Coming late in the cycle, LITTLE DARLIN'S is assembly-line "underage girls" porn, of the type so popular in the late '70s. Low-end porn fans have 2 recent DVD reissues to choose from, both of which pretend that Lysa Thatcher is the star, which she's not.
R. Bolla and Jake Teague, who were also making Italian horror films at this time in between porn assignments, do the lion's share of the humping. Bolla is working at a girls' summer camp, and he does a fairly tiresome voyeur routine that fits better in a nude film some 20 years older than this strictly XXX exercise.
Teague, as he often did in such films as EIGHTEEN & HORNY, provides the dirty-old-man personification, matching up his AARP look to deflower an underage-seeming virginal teen for the satisfaction of would-be pederasts in the audience. He's a capable actor but I find this schtick tedious and way-too-obvious.
More wholesome is all-American boy Jerry Butler, briefly matched with a girl in his same age bracket. Thatcher gets to perform in an overly extended lesbian scene but unsatisfyingly does not get it on with any of the male cast.
Many fans will be entertained by the DVD commentary track provided on the Halo Park release, but I found it to be incredibly annoying. Bolla and Butler crack jokes and repeat themselves over & over, while mouthing some of the more tired clichés concerning how great porn was back in the day vs. now. It comes off as churlish, self-serving and a case of heavy sour grapes, and not as funny (by a long shot) as intended. Their rhapsodizing over a girl licking a penis or testicles ("that's how they did it in OUR day") and extolling the virtues of the film's meager production values & film technique is embarrassing. Senility seems to have been setting in, and topical stuff like the recently concluded Obama vs. Hillary race (with Bolla projecting McCain as the ultimate winner) just idiotic.
Making the audio track worse is an ego-tripping member of the ever-expanding ranks of self-appointed Adult Film Historians (Doris Kearns Goodwin need not apply), who is miked so that Bob & Jerry fortunately drown him out, but keeps inserting his Hollywood Babylon babble into the conversation. Was co-star Kathy Harcourt murdered by the mob? Was Ron Jeremy Hyatt a rapist (Ginger Lynn his victim)? Did the "film historian" really sleep with porn starlets? What porn anecdote concerning Marlon Brando isn't ready to be told? Answers to some of these burning questions await the slob who clicks "ON" for the asinine audio track.
