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It begins on a wintry day. A woman appears at the end of a long line of columns, as if under a boardwalk. The camera gets closer to her, and her visage takes shape. She is clad in black fur. The camera continues to approach her, as if representing a lover running to embrace her, but she remains tantalizingly distant. Elsewhere, a fur-clad man cavorts through an urban park in a fresh snowfall. He balances himself atop a row of benches, leaping between them without touching the ground. He ascends to the top of a jungle gym, where he raises his arms to the heavens, triumphant, jubilant, like a victorious boxer (right). The man reaches the edge of the park, stops, and raises his eyes to an apartment window. There is a woman standing inside, half dressed, longing for her man to come home. Why is he cavorting outside instead of inside with her, she wonders. She stares out of the window silently, but her thoughts speak aloud. |
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Is it the opening to a Bergman story about two Scandinavian lovers who can't quite make the connection they once hoped for? Close. It's actually a porno film. The chick in the Dr Zhivago fur is completely irrelevant to the "plot," if I may use that word loosely, except for the fact that the man sees her again later, at which time she flashes him. The woman inside is Kitty, and the guy in the park is Rocky Balboa. No, I'm not kidding. It's Sylvester Stallone himself, 23 years old, in the days when he needed the work, some six years before he made Rocky. The rest of the movie is simple, routine porno exposition. Rocky and his woman mess around, then they answer the door and welcome some guests. Three women and a guy join them for an orgy. The end. For the purpose of our historical analysis of cinema nudity, let the record show that Rocky Balboa shows the ol' tallywacker, but it stays at rest, even through some heavy-duty, body-grinding orgy action. Forgetting that for a moment, and turning our attention to the body parts we are more familiar with, Stallone was barely recognizable. His body surely didn't give him away. He wasn't out of shape then, but he had no abs at all, and no pecs to speak of. He had the slim, muscular shoulders of a swimmer rather than the later weightlifter's development we are more familiar with. If he is 5'10", as listed at IMDb, I suppose he weighed about 175 in those days - nowhere near big enough to dominate the heavyweight division he would later obtain fictional mastery of. Astoundingly, his voice and diction didn't betray him either. Over the years, the voice of Rocky Balboa, the tough working class Philly guy, has gradually become entwined with Stallone's own distinctive vocal rhythms and slurred speech so that the man and his character are indistinguishable. In his few lines in this film, however, Stallone did enough acting to sound like a typical middle-class college kid from middle America. Given the youthful timbre of his voice, his forced generic diction, and the practiced absence of his familiar slur, I don't believe I would have recognized him from the voice alone. In fact, the distinctive drooping shape of his mouth was the only thing that would have prevented Stallone from claiming that "Stud" was just a guy who looked like him. Well, that and the fact that he used his real name. Stallone later admitted in a Playboy interview that he scarfed up a whopping two hundred bucks as his fee for this assignment. I will avoid making the obvious observation that he was overpaid. At any rate, Stallone wisely kept his day job rather than banking on a future career as the Ron Jeremy of his era. I don't know if anyone ever saw this 8mm film back in 1970, but of course it was dragged out of the vaults when Stallone became a superstar in 1976. It was re-edited, converted to 35mm, and re-released under the title "The Italian Stallion." The scene where Stallone raises his hands above his head is purely a fortuitous link to Rocky, of course, but this film's parallel to the later boxing movie was magnified a hundredfold in the 1976 re-edit, because The Italian Stallion was re-scored at that time - with music that sounds as much like the theme to Rocky as possible. I'm not sure what the legal standard might be for copyright violation in such a case, but this score really intends to sound familiar, and pushes the outside of the envelope in that effort. To tell you the truth, I was impressed with the ripped-off music, not by the quality, of which I am no judge, but by the obvious expense. I don't care how little originality one employs, it is not inexpensive to compose and record a score like this. This is not the kind of music that can be produced with an acoustic guitar played by some solo street busker who will work for a bottle of Ripple. If you remember Rocky, you recall that it has a symphonic score which uses lots of horns to generate drama. To create the orchestral rip-off sound, somebody paid a composer for the time required to score many separate instruments. Somebody also booked lots of studio time and paid plenty of union musicians. I would guess that the tacked-on score for the re-edited version of this flick must have cost twenty times as much as the entire movie had cost in its original 8mm avatar. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything that the editors could do with the visuals. Hey - it was an 8mm porn film, with the scenes probably shot in one take. It's on DVD, but it looks worse than the shabbiest VHS tape you've ever seen. Even if it had looked good, it would still not be a good sex film. I guess you would call this medium-core porn. It's harder than a softcore, because it shows penises and spread leg shots, but it's softer than a hardcore, because there are no erections or extreme genital close-ups. This completely worthless film would, of course, be as unknown to the public as your home movies except for the presence of the Rock. Stallone hit the jackpot, but the IMDb bios show that the other five principals never appeared in any other film before or after this one. There was also a seventh member of the cast, and she does have a lengthy IMDB filmography, but her story is the saddest of all. The mysterious girl in the park, who opened the film and later flashed the Rock, but did not take part in the sex scenes, was played by Janet Banzet, an aspiring actress who stuck to her career dream for ten years until she realized that a silent, uncredited flash in an 8mm stag film was her upper level of competence. She committed suicide soon after this flick was lensed. I don't want you to leave on that sad note, so let me cheer you up with this computer-generated recommendation from Amazon.com. Party at Kitty and Stud's was directed by someone named Morton Lewis, and Amazon says, "Customers who bought DVDs directed by Morton Lewis also bought DVDs by Bernardo Bertolucci." I'm sure Bertolucci would be proud. |
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