Ron Sullivan's THE EROTIC CIRCUS re-emerges 5 decades later in truncated form as ORGY AT THE PSYCHO HOUSE, and is a disappointing early example of his work.
Correcting the misleading liner notes on its 2015 DVD, its video issue is not intact, running 13 minutes short, at a scant 56 minutes of its original theatrical running time of 69 mins., as documented in the AFI Catalog of '60s films. Comparing the AFI's synopsis of the plot, the video is missing the film's ending with its final twist.
Notes make much ado about the actors in the film never having appeared in any other features, which is untrue. Watching THE PROCURER, an earlier film for which Sullivan was on the camera crew, I identified two leading players.
Rather familiar plot for porn and terror films resembles the template of protagonists with broken down car who before the use of cell phones would stop at a nearby house for assistance, setting in motion an excuse for jeopardy, sex & violence. CIRCUS is a variation.
In this instance, film opens with a brief prologue of Yenos, a caretaker, assaulting a woman and killing her in a shed with an axe -not gory enough for genre fans at all. A clever sound segue of a saw takes us outside to the actual story as he is sawing wood, observed by Jaimy, a central character who is non-acted by an unknown and perhaps (like the liner notes said) a one-shot given his poor, almost mute performance.
Jaimy's mother played by porn vet Cherie Winters (of umpteen Sarno films plus Sullivan's earlier THE BIZARRE ONES) is a bit young looking but her grey wig is adequate aging device. She has Jaimy assist her taking a bath and caring for her bleeding foot, cut on a piece of glass suspiciously lying on the bathroom floor. This being 1969 Winters has a full-frontal nude scene and is incestuously in bed with Jaimy when a harsh cut indicates several minutes of action are missing from the print - the film on DVD has plenty of nudity but none of the soft- core simulated sex scenes which were required for Adult Cinema releases of the period.
Most interesting character is introduced driving to visit Jaimy & Mom: it's her brother Louie, a speed dealer (with two girl friends in tow) broadly played by Louis Waldon, another Sarno veteran. When he arrives he takes photos of the girls plus Jaimy, and remarks on the framing that it reminds him of Andy Warhol. This reference is interesting because around the time EROTIC CIRCUS was shot Waldon was co-starring in Warhol's ground-breaking BLUE MOVIE, which when it debuted in NYC in 1969 was the first hard-core porn fiction feature ever released in the U.S.
One girlfriend Debbie who is styled as a stoic model delivers another full-frontal nude scene taking a shower and then the six characters get together for dinner. Louie has already told boring stories on the way over by car, and now regales everyone to a tale of a monkey in the far east whose brains are eaten while the animal is still alive, a scene acted out a decade later in Hubert Frank's all-time classic soft-core porn film VANESSA.
That night, Louie takes to having sadistic sex with the other girl, a blonde named Mary -all we see is her nude lying on her stomach as he threatens her with a lit cigar, but her screams are heard by the rest of the household. Mom fantasizes a lesbian tryst, shown in superimposed clinches, and masturbates under her bed covers. Yenos, played by vintage porn's Steve Coogan lookalike Stephen Treadwell, who co-starred with mom Winters in both THE PROCURER and Sullivan's THE BIZARRE ONES, fantasizes getting a blow job from 3 ugly women (not ugly due to any fetish of his character but rather the fault of the extras casting director).
Cross-cutting between these 3 scenes eats up much of the running time of the extant print. Next day Louie is wandering in the snow when he's caught in an animal snare, ending up hanging upside down from tree branches. He's castrated, not shown but confirmed when Mary goes looking for him and finds his severed dick under the pillow. She next finds Debbie's bloody corpse in the bathroom and runs outside screaming again, only to be stabbed to death by Mom -with a special makeup effects moment of her mutilated eye socket.
Musical score is a trite mixture of sitar music, electronic sci-fi movie music and a rock instrumental, fairly randomly applied as per porn practice. Though mom's guilt has been firmly established, it is Yenos who is the cleanup squad, dragging Debbie's corpse (still with her sexy black stockings on) down the stairs and using his trusty saw to cut up the cadavers. Instead of burying them in the snowy ground, he creates an interesting but rather pointless in context sculpture of arms and legs sticking up out of the snow, one of the few attempts in the film at artiness, apart from a couple of early portrait compositions influenced by the great '60s work for Bergman of Sven Nykvist, particularly in PERSONA.
Film ends with a dull, lengthy sequence of Mom applying makeup and meticulously styling Jaimy's hair and eyebrows to give him an androgynous Lou Reed look, when tuition to classes with Stella Adler or Sanford Meisner would have been a better bet. Final voice-over line about Jaimy is unintelligible thanks to print shredding.
Sullivan's stress on sadism as a theme in all his early films is present here, but better developed in LUST WEEKEND. For a proper marriage of soft porn and violence, I would recommend Jose Larraz's WHIRLPOOL, which I saw in 1971 at a Cleveland Adult cinema and which was a big hit at the time, or his more similar to EROTIC CIRCUS later movie DEVIATION.
Correcting the misleading liner notes on its 2015 DVD, its video issue is not intact, running 13 minutes short, at a scant 56 minutes of its original theatrical running time of 69 mins., as documented in the AFI Catalog of '60s films. Comparing the AFI's synopsis of the plot, the video is missing the film's ending with its final twist.
Notes make much ado about the actors in the film never having appeared in any other features, which is untrue. Watching THE PROCURER, an earlier film for which Sullivan was on the camera crew, I identified two leading players.
Rather familiar plot for porn and terror films resembles the template of protagonists with broken down car who before the use of cell phones would stop at a nearby house for assistance, setting in motion an excuse for jeopardy, sex & violence. CIRCUS is a variation.
In this instance, film opens with a brief prologue of Yenos, a caretaker, assaulting a woman and killing her in a shed with an axe -not gory enough for genre fans at all. A clever sound segue of a saw takes us outside to the actual story as he is sawing wood, observed by Jaimy, a central character who is non-acted by an unknown and perhaps (like the liner notes said) a one-shot given his poor, almost mute performance.
Jaimy's mother played by porn vet Cherie Winters (of umpteen Sarno films plus Sullivan's earlier THE BIZARRE ONES) is a bit young looking but her grey wig is adequate aging device. She has Jaimy assist her taking a bath and caring for her bleeding foot, cut on a piece of glass suspiciously lying on the bathroom floor. This being 1969 Winters has a full-frontal nude scene and is incestuously in bed with Jaimy when a harsh cut indicates several minutes of action are missing from the print - the film on DVD has plenty of nudity but none of the soft- core simulated sex scenes which were required for Adult Cinema releases of the period.
Most interesting character is introduced driving to visit Jaimy & Mom: it's her brother Louie, a speed dealer (with two girl friends in tow) broadly played by Louis Waldon, another Sarno veteran. When he arrives he takes photos of the girls plus Jaimy, and remarks on the framing that it reminds him of Andy Warhol. This reference is interesting because around the time EROTIC CIRCUS was shot Waldon was co-starring in Warhol's ground-breaking BLUE MOVIE, which when it debuted in NYC in 1969 was the first hard-core porn fiction feature ever released in the U.S.
One girlfriend Debbie who is styled as a stoic model delivers another full-frontal nude scene taking a shower and then the six characters get together for dinner. Louie has already told boring stories on the way over by car, and now regales everyone to a tale of a monkey in the far east whose brains are eaten while the animal is still alive, a scene acted out a decade later in Hubert Frank's all-time classic soft-core porn film VANESSA.
That night, Louie takes to having sadistic sex with the other girl, a blonde named Mary -all we see is her nude lying on her stomach as he threatens her with a lit cigar, but her screams are heard by the rest of the household. Mom fantasizes a lesbian tryst, shown in superimposed clinches, and masturbates under her bed covers. Yenos, played by vintage porn's Steve Coogan lookalike Stephen Treadwell, who co-starred with mom Winters in both THE PROCURER and Sullivan's THE BIZARRE ONES, fantasizes getting a blow job from 3 ugly women (not ugly due to any fetish of his character but rather the fault of the extras casting director).
Cross-cutting between these 3 scenes eats up much of the running time of the extant print. Next day Louie is wandering in the snow when he's caught in an animal snare, ending up hanging upside down from tree branches. He's castrated, not shown but confirmed when Mary goes looking for him and finds his severed dick under the pillow. She next finds Debbie's bloody corpse in the bathroom and runs outside screaming again, only to be stabbed to death by Mom -with a special makeup effects moment of her mutilated eye socket.
Musical score is a trite mixture of sitar music, electronic sci-fi movie music and a rock instrumental, fairly randomly applied as per porn practice. Though mom's guilt has been firmly established, it is Yenos who is the cleanup squad, dragging Debbie's corpse (still with her sexy black stockings on) down the stairs and using his trusty saw to cut up the cadavers. Instead of burying them in the snowy ground, he creates an interesting but rather pointless in context sculpture of arms and legs sticking up out of the snow, one of the few attempts in the film at artiness, apart from a couple of early portrait compositions influenced by the great '60s work for Bergman of Sven Nykvist, particularly in PERSONA.
Film ends with a dull, lengthy sequence of Mom applying makeup and meticulously styling Jaimy's hair and eyebrows to give him an androgynous Lou Reed look, when tuition to classes with Stella Adler or Sanford Meisner would have been a better bet. Final voice-over line about Jaimy is unintelligible thanks to print shredding.
Sullivan's stress on sadism as a theme in all his early films is present here, but better developed in LUST WEEKEND. For a proper marriage of soft porn and violence, I would recommend Jose Larraz's WHIRLPOOL, which I saw in 1971 at a Cleveland Adult cinema and which was a big hit at the time, or his more similar to EROTIC CIRCUS later movie DEVIATION.
