A few surprises, but not much to write home about

BRUISED ANGEL is an okay early gay roughie with a few surprises, but mostly not too much of note either aesthetically or historically. Vinegar Syndrome has revived it on their Exploitation.TV outlet, another in an increasingly long line of early gay XXX features for genre junkies to reassess.

Nominal plot finds Jim Frost's motorcycle breaking down as he heads home to see his wife. Another young guy stops off to help him, and offers to take him back to his place, where they can call his friend Leo to fix the bike. 

Back at the young guy's house, Jim is offered a drugged drink which quickly knocks him out. He wakes up tied to a bed, where, in by far the film's loopiest scene, the young guy shows up in full drag, strips down to a garter belt and stockings, and proceeds to slice off his clothes and menace him with a knife, before violating him sexually.

Back in the living room, the young guy somehow gets his captive to return his dubious favors, servicing and topping him before the two are interrupted by the arrival of Leo and his scrappy subordinate Dino. From there it's fairly standard S&M lite, with the young guy tied to a table and sexually abused. The one remaining eye-opener is a sounding scene (done with a feather), thankfully not shown from too close up, but with the sound nevertheless selling it more than well enough to have me crossing my legs.

As an S&M film, there's not really too much here that's out of the ordinary or of major historical interest, aside from a little clothes-pin action and the aforementioned sounding (by far the earliest instance of this that I've seen in a gay porn flick). Things largely devolve into a fairly standard F&S by the end, with sex being performed proficiently but never becoming particularly rousing either.

Technically the film is primitive, though at least features sync sound, which sets it apart from a surprising number of its contemporaries. Audio recording is muddy, with noticeable fluctuations in background tone depending upon who is speaking within a given scene. Much of the camera-work is of the point-and-shoot variety, particularly once the protagonist gets tied to the coffee table, at which point the camera seems to become as strapped-down as he is. Occasional close-ups and inserts often seem both visually and aurally like they were dropped in from another planet. 

Worth a view for genre historians, for all others, BRUISED ANGEL will be of decidedly marginal interest. Aside from the early gonzo rape scene, its most outré element remains perhaps Jim Frost's god-awful white-boy fro, one more ghastly byproduct of a decade known for poor decisions.

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