From one angle, Bob Chinn’s The Love Slaves (1974) is an early vehicle for John Leslie as he investigates the dark and shadowy criminal underworld which is using women to do its murderous bidding. From another, it’s an sex film in which the male lead has sex in the first five minutes and then, curiously, never gets laid again.
A remake of 1966’s The Love Robots (Shiro no jinzô bijo), a Japanese softcore noir distributed by producer Bob Cresse, The Love Slaves has director Bob Chinn (credited as Robert Husong) showing his chops as a great low-budget genre director. Grittily sot on 35mm short ends, It’s certainly a hardcore sex picture that checks most all of the necessary boxes but, at its heart, The Love Slaves works best as a very hard-bitten neo-noir.
Looking into the recent string of kidnapped women and spike is drug trafficking is Special Investigator Steve Blake (John Leslie) from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (an actual agency which had been absorbed into the DEA a year earlier). He lives with his medical student sister, Karen (Tanya Shea), and is romantically entangled with Veronica (Veronica Taylor), sister of one of the women nabbed off the streets of San Francisco.
If moving his production activities from the vice squad-festooned L.A. to the much less litigious San Francisco to shoot The Married Woman the same year allowed Chinn breathe a big sigh of relief and relax while making some liberating, hedonistic fun that was a throwback to his early stuff like 1970’s The Naked Nympho, The Love Slaves gave Chinn an opportunity to really sink his teeth into making an honest-to-goodness noir film. While the four Johnny Wadd films from 1971 allowed Chinn to find opportunities dip into the genre every now and again, it wasn’t really all that easy to set a credible and sustainable mood when shooting a film a day for a king’s ransom of $750 a piece. And, in 1974, what adult filmmaker in Los Angeles would have had the time to pay attention to the lighting and framing essential for the noir genre if one eye was on the door in anticipation of the heat bursting in and shutting the whole thing down?
So, in some superficial ways, The Love Slaves resembles the Wadd films but with more control of the elements and command of schedule due to the cooler vibe and atmosphere afforded to Chinn in San Francisco. Like in the Wadd films, we get footage of our protagonist driving in a convertible while his narration setting up the story and introducing himself by name is laid over the visuals. But instead of the open air brightness of Marina Del Ray or Honolulu, we are plunged into the darkness of night in the red light district in San Francisco which suggests a thick air of foreboding. The Love Slaves still uses the same wild exterior filmmaking tactics used in the earlier Johnny Wadd films but it’s much more refined with the exterior action a little steadier, daring, and a little more professional.
And more than anything else Bob Chinn had made up to that point, the story in The Love Slaves is very plot-driven, has a slightly more robust storyline, and it carries a much somber tone. By not fucking everything in sight and relegated to crashing on his sister’s hideaway sofa, John Leslie’s Steve Blake is the polar opposite of John Holmes’s Johnny Wadd which allows Chinn to keep the light out of the story as much as possible. To keep that mood as much as possible, The Love Slaves often utilizes a collage of dissonant electronic music to evoke the sinister atmosphere.
In terms of the sex, The Love Slaves is also a little unorthodox given its subject matter. The film begins with a simplistic setup between Leslie and Taylor that wouldn’t be out of place in a loop a couple of years earlier but it also might very well represent the most conventional coupling in this dark and bizarre world. For after that, all bets are off as The Love Slaves charts an entirely unique path that both upends expectations and stands as the bleaker, more complex assignment to the free-loving pleasures that were had in The Married Woman.
Despite the darkness inherent in the material, Chinn finds numerous ways to raise the temperature in many of the film’s sexual passages. The delightful Laura Bourbon pops up early as a female assassin whose reward for a job well-done is a session with Ken Scudder. Turk Lyon, Scudder, and a dildo-clad mannequin have a semi-foursome with Desiree West (billed here as Pat Lee and cast as the insatiable Star Pupil of Severin’s operation) wich, because of the sheer presence of West, still works despite kinda cheated (mostly in its implied anal action). Despite the distractingly atrocious wig she sports throughout the film, Shea’s post-breakfast masturbation scene is effective in its authenticity in both the drabness of her wardrobe and in the way the copy of Playgirl kindles her fire but eventually slips completely off her lap as it becomes secondary to her actual fantasies. Additionally, Shea’s scene with Enjil Von Bergdorfe is utterly fantastic as it gets a chance to highlight Von Bergdorfe’s skills as the pro live sex performer that she was (noteworthy is the performance-based artistry and gracefulness in which she disrobes). When Von Bergdorfe uses her legs to spider-walk up the side of a wall to achieve the necessary leverage to get maximum value out of being on the receiving end of cunnilingus, it is certainly a teachable moment to which viewers might want to pay attention to.
As well done as those moments are, the film really cooks when it’s simply being a low-budget thriller. Highly effective are the film’s scenes featuring the haunting and stark-white dungeon where Alain Patrick instructs his kidnapped slaves to carry out his nefarious deeds. Chinn and cinematographer Frank Mills (credited as David Stern) utilize the mirror frames of Patrick’s glasses and capture the location’s minimalism to absolutely great effect. Also nice are the stolen moments in the film’s exterior locations (that Safeway!), the stalking camerawork employed during the abduction scenes, and some eerily effective moments including Shea’s attempt on Leslie’s life (which would get a spit and polish, but for libidinous funsies, in the climax of 1977’s The China Cat with Kyoto Sun and John Holmes).
And it has to be said that, no matter which way you cut it, the film’s slo-mo gunshot climax is pretty fucking impressive. Tussling on the stern of a boat as it’s rocking on an actual ocean, as Patrick and Leslie do, looks kind of dangerous, but that danger had to have been compounded when it was decided to detonate a squib on an uninsured actor as he was simultaneously blowing his load. Not only was there a professional gamble that the setup wouldn’t work and all of Chinn’s over-cranked footage would be lost, but there was also the very real possibility that Janis Lake, the brave soul who allowed himself to be a lite-test dummy, could sustain serious injury if the effect went wrong. The whole thing is great fun and showed that Chinn would be more than up to the task with complex set-ups and the bigger budgets that he would soon enjoy while working for Armand Atamian’s Freeway Films.
Being a hard-edged film that plays for keeps, The Love Slaves doesn’t shy away from the rough stuff and the film is home to a violent, third-act sexual assault on Shea at the hands of Scudder and Lyon that is definitely ugly but well within the accepted parameters of the material. Outside of his two later collaborations with Jaacov Jaacovi, it’s hard to think of another scene in Bob Chinn’s oeuvre as tough as the one here which, not coincidentally, was completely excised on VHS in 1984 and replaced with a scene from Breezy including Crystal Breeze, Marie Sharp, and Steve Powers, a film which was decidedly NOT directed by Chinn. But the sexual assault scene is handled in the appropriate context and, honestly, is not nearly as off-putting as the breakfast Tanya Shea makes John Leslie when her character is introduced. That’s just an undercooked pile of no thanks swimming in a grease bath.
With an unorthodox approach to its hero and most of its sexual situations (with both of these things overlapping in the final moments as an incapacitated John Leslie can do little else but watch an insatiably horny Sharon Thorpe wildly masturbate without being cognizant that he’s even in the room), The Love Slaves is a fascinating piece of work that may not be the best selection if you’re looking for the kind of lighter fare Chinn produced in the later 70’s, but definitely one to drink in if one were curious to know how much Bob Chinn cared about making solid genre pictures while also delivering on the assignment of giving adult film patrons exactly what they paid their money to see.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
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