Taboo 3 (Standard Digital) Review

The Plot: For those of you who aren't older than dirt like myself, the Taboo series wasn't always a mildly interesting piece of porn which had little plot and the most "taboo" thing they do is have a double penetration with hot wax while staring at pictures of chickens. No, back in the old days, the Taboo series dealt with real taboo subjects. Promiscuity. Betrayal. Bell bottoms.

For those of you just joining us, Taboo I dealt with Paul, a young teenager who suspiciously looked to be about 30 or so, who ended up sleeping with his mother. Taboo II featured "Junior", a friend of Paul's who ended up sleeping with his sister and his mother (but not together). Taboo III starts with Paul leaving the house because he just can't take the situation any more, leaving Mom (Barbara) and his younger brother Jimmy to work things out.

Jimmy and his friend Bryan are attempting to manage a band into stardom. Apparently the way they do this is by making key management decisions in the sauna that is inexplicably attached to the club where the band rehearses. After a two minute meeting, they naturaly have ten minutes of sex. I wish my meetings went like this. I would probably stop falling asleep in the middle of the financial presentation.

It turns out that just about everybody is fucking everyone else (hey, it is a porn movie after all!) Bryan fucks Jimmy's girlfriend, Diane. Jimmy fucks Diane. Bryan and his mom are getting it on, too. Come to think of it, Jimmy's mom and Bryan are also pretty active. Diane gets busy with a random band groupie she found on a pool table in the middle of an orgy. Both Barbara and Bryan's mom are fucking the pizza boy. As the King would say: Whole lotta shakin' going on!

And no Taboo movie would be complete without our hero, Jimmy, getting it on with his mother Barbara. Ewwwww...

Despite the controversial subject matter, Taboo III is a movie with a plot. It may not make a whole lot of sense, and some of the characters portrayed make you want to reach into the TV screen to dispense heaping helpings of bitch-slap, but it is a movie first and a bunch of people fucking second. The acting is fair to poor, the dialouge is poor to bad, and the plot is just weird. This movie is really showing its age, with the subdued lighting, bell-bottom jeans, full-on pubic hair forests and implicit chauvanism.

The Cast: We've got some of the big names of years gone past in this one folks! Kay Parker and Honey Wilder play the two objects of the Oedipal complex. Kay is our leading lady, playing the part of Barbara, the incestous and overly protective mother to Jimmy (Jerry Butler). Honey Wilder plays Joyce, mother of Bryan (Blake Palmer) in a similar fashion. Of the two, I much prefer Honey Wilder. While everyone has natural tits in this movie, Kay Parker's are showing a severe case of boob droop.

Lisa Lake apparently makes her debut in this film as Diane, the ex-groupie turned girlfriend. Nice body, but the valley slut act makes her a pain to watch. Talk about conflicting impluses, but you want this beautiful woman to suck your dick simply to get her to shut the fuck up.

Two other cameos from more modern times are Marc Wallice and Ron Jeremy. It is amazing how long these guys have been in this business.

The Sex: I really don't feel like going into the individual scenes here. Some were good (the orgy scene is excellent) and some were bad (Jimmy and Diane screwing on the couch). I'll cover the highlights, but to be brutally honest, this movie did very little for me.

Our first scene with Jimmy, Brian and two random bar groupies in the sauna is fairly tame. Brian gets blown, Jimmy gets blown and then sat upon. It is mildly amusing to see the different shooting styles between this classic film and modern porn. Gone are the arch-back-and-twist-so-we-can-see- everything positions. The upside is that they look like they're actually having sex. The downside is you can't see much because real people don't have sex from a foot away. The other downside is that this scene is nothing really special.

Well, it appears that Jimmy's dating the two- timing ex-groupie who hasn't quite gotten out of the habit of banging everything in the recording industry... or so the plot goes. Diane and Brian have a go next to the pool table in an energetic coupling that looks pretty hot. Diane is a wriggler and she shimmies all over the place, tossing her head from side to side, moaning and generally thrashing about like Chloe (before Chloe warms up). The trouble is that it looks completely contrived. She's acting, and doing it badly. Still, she has a nice body and I prefer poorly acted throws of passion to no passion at all. Altogether, it's not a bad scene.

Well, if we're going to call the movie "Taboo III" we should at least have something taboo in it, right? Ask and she shall receive! Brian has apparently been getting some family action from his mother. Not only that, but he has known about Paul and his mother Barbara for a while and has told Mom. While this doesn't seem all that important, this means that Barbara's best friend knows that she's been sleeping with her eldest son. After discussing the "romantic" situation over in the house of ill dispute, mom & son have a quick roll in the hay. The scene is pretty good, as the performances are fairly competant and they look like they're having fun. But I could do without the creepy feeling that washes out from the movie whenever he says "You're the best, mom!" Still, mom's looking pretty buff here...

Now this is a part of the movie that I just don't understand. Jimmy and his groupie-turned- girlfriend Diane have a rocky relationship. At the beginning of the movie, he's busy with the band and she wants sex. She goes and gets laid with his best friend and then he wants sex while she doesn't. Weird. Anyhow, when the parents are away, the kids will play. Jimmy has a rush of hormones and starts to have sex with Diane on the couch. There is a hilarious part where she's doing the "Tell me you love me!" bit and he's complying with a mouthful of muff. It comes out like "Eiiiiieeee wuff oooo!", which is a welcome counterpoint to the whiny harpy-like alto tones of Diane. Anyhow, the scene is pretty lukewarm despite her attempts to thrash about like a worm on a skillet. And to make matters worse, Mom walks in on them and watches them for a couple of minutes before stumbling off to the bedroom to cry. Okay, note to directors: Watching a fortysomething woman crying really disrupts the mood of a sex scene.

Some things you just have to take on faith. The idea of Mom getting upset over her son banging his girlfriend that she cries really hard and then calls up her best friend's son to bang him is a leap of faith that should be relegated to saints or Evil Knieval. Mom actually doesn't find Brian at home, which puts a bit of a cork in her romantic aspirations. Until she walks in on her friend in bed with her son. Say, looks like she's going to get some sex after all! It's not bad sex, either. Nothing special about it except the creepy factor of having your mother hold her best friend while you slide in and out of her. Not a bad scene at all.

Every good 70s porn movie needs an orgy and Taboo III delivers in spades. After the performance, the record company guys (including a fairly thin Ron Jeremy) get sucked & fucked as a perk of the business. This scene is great. It switches often enough that you don't get bored, but not too often to keep you from getting interested. It is an interesting peek into the accepted porno view of the universe, where every girl just accepts that she's being invited to a party to get fucked by the management. At least these days they usually hold out for someone who performs on stage. Lots of good stuff in this scene, not the least of which is the best girl/girl scene in the movie (on top of a pool table, natch). Ron Jeremy proves again how he got such a reputation in an amusing scene. Forget trying to walk and chew gum at the same time, try screwing and signing your name at the same time.

Okay, now that Brian and his mom get it on while discussing Jimmy and his mom, it's time for Jimmy to give it to Brian's mom. Remember those math problems in high school where you had to figure out the maximum combinations of red, black, white, blue and brown socks you could wear without repeating? These two work well together and the sex is a welcome relief after watching him go at it with his girlfriend. Mom, who seems to be forever stumbling in on people having sex, spots her son banging her best friend. Having pretty much done the same thing to her friend, she really can't complain too loudly. At least this time it doesn't send her off on a crying jag. Still, it wasn't a bad scene at all.

Well, having pretty much accepted that letting your hair down and screwing men half their age is a good thing, the two ladies order some food for delivery and proceed to bang the delivery boy. This scene is actually very good as the two ladies work him over in fine fashion. Interestingly, this scene, like all the other scenes with more than one woman in it, only one of the two gets penetrated. Not what I was expecting, but it was a good scene nonetheless.

Last and not quite least, Barbar and Jimmy have their incestious moment together. Barbara pulls up to the house in her sedan (a neat trick considering she drove a Corvette and returned in a Mercedes) and sees Paul's car in the driveway. Hooray for mom, she's going to go jump the bones of her son again! Well, it turns out that Jimmy has been asleep in Paul's bed, waiting for her to show her that he "can do it better". I've heard of sibling rivalry, but this is just too much. On top of that, the scene wasn't all that good. Oh well.

The Image/Audio: The image is okay, but there are definitely some marks on the print that didn't get cleaned up before being digitized. The lighting is typical for the porn of the era, meaning just about everything is under-lit and cloaked in shadow. You're going to have a tough time seeing details.

The audio is uninspiring, including the big club scene. Gah, there is a reason that disco died. However, the songs make an honest attempt to weave in with the plot. The song playing while Diane is cheating on her boyfriend, for example, is exceptionally apropos. But no matter how much it fits in with the action, it's going to be annoying simply because... well, there is a reason we don't listen to music like that any more.

The Extras: There isn't all that much to see here. There is the standard chapter index with nine stops in it, a photogaller that starts with photos taken during the filming and then switches to diplaying scenes from the film itself. Why they do this, I don't know. There is some corporate info stuff that is nothing more than an address & phone number. There are some trailers on the flip side. Actually, there are a lot of trailers on the flip side, I gave up counting at 20!

The Good: For those of you who are bored with "extreme" sex DVDs and want to get into the really freaky stuff, sex with your children is one way to do it. It's nice to see natural tits for a change.

The Bad: Lighting is poor, the music is dated and annoying (but somehow appropriate) and the plot has severe mental instabilities.

Overall: It's good to see some classic cinema every once in a while. If you like the Golden Age of Porn, than this is a fair addition. If you prefer to have more modern women on your screen, then I would stay away. IMHO, Taboo II was much better.