Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls

On the one hand, the porn chic trend reached its peak in the second half of the 1970s, when the makers and producers of explicit adult films came up with ambitious projects that attracted the attention of both viewers and critics with their production and acting qualities, imaginative screenplays, original concepts and often even progressive work with the formulas of the category. In parallel with that, there were also purveyors of dreck like Bob Chinn, who continued to churn out obviously cheap skin-flicks targeted at a trench-coat-wearing clientele. Chinn didn’t attach any creative ambition to his films, as porn was simply easy and relatively fun work for him. This is reflected in the anti-qualities of his flicks, such as the intuitively ineffectual camera positions, long one-shot scenes and the overall feel of the productions, where no one bothered much with the cinematic aspect. It wasn’t until the 1980s that his films began to look a little more visually sophisticated, whereas for the entire previous decade they remained a reminder of the shabbiness and filth typical of the illicit utilitarian products of the under-the-counter single-reel market. Chinn's main strength lay in casting, or rather in the fact that John Holmes was happy to work with him and owed some of his cult status to him, since Chinn was the spiritual father of his film persona, the private detective Johnny Wadd. In his day, Chinn’s films were, thanks to their exaggeration and sense of humour, a welcome breath of fresh air in the mass of porn production at the time. It is necessary to add that, in these respects, there is no sophistication to speak of, however comparable Chinn’s movies may be to the work of the more ambitious directors of the time, particularly Radley Metzger and Gerrard Damian (not to mention European filmmakers such as Claude Mulot and Alan Vydra). Chinn’s humour is along the lines of crude, cartoonish sexism and relies on satisfying stereotypes of dumb, easy girls and slick dudes who always get their way. (2021.03.07)