I like some of pornographer Arch Brown's work, notably the somewhat poignant PIER GROUPS, but FIVE HARD PIECES is merely a selection of short subjects. In fact the preserved on DVD Something Weird version includes a sixth piece entitled "Woodshole".to round out the program.

This is an MOS black & white package, probably only of academic interest today. It kicks off with a bearded guy sightseeing in the Big Apple, picks up a young man at the Teddy Roosevelt monument and photographs him in the nude back in his room, leading to humping (as a Doors LP plays on the soundtrack).

Segment 2 has a different couple eating breakfast nude on the couch, then segueing to deep throat action on a pull-out bed. Just moody footage, without content or context, and backed by both jazz and rock..

For the third scene, the same two guys pack and leave Central Park West. head to a brownstone where they share a bath and then have sex on another pull-out bed. Next scene features a guy masturbating, joined by a second fellow for sex together.

Fifth piece has its own title card: "The Toolman": a man wakes up cold and phones for a repairman (sounds like a stag film plot). The guy shows up, writes him a bill and gets paid in cash. Next our hero wakes up sweating, as his radiator is still not working properly. The tool-man returns to fix it, they sip beers and surprise, they have sex in, you guessed it, a pull- out bed. He gets paid in cash once more - seems like a subliminal message here.

I was ready to sign off, but #6: WOODSHOLE appears. A guy in a broken-down VW beetle gets help from another man, so they swim in a lake and have sex in a nearby house, sneaking in. Theremin music is the odd choice for soundtrack, cuing their having sex out on the grass and then romping in the forest. Film ends as they push the VW down the road.

As a silent film, this deadpan porn exercise is acted out unemotionally and works neither as stimulation nor as some sort of tone poem. It's billed as "five film fantasies" but not under my definition of that term -it's simply f*cking filler.

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