“The skull in the cage knows: the real bars are behind the eyes.”
Cafe Flesh is a classic (really) adult film that developed a signfiicant cult following. The basis of the following is a little obscure given the actual quality of the film and story line, however it does stand out from most movies with cum shots on screen as having a premise and a plot, the storyline being more complex than some mainstream cinema… though not exactly challenging those mainstream movies that might have a chance at an award.
The story line is that there has been a nuclear war and in the post haulocost world people have become either sex negatives or sex positives. Sex positives can have sex (unlike bay-area sex positives who talk about sex all the time but never actually have it) and are required to by law to inspire the “caged desire” of the sex negatives. This is posited as and might even be read as a nominally “deep” statement about the nature of human desire and the repression of the same. OK… not too deep but still, it is a porn movie.
And “adult” it is:
- The first sex scene is MF, quick cum shot.
- The second also MF, also a quick cum shot.
- The third is FF, sort of cut short (no female ejaculation here, but this was from the bush era, and not the political one, not even the first).
- The fourth: MMF, slightly longer to accommodate the necessary permutations.
- The fifth: MF, with “Ric0” the agent of change.
- The sixth: FF, a plot driven moment of tremendous magnitude.
- The seventh: MF, Rico drives the plot to its abrupt conclusion.
Overall it is actually a nominally watchable movie, though there’s some intrinsic schizophrenia in any movie that attempts to marry a plotline with an effort at arousing the viewer in a prurient way; Cafe Flesh straddles the two somewhat uncomfortably. It is to the creator’s credit (I think) that it succeeds more as a plot-driven movie than a porn movie, not to imply any absolute figure of merit to that success, rather a relative one.