Not content to grind out junk, many pornographers attempt to "go straight" and fashion a real movie, but INSIDE AMY misfired terribly. Director Ron Garcia wisely didn't quit his day job, and remains a respected cameraman, most recently grinding out episodes of "Hawaii Five-O" and "Numb3rs".
But way back when, he took a flyer and produced, directed and edited this extremely dull opus. A parallel might be found in Robert Vincent O'Neill, also latterly in TV after directing drive-in movies and most like this one, THE PSYCHO LOVER. But he never had the temerity to hand in an exploitation feature running a whopping 103 minutes, approximately 30 minutes over the limit.
I caught this at a Cleveland drive-in back in the '70s, but had no memory of it other than a notation in my screening diary. The DVD reissue is dullsville.
AMY boasts a cast of top XXX & softcore starlets, not getting down. So what is the point of making fake porn? Is it merely an ego trip, or an attempt to widen one's horizons. Failing (miserably) at the latter, I have to chalk this up to Garcia's ego.
Case in point: INSIDE AMY features Rene Bond, Marsha Jordan and Uschi Digard, and none of them even remove their clothes, yet they are all cast as swingers, attending a nightly ritual of wife-swapping parties. Go figure. Story is pre-Viagra, as James R. Sweeney pressures his lovely wife Jan Mitchell to go with him to swingers' parties, to spice up their love life. He suffers from premature ejaculation, as we see in an early scene where he shoots his (softcore, implied) wad after humping wifey for a total of about 10 seconds.
They meet innumerable swinging couples at Filthy McNasty's nightclub, named for the classic 1961 Horace Silver hit introduced "Live from the Village Gate" on his Blue Note LP "Doin' the Thing". But we hear instead a rather catchy but unrelated song "Filthy McNasty" from a vocal group with organ led by a female singer, evidently created for this movie.
Many plot gimmicks fail to amuse, beginning with Sweeney inevitably striking out when they go to there first party. Wifey is a huge hit, humping all the guys there in succession, while Sweeney can't get it up at all with Marsha Jordan and just downs his sorrows with booze the rest of the evening. Humiliated he vows revenge and starts murdering all the other swingers.
This unpalatable premise throws the film into standard thriller mode, but minus the thrills. James R. Sweeney's flat performance in the central role is completely incompetent, and his miscasting merely becomes more & more evident: it would be comparable to casting Peter Riegert or Michael Lerner instead of Michael Rooker as HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER. The only explanation is obvious: vanity production.
Making the film worse is the tiresome and frankly idiotic procedural details of the cops on the case. Sweeney has painstakingly been shown from the beginning to be chums with them, so even these stupidos finally figure out that he's the mass murderer. I was completely bored out of my gourd by the time we belatedly reached the final freeze frame and the band came on screen to sing us out with a reprise of "Filthy McNasty".
There is a lesson in all this: don't hire Rene Bond and Uschi Digard to cameo in your movie with their clothes on!
