FANTASY GIRLS (1974)

In Alex de Renzy’s Fantasy Girls, the red light district of San Francisco is staked out like a sexual playground while the working stiffs of Ruby’s Massage Parlor trade pleasure for a price. It’s a functional establishment, replete with wood panelling, garish wallpaper, mirrors with gold-vein accents, and a crack staff of eager and enterprising […]

LITTLE SISTERS (1972)

Moving from the dusty western setting of Powder Burns, Alex de Renzy and his troupe of lovable weirdos took their action to more bucolic digs for Little Sisters, made and released in the sun-bronzed year that was 1972. A ragged and tough twelve months for the counterculture as they watched George McGovern get dog-walked by […]

POWDER BURNS (1971)

If there is any other value to be afforded to Alex de Renzy’s Sexual Encounter Group outside its own existence as a funky time capsule, it might make for a fine segue into de Renzy’s equally dull Powder Burns, a primitive narrative feature made the following year that feels constructed out of the kind of […]

WEED (1971)

Before saying goodbye to the straightforward documentary film, Alex de Renzy swung hard with Weed, an epic, captivating, and thorough look at marijuana, another taboo subject on the cusp of wider acceptance in the early 70’s. A fascinating stamp in time, Weed was made in the shadow of the ongoing work of the Shafer Commission, […]

INNOCENTS ABROAD (1971)

Alex de Renzy’s Innocents Abroad is an invitation by the filmmaker to explore various locations across Europe and witness the cultural shift as the sexual revolution grips specific countries and cities. Definitely a direct follow up to his previous year’s groundbreaking Pornography in Denmark: A New Approach, the idea put forth in Innocents Abroad is […]

SEXUAL ENCOUNTER GROUP (1970)

It’s difficult to puzzle out how much of Sexual Encounter Group, an 81 minute odyssey of guided, mannered group sex produced by director Alex de Renzy for exhibition in his Screening Room and beyond, is a genuine time capsule or an orchestrated put-on. Regardless, beginning poolside and concluding with a post-coital immersion, what unfolds between […]

A HISTORY OF THE BLUE MOVIE (1970)

Soon after the release of Alex de Renzy’s Pornography in Denmark: A New Approach in 1970, a rash of other filmmakers and producers decided to get in on the act and make their own “documentaries,” then a semantic-but-legal safe haven for producing or projecting non-simulated sexual acts. One of the earliest and most notable examples […]

PORNOGRAPHY IN DENMARK: A NEW APPROACH (1970)

Somewhere in the catalog of great cosmic ironies, Russ Meyer being the first filmmaker to adapt John Cleland’s Fanny Hill to the big screen is one of the more twisted. The book, a bawdy, lusty tale of a young girl’s misadventures and blossoming sexual awareness, was published in ye olde England in 1748 and was […]