If you didn’t know any better, you might think you were settling in for a cheap, shot-on-video quickie while watching the opening credits to Bob Chinn’s Losing Control, shot and released during the insanely busy year of 1985. But once we get dropped into the story, Losing Control reveals itself to be an honest, funny, and surprisingly strong feature by Chinn. It’s not surprising that Chinn made a strong feature, mind you. It’s just that as video productions began to lap up around Chinn’s feet, the formula for features had changed to the point where a dialogue-heavy, character-driven ensemble was now an exception and not a rule.
In Losing Control, Eric Edwards plays Edward Randall, a divorcee who has made a comfortable living in computer chips (I like to think he probably worked on the computer chips that were used to develop the gadgetry in Chinn’s Fantasies Unlimited). One morning, he runs into old college flame Monica Chapman (Jacqueline Lorians) at a coin-op laundromat, a location that doesn’t necessarily belie his wealth as he’s hitting the Launder Land which is “Speed Queen Equipped”. He invites her and her roommate, Tina (Patty Petite), to a party he is having at his house that evening where he is hosting some old college friends. Things go awry when, just as the guests begin to arrive, hold-up men Nicky and Richie (Steve Drake and Dan T. Mann), show up and take Edward, roommate Jeffery (Harry Reems), and Edwards’s guests (Kimberly Carson, Randy West, Kristara Barrington, Renee Summers, Herschel Savage, Lorians and Petite) hostage.
Like All the Way In!, A Passage to Ecstasy, and Blondie, Losing Control illustrates the ability of Chinn to work an ensemble piece within the tightest of means and still produce a film with tons of vitality and spark. Shot over the course of one full day and one full night (and grabbing the exterior and interior of the laundromat in the early hours of the next morning… more on that in a bit), Losing Control is a small wonder of a film that is 100% lovable. With a cast that is evenly split between the men and the women, the audience is given characters who are distinctive, fairly unpredictable, and always interesting to watch. Herschel Savage and Kristara Barrington play Pete and Joanna, an unhappily married couple who show up at the party with Nina (Summers), the bubbly, reigning ‘Miss Sunkist’. Absolutely bored by the idea of another tired get-together, the two women find themselves completely excited by the idea of being part of a hostage situation and take charge to liven it up. Likewise, Kimberly Carson’s character of Dr. Susan has a ceaseless habit of breaking every situation into sociological mumbo jumbo, much to the chagrin of her husband, Marvin (West), sporting goods manufacturer with a practical outlook on life that matches his heart of gold. In each instance in the film, the characters come through in their specific efforts to de-escalate the situation with humorous or amorous (or both) results.
In terms of his 80’s output, Losing Control has to rank as one of Chinn’s very best films. From top to bottom, there really isn’t one bum performance in the bunch. Savage, Reems, and Edwards are all their professional selves and do great work, but Carson really impresses by delivering her gobs of dialogue with a supreme confidence. Lorians is a perfect mix of girl-next-door and a smoldering heap of good trouble that recalls a less voluptuous Sue Nero, and Renee Summers is a hoot and a half as a bubbly schemer (but for the greater good). Giving the performances a great deal of assistance is the lively script by Debbie Chinn. With a real ear for dialogue, especially women’s, Debbie’s script contains a commendable plea for decency in a world rocked by economic uncertainty and an unrelenting shift toward a more conservative point of view by the culture at large.
However, the ingredient that makes Losing Control extra special is just HOW MUCH dialogue there is and how the coordination with both Eric Edwards and Jim Talmadge (snagging production manager and transportation captain credits) was instrumental in prepping the rest of the cast with the script and greasing the schedule so they could cram a planned two-day shoot into one 30 hour sprint. If Eric Edwards looks a little worse for wear in the opening scene in the laundromat, it’s because it was the very last thing that was shot and the man, along with the rest of the cast and crew, had been pulling the sled pretty damn hard for a good long while.
And, naturally, in pulling the sled comes the most physical aspect of adult cinema which are the sex scenes. Though made at a time when they were becoming more and more elongated and numbing to the detriment of the story, they balance out perfectly here. For as many characters and verbal interactions as there are throughout the film, there’s a great assortment of ribald action. The film finds a comfortable intermission with the Drake/Carson and Savage/Petite pairings as they are put in the middle of the film, stretched out, and cross-cut against each other in an effort to break up the dialogue scenes. On either side is a fun opener with Lorians and Petite, and Boyer and Reems bring the heat in their early scene (but, again, when doesn’t Boyer?). When Kristara Barrington wasn’t asked to put on an offensively stupid accent, she could be an engaging actress and she and Renee Summers have an absolute ball in their bathroom threesome with Dan T. Mann (despite the reservations one should have about having sex on a CARPETED bathroom floor… pew). The West/Summers scene is another scorcher as they dig in like they actually mean it, and the film’s final act between Edwards and Lorians (the one that everyone will see coming within seconds of the opening credits) is worth the wait.
Though it was shot on 16mm (by frequent Chinn collaborator Tom Di Nucci), Losing Control only played theatrically in Europe. Stateside, it was marketed with a slick and a box art that pressed the then-red hot Erica Boyer’s appearance. Of course, the incongruity is that, blessed as we all should be for any moment Boyer graces the screen, she has one superfluous sex scene with Harry Reems in this picture and then exits before the inciting incident occurs. This isn’t a Psycho-level bait and switch, mind you. This is just a cold reality of the adult film world in 1985 as it completely gave in to the reality of video and stopped selling features as motion pictures and began churning out and manufacturing product.
The shift to video was inevitable and there was no way for Chinn to avoid it. By the close of business in 1985, he had wrapped on seven features in the calendar year, two of which had been shot on video. His remaining five features, spread across 1986 and 1987, would all be shot on video. And in anticipation of a world of private home viewing, Losing Control’s final line (“Rewind the tape, take it back to the tape store, and get another one”) is perhaps the best closer in all of Chinn’s films; a tacit but sweet surrender to the reality of the day and a perfect way to close out his run of smut on celluloid. An absolutely lovely gesture in a rather remarkable, underseen gem of a film.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
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