Lady on Top

LADY ON TOP, revived as a short featurette on Vol. 25 of Something Weird's Dragon Art Theatre series, starts off promisingly with plain-Jane Lisa on a rooftop lamenting her fate -with suicide a definite possibility. Unfortunately pic settles into routine XXX porn before long.

Flashback structure shows Lisa being picked up on a park bench by Bob, intrigued by his warbling and brief guitar strumming. Back at his place they're in the sack in a hurry. Segue from sixty-nine to anal sex is executed with such a blasé attitude that we know we're in the mid-'70s, not the early years of porn.

Casting of Judy Craven as Lisa gives the film's its initial interest, since she looks more like Shelley Duvall than a typical porn starlet. Judy is credited here as Sandy King, but is familiar from her NYC-based movies like ANGEL NUMBER NINE and THE TYCOON'S DAUGHTER. In the wake of Gerard Damiano's morbid and influential works, notably MEMORIES WITHIN MISS AGGIE, the viewer can expect something interesting here. Unfortunately the soundtrack plays Cream's "Sitting on Top of the World", a hint that we're headed for mediocre, porn is porn.

Bob moves in with Lisa, and her best friend Heather warns our heroine against him, citing the usual "all men are bad" truism and even making lesbian moves (rejected) on her. In a complete 180, Heather lets Bob make love to her after only token resistance, when she visits one day while Lisa is absent.

Porn clichés continue as Lisa inevitably arrives home to catch the duo post-sex still naked on the couch. Her angry reaction gives way instantaneously to a threesome, and film print used by SWV ends abruptly during this scene as Bob watches the two gals get it on.

Since there is no return to the rooftop framing story and no resolution, this 31-minute featurette is evidently incomplete. However, given that only three characters exist (not even any extras are on camera) in a 1-day-wonder genre where usually 6 thesps are employed to fill out an hour-long feature, LADY ON TOP is likely a short film in total.

Director Stan Sobel, who also made another film EROTIC MYSTIQUE credited with Sandy King that year, but in which she does not actually appear, tries to make a real film: he even uses unheard-of reverse shots for an early Bob/Lisa conversation scene. He unfortunately defaults to the usual extreme closeups of genitals for much of the running time, and the use of pirated music such as Bread's "Sweet Surrender" is poor.