Christopher Rage's Orgy Review

Reviewed by Billy Starr  on  6/13/2007

Many of the older gay porn flicks produced before or in the early states of the video revolution have been lost. Historically, that’s sad, but as far as erotic material goes, maybe not so much. A lot of the material was less, shall we say, adventurous than the best stuff put out today, fairly formulaic sex. And it was usually sex as a part of the story rather than being the story. But with the advent of video tape, filmmakers were freed up to take the camera to the action. And because tape could be viewed at home, there was less need to make a “movie,” to sell a story, to fill a theater.

In the early 1980s nobody took this new found freedom and ran with it better than Christopher Rage. Rage’s films were a slice of New York underground sex life with little held back and no subject but sexual satisfaction itself; regular guys, shameless and uninhibited. The material also, for its time, pushed the envelope. Following formulas was not Rage’s thing; making up new ones was.

Orgy does that right from the beginning. The opening credits roll over a sea of anonymous cocks and hands, all jerking off, not something shocking today but 25 years ago, probably quite unusual way to open a flick. The year was 1983. After the credits we see a street scene in which a leather-clad guy is walking on Broadway. (1983 and Broadway because he walks past the Winter Garden Theater where Cats is playing.) The whole city looks a lot seedier than it is today, incidentally. The scene then devolves into a series of ever shorter vignettes in which Rage cuts back and forth at increasing speed. The first rather lengthy scene shows a guy force feeding his cock to a leather hooded companion on his knees. He jerks off and then he lays on top of the guy on the floor and screws (condomless of course) him mercilessly. All we see are the two guys’ bodies, torsos and asses, really, emphasizing again that the sex itself is the star of the film.

Next a guy in a chair plays with his equipment. He is quickly joined by a hairy-chested partner for some 69 action. Two extremely randy blonde dudes can’t keep their lips off each others’ body parts. Guys are added to the scene until toward the end there is a mass of nine writhing bodies servicing each other in every way imaginable. All of this is accompanied by a sort of new age musical soundtrack with whispered voice overs saying things like, “Do it again” repeatedly. The scene winds down (there is really no other way to describe it) with a mass jerk off scene in which unsafe cum eating plays a large role. The cast is spent and the scene darkens.

Total running time is close to 70 minutes, although it is difficult to know how complete a version this DVD is. Spunk Video has restored many of Rage’s works and there are other chopped up versions floating around. This is actually a fairly good DVD transfer, relatively clear and sharp and the sound is decent enough.

The cast is very attractive and natural looking; certainly not the professional gym bunny bodies that predominate today. And the action has a kind of forbidden, illicit feel about it. It anticipates a lot of the group-sex-without-context flicks that came along later, such as Titan’s Manplay series. It certainly is a look back at a different time and is worth viewing. But it is really sort of experimental and not really Rage’s best stuff. For that, collectors may want to get their hands on better Rage works, such as My Masters or or Sleaze.