayer, whose idea of a good time is to get nekkid and
stalk a bride who's praying in a chapel, chase her through the
woods, do things that I'm not going to describe here, then steal
her bridal veil and go back to the chapel as the bride himself.
Double whoa! In fact, it makes it seem downright wholesome when
Andrea Cox, a nurse from Wyandotte, Michigan, merely wants to
have sex with the entire New York Jets football team. Or Genie
Joseph, the psychology student, wants to have sex with her
professor while he's lecturing to the class. Or John and Carol of
Seattle, who want to have sex with clowns in a mirrored funhouse.
The strangest one of all involves three guys dressed as Pilgrims
with no pants and a complicated psychological "feather torture."
When it doesn't work, the inventor is furious. I'm not even gonna
mention the Crisco Master. If you knew, you would thank me.
Twenty-six breasts. One dead body. Football-field orgy. Funhouse
orgy. Old-fart soul kiss. Weightless-sex fantasy. Mary Magdalene
and Jesus fantasy. Grossout degradation fantasy. S&M, B&D, and
LMNOP. Gratuitous disco montage. Pilgrim Fu. Crisco Fu. Seventies
Fu. With Marcia Blau, the New York writer who starts screaming
"No!" when her fantasy comes true (it involves an operating table
and several men in dark suits); Taiiji Torrence, who spends the
whole movie in the lotus position, having sex on the astral
plane, uniting her spirit to the elements; James Schulze and
Barbara Jo Fiedorlyzk, a Cudahy, Wisconsin, couple who write an
elaborate scene involving his being strapped to an operating
table and her being the topless nurse who cures him, then
describing their embarrassment when it leads to nothing; Sterling
Jones, the most normal one in the group, for his fantasy about
being a paperboy who's invited into a house with five giggling
females; Sandy Light, the transvestite who likes to pick up
lesbians and take them home and give them a "surprise"; Terri
King, the woman who likes to dress up like a man, pick up her ex-
boyfriend in a gay bar, take him home and beat the stuffings out
of him; Esther Lester, the New Jersey truckdriver whose fantasy
is to be a nude artist's model but can't stay on the pedestal
because she's drunk on bourbon; and Vanessa Vanderbilt, the bald
bisexual who likes to dance in her bikini at pool parties ("The
word 'alive' would be toning down what I really felt"). Best
line: "What I have become is an empty channel for what is flowing
between the man and the woman, and attaining a pure androgynous
state in that."
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