Sexboat

The story here is that a lot of women, for one reason or another, sign on to a cruise on a ship manned by women, so to speak. Two of the gals turn out to be guys in disguise. It's a lot dirtier but not as funny as "Some Like It Hot." The entire movie seems to begin where "Some Like It Hot" left off, with Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe snuggled up together and she says, "Let's have a party," and he says, "Yes, Let's have a party. It might even turn out to be a SURPRISE party."

It's from what has come to be known as the golden age of porn. That is to say, there is a plot. It's not simply repetitive closeups of the Washington Monument meeting the Holland Tunnel, although we have the obligatory orgie scene.

The first skin flick I saw was at a theater in Times Square, years ago, with a friend, Phil, and his wife Ingrid. We sat there in silence for about ten minutes, at first excited, then bored. "Why do you think they keep pulling out?" asked Phil. "Maybe they're all Catholics," offered Ingrid. After half an our of subsidence into boredom I asked the guy sitting in the seat next to me for a match. "Sure," he said nervously, taking a book of perspiration-soaked matches from his breast pocket and handing them to me. It's a curious thing to watch human being copulate. After a while it's just as boring as if they were rhesus macaques. Maybe less so.

At any rate this one belongs to the golden age when plots were introduced, however minimal they might be, even compared to afternoon soaps. And it's interesting to see what genetalia looked like before glabrous became glamorous. The women are glossy and beautiful, the men indistinguishable.

Its stimulation quotient, for males, is maybe 50 percent. Not good, not bad. The plot is dismissable, as is the acting, the direction, the score -- everything except the sexual encounters, and as far as they go there have been worse. There have been better too.