Let's invite ten people to a remote country manor in upstate New York and tell them play out any sexual fantasy they want with a professional film crew and a company of actors.

We get to watch.

Apparently the resulting movie, called "Acting Out," has sat on the shelf for at least 23 years, which should give some idea of the quality of fantasies in 1978. It took the pioneering zany ultra-low-budget specialists at New York's Troma Films to dust it off and release it--much to the chagrin, I'm sure, of all the would be sexual-revolution hipsters, in their Afros and leisure suits and peasant dresses, who actually performed in it.

The seventies were weird. All the people who missed out on the sexual wildness of the sixties suddenly decided they needed to jump into the "whatever turns you on" pool. They decided anything they ever wondered about but never tried was probably the most amazing discovery in the history of human consciousness. They felt this longing, and it involved being nekkid a lot more often. On the other hand, maybe they were just perverts. What's interesting about this film is how intellectual it is. Producer Carl Gurevich was trying to find "average Americans" longing to break out of mainstream suburbia and become party animals, and with the help of Gallery magazine he found them and first filmed them talking about their fantasies, only to discover . . .

We didn't really wanna know this stuff.

I'm gonna go easy on the descriptions of the fantasies, because there are moments when you think "I'm not really watching this." I mean, you ARE watching it, but you're already training your mind to make-believe you never saw it. 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.

That would be, I believe, a 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 who 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 psychogical "feather torture." When it doesn't work, the inventor is furious.

I'm not even gonna mention the Crisco Master. Believe me, you don't wanna know.

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. Drive-in Academy Award nominations for 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, for saying "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."

Two stars. Joe Bob says check it out.

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