ADOBE ANGELS (1991)

After retiring from the adult film business in 1987 for a more conventional life in Hawaii, director Bob Chinn eventually moved back to the lower 48 and settled with his family in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he became a successful camera salesman at Kurt’s Camera Corral. It wasn’t long, though, before the filmmaking bug got […]

PANAMA RED (1973)

A hippie musician is given 72 hours to unload 500 kilos of grass on various funky acquaintances throughout the Los Angeles metroplex. Cisco Pike, you say? Nope. This is Panama Red, the second film from director Bob Chinn’s Pantheon Pictures and the only film on the filmmaker’s resume that was awarded a PG rating from […]

FLESH OF THE LOTUS: A JOHNNY WADD NOVEL (2011)

“Trust me, Johnny.” These words are passionately delivered to private investigator Johnny Wadd who lives in a world where trust is hard to come by. It’s a world where lifelong friends take paths that twist in different directions but end up in the same bottomed out gorge of Los Angeles in 1972, a world of […]

THE DANISH CONNECTION (1972)

Before he resurrected the memory of the Johnny Wadd character in 2001 with a spinoff cycle of features that centered around Wadd’s illegitimate son, and then again in 2011 when he began adapting and reworking the plots of early Wadd films into a series of detective novels, Bob Chinn, originator of the fictional private eye, […]

LOSING CONTROL (1985)

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, […]

FANTASIES UNLIMITED (1985)

Dipping in on the then-nascent home computer technology craze that made its way onto the big screen, Bob Chinn’s Fantasies Unlimited finds its primary location in a business which delivers VR sexual scenarios via dial-in phone service. As the technology struggles throughout the day with a slight glitch in its interface, Tom (Eric Edwards) and […]

LAS VEGAS LADY (1981)

After professional setbacks which included two troubled projects in a row (one of which caused his irreparable split with actor John Holmes), the creative burnout that director Bob Chinn was feeling in 1981 is completely and utterly palpable in Las Vegas Lady. A blank, 57-minute stare across a desolate parking lot and into the middle […]

BLACKMAIL FOR DADDY (1975)

For such a forgotten film in the sprawling resume of Bob Chinn, Blackmail For Daddy is one of his most curious. Piggybacked with the shoot of For Love of Money, Blackmail For Daddy is the one film of Chinn’s that’s truly dependent on another, and not in the same kind of way that would be […]

FOR LOVE OF MONEY (1974)

“Enough romance… let’s fuck” blasts forth the disembodied opening line of dialogue that shatters the silence on the soundtrack immediately before Fred Huber shoves his member into the mouth of Maria Arnold while the “Mars” movement of Gustav Holst’s The Planets booms over the soundtrack. If you are fortunate enough to draw 1974’s For Love […]

THE DEVIL’S GARDEN (1973)

My premiere viewing of Bob Chinn’s The Devil’s Garden was one in which the unique and unfamiliar experience lent itself to the wonderfully strange film that unspooled itself in front of my very wide eyes. The only available copy to me was the original VHS that was released by Something Weird Video in the good […]