5 New York Classics Review

Reviewed by Joe Shaver  on  5/13/2004

The only film in this collection worth watching at all is ALL TIED UP. As though realizing this it had a disc all to itself. The other four films are crunched together on the second disc. And that is a problem because they are so compressed that you are lucky if two of the four will play. I was able to watch (unfortunately) two and a half of the films but the rest of the disc simply would not play on any of my five players.

ALL TIED UP stars Scorpio one of our earliest porn stars. He was slender, bottomed as well as topped and had a blond walrus mustache. Indeed all of the guys in all the films wear mustaches. It was the badge of gaydom in this ancient time period. One didn’t need gaydar, the mustache screamed “GAY!” The Nazis wouldn’t have needed pink triangles with these guys. (Okay, so I had a mustache myself once—but it was in a much later time period so I wasn’t a clone). Anyway, a delivery boy seduces Scorpio so that he can steal the keys to his apartment thus allowing two others to enter and tie Scorpio to the bed. Thereafter he gets dildos and cocks up his butt. This was the best of the films I was able to watch, but still a far cry from the quality and sexual heat we get today.

LE VOYEUR is sort of a quasi-documentary on the Broadway Baths. The guys are hideous. Even handsome hunks like George Payne are made to look unattractive. The editing is choppy, the sex a turnoff. If this is not the worst film ever made, then I don’t want to watch what is. The film should never have been put on DVD. This turd should have simply been allowed to sink into the great cesspool of time.

PIER GROUP follows. After watching the preceding film this one seems better than it is. A homely mustachioed guy wakes up and is told not to come in to work but to check out the abandoned piers for his company to bid on. He is supposedly straight, but the mustache says otherwise. His next-door neighbor also gets a phone call telling him not to come in to work. He heads off to the piers for some cock. The film consists of the “straight” trying to go about his job while ignoring the activity going on around him. Once or twice he sees his next door neighbor and we think he might decide to join the action, but he just goes on home to his frowsy wife. The film does give us a glimpse of indiscriminate cruising in the time before AIDS. Although there was lots of sex with these clones, the film never gave me even so much as a slight a hard-on. Though, I did learn not to swim in the Hudson. People pee in it.

POINT ME TOWARD TOMORROW that follows is the story of a doctor who while arguing with his lover hits a young pedestrian and blinds him. Doc pays for the kid’s hospital and feels terrible guilty. The doc has hairy shoulders and a—shall we say—mature body. The kid is rather cute. The fuck scenes are faked.

SURF & TURF, a forgettable film with Jack Wrangler, completes the disc, if you can see it.

These films are not "classics". The are just old. They were third rate even in their time. Now they are pathetic. Unless you are compiling a collection of gay porn for the Smithsonian, you will want to pass these by.