Roxanna

Rating:
Released: 1970/2002 Retro-Seduction Cinema
Starring: Uschi Digart, Misty Mundae, Katie Jordan, Darian Caine, Josh Robinson, Barbara Joyce
Directed by: Nick Phillips (1970 version); Ted Crestview (2002 remake)
IMDb

When I sit down to watch a Seduction Cinema movie I’m usually prepared for about 70 minutes of whacky jokes and abundant lesbian sex scenes. But Ted Crestview’s 2002 remake of Nick Phillip’s 1970 sexploiter Roxanna is different. It is far darker, far grittier and far more reaching in its scope than previous efforts. Sure, there’s lots of the usual nudity and lesbo gropings, but there’s also a story in there somewhere.

Misty Mundae shows some decent acting chops as a young woman dancing on the knife edge of sanity. Her coke-fueled hallucinations and growing disenchantment with her boyfriend move her steadily along a downward spiral of moral decay and self-abuse that ends, ultimately, in murder. She discovers that only other women can give her the pleasure she so desperately needs, and as the sexual affairs and drug indulgences quickly take over her life, she finds her sense of self being stripped away to the point where she no longers knows who she is or what is real anymore.

This movie is dark, and I found the sex scenes to be almost cold, devoid of real emotion or sensuality. Maybe that was the director’s intention. Roxanna moves through life like a parasite, taking what she wants with little thought to the needs of others. In a movie like this, the sex is not meant to be warm and loving but is a tool that is used to get through life, much like a junkie needs a fix. And in many ways, Roxanna is addicted to sex and the temporary relief it provides.

The 1970 original is also on this disc, and though it is much more atmospheric in its “trippiness” (it was, after all, filmed during the golden age of psychedelics), the sex also has the old grindhouse feel of the early porno days, when so-called “dirty” films were confined to cheap peep houses in the slums. I can’t even begin to figure out what Phillips was aiming for with the strange effects and camera angles but I’m guessing it had a lot to do with the sexual climate of the times-and more than a few hits off a bong. If you can get past the confusion and unsettling feel of the film, you might enjoy some of the sex scenes, especially the first scene featuring large-breasted 70’s sex queen Uschi Digart in her prime.

Fuggy’s Review (Added: Nov 11, 2007)

Watching this one I got a sense of, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, déjà vu all over again. I realize now it’s because there isn’t much that separates this movie from another Retro-Seduction release, The Pleasures of a Woman, which was also directed by noted pornographer Nick Phillips (here working under the nom de poon Nick Millard) and featuring many of the same players. Of the two, I think Pleasures of a Woman is the better of the two, but this one, Roxanna, came first.

As 42nd Street Pete describes in the DVD extras, even in the swinging 70s a movie still had to pass muster with the censors by proving its artistic value with some sort of moral message. Thus, even though this is a loose collection of (mostly) lesbian sex scenes with no dialogue, the narration becomes a morality play about wantonness and drug use, with copious examples of both on display. That’ll teach you not to have fun, right?

Monica Gayle is Roxanna, a model, who appears to be confined to a mental institution where she’s curled up against a white wall, naked, shaking uncontrollably, and drooling on herself. If that’s not hot enough, then throughout the movie she spends her time flashing back to her various sexual liaisons and narrating the details of her own “perverse” demise into insanity. Apparently the moral is that having sex with other hot chicks makes you crazy. Crazy for more hot chicks, I say!

There are all the hallmarks of a typical Nick Phillips movie on display: stylish leather and rubber fetish boots and gloves, generalized lesbian groping, and breast worship. The opening scene features Uschi Digard in arm-length gloves and Uschi-length boobs, dripping them pendulously over Roxanna’s mouth and body. There’s a later sexy scene where Roxanna’s makeup girl (looking cute and butch in a headband, as makeup girls always are, for some reason) becomes her makeout girl, and smudging all her handiwork in the process. As for the rest of it, really, anything that was described in the previous review of Pleasures of a Woman can also be described here.

And just like in The Pleasures of a Woman, Retro-Seduction has paired the original movie with a newer “remake” of the movie featuring some of the regulars from the Seduction Cinema stable of actresses. It’s more an adaptation of the theme of drug abuse than an adaptation of the original movie itself. Misty Mundae snorts some coke off of Katie Jordon’s breasts and then cowers in the corner looking like a sexy mess; that sort of thing. At 50 minutes, the original Roxanna is short, but at 36 minutes the remake is even shorter. Pleasures of a Woman is a better original movie; but Roxanna is a better remake, if that makes any sense.