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 […]

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, […]

EVIL COME, EVIL GO (1972)

As the world of softcore began to crumble in the early seventies, it became more imperative for filmmakers to try and formulate some kind of a hook to make their projects worth the time to an audience who could just as well plunk down the same amount of money to see the real thing. For […]

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 […]

EXHAUSTED: JOHN C. HOLMES, THE REAL STORY (1981)

“Everything in life is an act,” says John Holmes in the opening moments of Julia St. Vincent’s Exhausted: John C. Holmes, the Real Story, and, boy howdy, does Holmes put one on for its entire running time. A ludicrous hagiography and ode to the adult film world’s biggest superstar, Exhausted is a heaping helping of […]

TAXI GIRLS (1979)

Buoyed by the notoriety of Little Orphan Dusty that did nothing but make tons of money for him, co-director Jaacov Jaacovi was anxious to get back into the mix and repeat the success with another project. As he had done with Little Orphan Dusty, he approached Bob Chinn to go in halves on the directorial […]

HOT & SAUCY PIZZA GIRLS (1978)

“All I want in this life of mine is some good clean fun.” – Little Feat, “Fat Man in the Bathtub” Country Girl Pizza is the home base for Bob Chinn’s Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls, a freewheeling, deep-dish slice of gooey, west coast goodness from 1978. Set in a screwy and oversexed heightened reality, […]

PRISONER OF PARADISE (1980)

During an early scene in Bob Chinn’s Hot Legs (1979), modeling agency head Richard Pacheco is on the phone with his boss, played by Delania Raffina. The audience can only make out his side of the conversation as her side is built out of of shrieking, garbled nonsense that blares through the phone’s earpiece and […]

CALIFORNIA GIGOLO (1979)

At the beginning of Bob Chinn’s California Gigolo, a button-cute and tarted up Kandi Barbour makes eyes at John Holmes and they begin a strange back and forth tease that, after a suspended cable car ride, culminates at the top of a mountain. Cutting between the two as she gives him fadeaways and grins, John […]

BLONDE FIRE (1979)

As the 70’s began to draw to a close, so did filmmaker Bob Chinn’s relationship with Armand Atamian’s Freeway Films. Flush with projects from other companies (most notably, Harry Mohney and Gail Palmer’s Caribbean Films) Chinn had mostly been soldiering on with Freeway as a token of gratitude toward Atamian and also because of Chinn’s […]