(The) Sex Garage. 1972. Directed by Fred Halsted.

(6/6/00)

[Note: This was hown in a very bad preservation print. It was in black-and-white and I am fairly sure that the film was originally in color.]


This is a really strange film. It begins with a scene of a woman giving a mann a blowjob in a car in a garage. And this is supposed to be a gay porn film.

Anyway, this male-female oral sex is performed to some really upbeat music. But then we are introduced to another scene, that of a man jerking offin a shower. The music for this scene is Bach's "Joy of Man's Desiring." The film cuts back and forth between the two sequences with very abrupt shifts in the sound. Sometimes there is inserted a very brief cut from one sequence, its accompanying music being a very short, jarring interruption. For me personally these jarring shifts take me out of the scenes and out of any involvement with their sexual content.

The upbeat music is replaced in places with those exaggerated sucking sounds which were so familiar in oral sex scenes during the 1970s. Then we see the heterosexual couple on the floor, man on top, and I believe we hear a lot of heavy breathing at that point. And then a man drives up in a car and the womkan runs away. And that is the only good look that we get at her. The fact that we hadn't really seen her body up till that point is another factor that kept us from getting sexually involved. Why? Why does Halsted do it that way?

Or perhaps other people respond differently.

In a regular heterosexual film the man in the car would have been the woman's husband. But there is a twist here and it is that he starts having sexual activity with the man that was involved, not the woman. Perhaps the heterosexual encounter is Fred Halsted rejecting the simple categorization of straight and gay.

We see shots of a motorcycle riding the roads and the two men are joined by a third, a biker type who brought to my mind associations with Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising. He seems somewhat sinister and I believe that he is wearing leather. They become a threesome. The sex is rough with one man's head being forced into a toilet bowl by another man's foot. One man dons black briefs and one inserts his penis into an orifice on the motorcycle. All of this is played out to the sound of electronic music.

As one man reaches climax the electronic music fades and we share the sense of release. We then hear his heavy breathing.

I find that I don't remember much of the details of the sexual activity. This might have been because I was turned off by the shabbiness of the print or it might be that I just couldn't get that interested in it. Or it could be that my eyes were tired and my attention span exhausted after L.A. Plays Itself.