Fireworks

Progenitor of a number of luxe porn productions in the late '70s and early '80s, director Alan Vydra seems to have largely fallen off the radar since then. Despite his access to handsome production values and good cinematographers, however, I haven't yet seen any of his work that particularly merits rediscovery. FIREWORKS does little to change that perception. The essentially plotless film concerns itself with a male bordello, where throngs of women flock to have their fantasies fulfilled by the hunky staff. The movie begins with a lady being tag-teamed by a couple guys accusing her of jewelry theft; behind the scenes, it's all revealed to be a fantasy, with a scrawny accountant and portly maître d' keeping a running tab of charges while spying through a peephole. A young guy shows up looking for work, and, deemed too wimpy to serve as a gigolo, ends up assigned a janitorial position. Meanwhile, a classful of horny schoolgirls tricks their teacher into booking a trip to the place as a site of historic interest, only for her to realize she used to be one of its most popular clientele. Weirdly, the film is all set-up and no pay-off. Nothing ever happens with the gardener, the schoolgirls just go to the whorehouse and screw, and the teacher just kind of sits around. With essentially no plot, the film then lives and dies by its sex scenes, and they're... fine. Proficient, though not terribly arousing, with a tendency toward group gropes and gangbangs. The women are largely attractive, while the male cast vacillates between hunky and unappealing. The preponderance of multi-partner scenarios at least differentiates this from most American productions, but then, so does the horrendous dubbing, which robs most scenes of their potential passion. (This is an ongoing issue with Vydra films, even American-shot ones like EXTREMES, which are still post-dubbed in European style despite their Anglophone casts.) The biggest problem with FIREWORKS, however, is not endemic to the movie itself, but its American version, which for some baffling reason has been completely reordered. The plot I've described largely attempts to reconstruct the Euro cut (it's not exactly a MEMENTO-level exercise piecing this back together), but one has to wonder why it was ever reordered in the first place. In the American version, the janitor is referred to as a newbie in an early locker room scene, but only shown arriving in the last 15 minutes. Another scene with a masturbating woman getting serviced by a blond stud is for some reason cleft in two, with the guy's arrival preceding her masturbation scene (which establishes her need for attention) by several reels. Worst of all, the film's clearly climactic orgy, where an entire firetruck of guys is called in to service a single insatiable woman, is plunked unceremoniously in the middle of the film, ensuring things end with a whimper rather than a (gang)bang. While even in its proper order FIREWORKS would seem to be no great shakes, in its American edit, it's hobbled before it can even get out of the gate, precluding any true reevaluation of the director's already questionable talents.