LENNY'S COMEBACK, inexplicably reissued on video by both Something Weird and After Hours Cinema, is an embarrassing porn comedy which fails miserably at the Prime Porn Directive: please cast beautiful women.
Instead we get Robin Byrd (already a Manhattan access cable TV fixture), Erica Havens and Victoria Corsaut, all qualifying for near-paper-bag status. Corsaut is a dead ringer for Louise Lasser (which earned her the title role in the spoof MARY FLEGUS, MARY FLEGUS) of "Mary Hartman" TV fame -now would you honestly want to see Lasser do porn?
Premise is a 10-year high school reunion, with a committee to plan the event consisting of Havens, Byrd and three of their male schoolmates from Garvey High School. (I assume it is Marcus Garvey, but the humor here remains obscure or stillborn.)
Flashbacks show sex back when the duo sported pigtails. The set for Havens to boff B.M.O.C. Richard Bolla is so cheap it looks like a storage room with random bric a brac in the background -any union set designer or set dresser would laugh himself (or herself) to death watching this footage!
Bolla, among the most overrated porn thesps from the Golden Age, is meant to be amusing as the clichéd flop from the most-likely-to-succeed bracket: present-day he is a failed insurance salesman who earns money mowing lawns. The actor does a terrible Woody Allen imitation that had me cringing for the last half of the film, and if this were even a marginally okay feature his awful turn would have sunk it anyway.
Byrd goes through the sex motions so mechanically it is hard to imagine why she had a big-screen career at all, apart from her gushy TV host stint. Corsaut is mighty annoying as Bolla's shrewish wife. Bolla was 31 when this film was shot, and his thinning hair and sizable paunch look ludicrous in his flashback as a teenager.
Odd casting has Michael Gaunt trying to be amusing as Leonard Nerdman, class laughingstock who unlike Bolla "made good". Gaunt was forever chilling in his best role as the rapist of the classic shocker THE INTRUSION, and makes zero impression in such a mild assignment as this one, all a setup to a "surprise" comical ending. Adding insult to injury, Fred Fagen is repulsive as the old coot Prof. Throckmorton who thrashes Byrd with a ruler in a flashback and then services her doggy-style. It's anti-entertainment.
Poor technique is evident throughout this farrago, with endless Manhattan traffic sounds threatening to drown out the dialog via crummy direct sound recording. It wouldn't matter, since the jokes are on the level of Prof. Throckmorton describing Byrd as "cramming for a course" as he shtups her. Bolla's improvised stammering as he juggles insurance industry terms would make the Woodman barf.
