Flesh and Lace / Passion in Hot Hollows

Director Joe Sarno made films that endure as the most accomplished and intelligent erotic films of the 1960s, and while another Something Weird Video release – the spouse-swapping double feature of Sin in the Suburbs and The Swap and How they Make It - is probably the ideal introduction to Sarno's work, this double bill of Flesh and Lace and Passion in Hot Hollows is no less fascinating. 1965's Flesh and Lace is, along with the lamentably unavailable Young Playthings, one of Sarno's strangest films, a haunting and genuinely poetic tale of a sexually repressed bar girl who winds up in the care of a lovestruck toy store owner. Sarno invests the film's oddball pulpy plotline with a peculiar tenderness and sensitivity for the sex-starved characters, and an eerily spare visual style that allows the material to resonate in unexpectedly affecting ways – and the film also features another superlative performance from Sarno fave Alice Linville. Passion in Hot Hollows, a smoldering saga of a sexually adventurous couple that wreaks havoc upon their arrival in a small town, is sometimes cited as one of Sarno's best films, but the later production date (1969) permitted Sarno to focus more overtly on visually explicit sexual material, which disappointingly detracts from the complex characterization and stellar performances that normally characterize the director's best work. Still, Passion is atmospheric, moody, and – like most of Sarno's work – genuinely erotic, and the film also contains some of the most arresting cinematography of any Sarno film: director of photography Steve Silverman often uses single shafts of light to starkly illuminate faces in otherwise total darkness, lending Passion a harshly high-contrast chiaroscuro quality.

And a word about the supplementary material: the commentary track on Passion - featuring Sarno, wife and collaborator Peggy Sarno, Basket Case director and exploitation archivist Frank Henenlotter, legendary exploitation producer David Friedman, and Something Weird kingpin Mike Vraney – is one of the best commentary tracks ever recorded for an exploitation title, with the quintet deviating from the film in question to provide a detailed and riotously funny account of 1960s sexploitation filmmaking. Recommended.

Travis Crawford