LITTLE ORPHAN DUSTY (1978)

After giving Rhonda Jo Petty her first feature role in 1978’s Disco Lady, director Bob Chinn was approached by Jaacov Jaacovi, friend and sometime crew member, to help direct Little Orphan Dusty from a screenplay that Jaacovi had written with his then-wife, Svetlana. As he had never made a film before, Jaacovi needed Chinn’s help from a practical and technical standpoint but also to help keep John Holmes, the proposed star of the film, in line. As Chinn was a veteran of many a Holmes project, he had a unique way of getting the best out of him while forever wrestling with Holmes’s monstrous ego.

As Jaacovi could only afford half of Chinn’s directorial salary, Chinn only agreed to direct half of the film but, when Chinn later recounted all that he directed, one is left to wonder just what in the world Jaacovi ended up doing on the set outside facilitate misery and chaos for everyone (with Svetlana’s heavy assistance). For it is this ramshackle approach on top of its noxious story and screenplay that make Little Orphan Dusty a rather unpleasant and nasty piece of work. An outlier/irritant on Bob Chinn’s cv but definitely a crown jewel on the slip-and-fall directorial resume of Jaacovi, the film finds itself torn between being a heartfelt romantic drama and a full-on geek show where a copious amount of fisting and ugly, degrading assault are its twin centerpieces.

In Little Orphan Dusty, Rhonda Jo Petty plays Dusty, a beautiful young runaway wandering the edges of the California desert. As soon as the opening credits end, Dusty’s troubles begin as she’s harassed and then gang raped (including a protracted fisting sequence) by a group of bikers (Turk Lyon, Ric Lutze, Mike Ranger, Alan Colberg) and their hog-ridin’ mama, Judy (Ming Jade). Left in the dirt in a heap, she’s found by nice guy artist, Frank (John Holmes), who gathers her up and takes her home to his beachfront pad. There, she goes through a bizarre journey of healing, growth, and love while perpetually being terrorized by the motorcycle gang.

Though puzzling it out is probably giving Svetlana and Jaacovi more credit than they deserve, we are left to suppose that the bikers are meant to be a manifestation of Dusty’s trauma as they appear whenever she’s left alone or runs away from Frank, regardless of how long or how far. But they defy real time and space as they couldn’t possibly materialize out of thin air as much as they do unless they were supernatural, yet they fully interact with everyone in Dusty’s world including a tangle with Frank and a gang rape at the climactic wedding party. This ALMOST achieves the same kind of mood that permeates Roberta Findlay’s A Woman’s Torment as so much of it feels as much projected as it is real life. And it is also has a little of the DNA from Chinn’s own Fires Down Below wherein a woman’s dilemma creates a daydream-like existence in which she’s visited by visitors both good and bad. But, again, it’s clear that any depth that’s plumbed is by pure accident as the intentions behind Little Orphan Dusty do not seem to have been formulated in any kind of good faith.

For Little Orphan Dusty is mostly invested in crushing a sense of innocence so, naturally, all of the film’s lighter scenes are played so softly that the movie actually achieves what it was going for. I guess the question would be why anyone would want to go for that if they were just going to rip the audience’s heart out for no real good reason afterward. It also introduces some complexities about the Dusty character that the film doesn’t feel like it needs to further elaborate on; namely, Dusty’s libidinous attitude watching Frank sexually mingle with his two models versus her puritanical attitude about swinging. We assume that she is the net result of a lot of emotional damage of some sort, some of which we witness, but we’re not really all that certain what’s going on with her character and the behavior she exhibits is a bit erratic and half-baked.

All of this is a crying shame because Rhonda Jo Petty gives an appropriately wounded and realistic turn as the titular character and John Holmes gives one of his best and most sympathetic performances of his entire career. Additionally, the two of them have remarkable chemistry and if the story didn’t make so many wrong decisions, it would have been nice to see something unfold between the two of them. Also in the plus column, the straight sex scenes have a soft eroticism to them that serves as a much welcome break in the carnage, and I dig on the loose party vibe in the group sex scene as the employment of the roaming camera through the incredible digs that were secured for the location makes it a nice piece of late 70’s orgy porn that seems more documentary than narrative film.

But the film’s emotional and character trajectories are disjointed and half-hearted which gives far too much weight to the transgressive pieces of the film and suggests something being very wrong with Jaacovi and/or Svetlana for dreaming this material up. Chock full of fisting scenes as if it were a how-to (one of which is set to the kind of music that they used when giving away prizes on game shows), Little Orphan Dusty is a little like I Spit on Your Grave without a satisfying comeuppance in the third act. It’s just one prolonged, improbable horror after another; a rape and revenge film that mostly forgets about the revenge.

Perhaps more infamous than the film itself was Little Orphan Dusty’s ad campaign which forever tied Rhonda Jo Petty to the “Farrah Fawcett lookalike” folderol and caused a great big spotlight to be put on her and the film. Of course, this was great for Jaacovi and Svetlana but it caught Petty a little unaware and her secret life in adult films was no longer much a secret (though, to be fair, it was probably only a matter of time that she became well-known due to her stunning looks and the fact that, well, Rhonda Jo Petty is her real name). Regardless, the Farrah Fawcett hype was just a bunch of absolute nonsense and, eventually, Jaacovi paid the right people and escaped any legal action for repurposing Fawcett’s famous poster layout for the film’s poster. For the record, Petty’s then-feathered hair kind of has a Fawcett look to it but, honestly, if I were bleary-eyed at 1:00 at a Ralph’s in 1978, I’d be more likely to mistake Rhonda Jo Petty for Dyan Cannon than I would Farrah Fawcett.

Never letting an opportunity to exploit something pass him by, Jaacovi was up to his tricks the following year with the much better Taxi Girls, also co-directed by Chinn (though, this time, uncredited). His attempt to spin the same kind of promotional gold by using Cheryl Ladd’s likeness on that film’s poster would prove to be a long-running and ruinous mistake. Despite churning out the gorgeous but absolutely mindless 800 Fantasy Lane with Jaacovi, Svetlana went on to become a respected hardcore filmmaker, but after splitting the sheets with Jaacov and garnering the kind of reputation befitting fictional antagonists like The Grinch and Lex Luthor. As for Bob Chinn, well… given that this was completely a for-hire gig who likely kept everyone in the cast out of jail and not accidentally murdered, he escapes a lot of blame for the final product and, truthfully, his presence on the set likely facilitated whatever calm and professionalism that could be found. His greatest sin boils down to taking on the project and his ultimate punishment was not seeing a dime of the film’s enormous profits. And, to add insult to injury, Jaacovi couldn’t find the decency to even spell Chinn’s last name correctly in the opening credits or on the one-sheet poster.

“It was a really stupid script,” Bob Chinn would later say during an interview that turned up as an extra on Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu ray release of Chinn’s Hard Soap, Hard Soap/Disco Lady. “But, after all, what can you do? I wouldn’t have wanted to make a film like that myself.” With the proof in his long-running and busy filmography, other than Little Orphan Dusty, Chinn never did make a film like that himself. And that’s a good thing as Little Orphan Dusty belongs in a very slim category of film to which “thank god” is the natural response to “they just don’t make ‘em like this anymore!”

(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain