Dungeon of Pain

It's obvious when pornmakers don't care, as evident in the desultory time-waster DUNGEON OF PAIN. Apparently actress turned director Ann Sapp had zero respect for her audience. It's a shame because she did cast two rather alluring porn actresses here.

The familiar NYC porn performer Alex Mann, who is quite perceptive in his comments earlier in his career in Gerard Damiano's documentary CHANGES, is embarrassing here, unable to achieve an erection. Opening scene has him in bed with real-life wife Pamela Mann, who is extremely attractive, but while the fellatio is for real, the intercourse is strictly a dry hump -probably necessitated by his inability to perform. Instead of trying it over another day (pretty difficult if you're shooting a 1-day-wonder) or recasting, we get the failure preserved for posterity, and revived by Something Weird on Vol. 61 of its Dragon Art Theatre series.

After this Mann tells his wife he's bored, so why not answer one of those Free Press ads and try "something different", meaning the wonderful world of s&m. Pamela agrees and they head to the dungeon of a quite beautiful (and stacked) but untalented Mistress. The rest of the film is 100% filler, consisting of the completely mechanical and tedious goings on in the dungeon, which looks like a cheap set left over from another film, filled with bales of hay (!).

Despite its seemingly descriptive title, which implies to the fans that they are to be treated to hardcore cruelty on the level of Joe Davian or Charles De Santos, what we get is disinterested "straight" sex plus some half-hearted, pretend whipping. It's not erotic, not a gross-out, not much of anything. The premise that the Mistress better work hard, with the aid of three slaves (one female, two male) for her money, namely $75 plus $25 tip offered by Alex, is as boring as what transpires. It does give us an insight into what the players were paid for junk-porn back in the day -reportedly $150 a day for the femmes and $100 for the males.

Perhaps the kinkiest sequence is good ole Pam strapping on a dildo to perform anal sex on the slave girl. Finale is shredded (as usual) in the Dragon Art print, with talk about urination (not shown) and a non-ending of Alex encouraging Pam to spit on the female slave.

IMDb already lists the Pink Floyd tracks pirated here, but let me add an opening Muzak version of Stevie Wonder's "Living in the City", and during several of the sex scenes I suffered mightily through a terrible version of among the worst hits from this era, "Classical Gas".