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WARNING
THIS
REVIEW AND MOVIE
CONTAINS FULL FRONTAL NUDITY
and STRONG SEXUAL CONTENT
VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED
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Sex Garage
(1972)
(ºÃÃÂÒÂäÁè¨Óà»ç¹)
Adult
Only
Directer:
Fred Halsted
Running time: 33
Min
Country: USA
Language:
No Dialog
Genre:Adult,
Short, Art
Subtitle:
No need to
translate
Starring:
Jim Frost,
Rick Coates, Fred Halsted, Joseph Yale, Eve
Orlon ... The Mechanic''s Girl (uncredited)
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SYNOPSIS
The black-and-white Sex Garage, released the same year
[as LA Plays Itself], is a marginally more focused work,
though by conventional standards it’s far from a
classical narrative. It opens with a hardcore hetero
scene — a sexy young guy getting head from an
enthusiastic woman. Surrounded by cars and car
paraphernalia, they fuck furiously on the concrete floor
of the title space. But the guy turns out to be
bisexual, and graciously accepts the services of a
knob-polishing queen who serendipitously moseys in. As
in other Halsted films — and recalling the entropic
atmosphere of early Warhol movies — here the characters
come and go at random. There’s no attempt to create
characterizations — in the demimonde of the “sex garage”
there are no “people,” just random fetishes, body parts,
and desires enacted and forgotten.
Sex Garage has its share of lurid encounters, but the
most prescient one is reminiscent of — and surely
outstrips — both Kenneth Anger’s bike fetish and the
car-fuck crazies of Cronenberg’s Crash. A bored hunk
arrives; tired of getting head from the wandering
suckboy, he goes for some real action and “mates” with
the exhaust pipe of his motorcycle in clinical close-up.
This film was banned in New York at the time because the
police believed it was “promoting obscenity.” Apparently
they didn’t appreciate the peculiar modernity of this
scene as a parable of humankind, so often overwhelmed by
technology, connecting with cold steel in a way hitherto
unimagined. The fact that the overcooked Crash had
similar censorship problems around the same time
(mid-1990s) that Halsted’s films spilled back into
select repertory venues shows how far we hadn’t come.
Those budding cineastes who wish to repeat Halsted’s
achievement, in general if not in the specifics, will be
heartened to know that Sex Garage was shot in a mere one
day at a cost of $1,800. –Gary Morris, Bright Lights
Film Journal
Mating with the Machinery
28 February 2008 | by Dirtymoviedevotee (dries.vermeulen@hotmail.be)
(Brugge, Belgium)
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
Conceived as a supporting short for its
theatrical release and forever since
screened together with the same director''s
legendary L.A. PLAYS ITSELF, the barely over
half an hour SEX GARAGE can rightfully be
considered an unofficial third movement to
that film, even elaborating on themes
touched upon therein. If that film cruelly
juxtaposed the evil that men are capable of
inflicting with the purity and innocence of
nature which the human race has carelessly
squandered and destroyed, this astonishing
black & white featurette - amazingly shot
over a single day - takes matters yet
another step further with an implied as much
desired immersion with modern technology as
one character attempts to make love to his
motorcycle, inserting his rigid member into
the exhaust pipe and tenderly rubbing his
copious ejaculate into the upholstery ! Both
the freewheeling cinematic style –
frequently favoring extreme close-ups of
both machinery and genitalia – and the
iconography of high speed vehicles and their
leather-attired drivers, not to mention its
kick ass soundtrack alternating girl groups
with classical music and appropriately
soulless synthesizer bleeps, align this
featurette with Kenneth Anger''s revered
cinematic patchwork SCORPIO RISING. Cast
members are anonymous and unfamiliar. Both
Bijouworld and John Rowberry (as editor of
the 1991 Adam Film World Gay Video
Directory) list Paul Barresi and the late
Bob Blount, who died in an accident shortly
after completing the Joe Gage classic L.A.
TOOL & DIE, as participants – who copied
from whom ? – but I can''t vouch for either
one as even repeated viewings have kept me
from anything resembling a positive i.d.
Opening on the (literally) titular garage, a
cherubic young mechanic receives oral favors
from his hippie chick girlfriend (who, at
least according to IMDb, just might be
carnal cult cutie Eve Orlon) who
subsequently spreads for what amounts to a
good ten minutes of straight sex. Intercut
with this is a gorgeous upper class brat -
with a world-weary mien straight out of
DEATH IN VENICE - sensuously soaping his
hirsute torso and pleasingly packed nether
regions in the shower, camera temporarily
zooming in on a note (along with a casually
displayed $100 bill) to take the car into
the garage to have it "greased up". Oh yeah
! As he drives up, the girl exits with a mix
of fright and the existential realization
perhaps that her presence is no longer
needed - indeed, inopportune - in Halsted''s
idiosyncratic private universe. Picking up
where the lass left off, Richie Rich is
casually humiliated and submitted, first by
the mechanic and then by a long-haired,
Jesus type biker boy stopping by. Apparently
tiring of his human sex partners, for whom
he displays but strained ennui, the biker
ultimately prefers the company of his
revered cycle instead, licking and kneading
as he works himself into a fevered frenzy
culminating in aforementioned penetration.
As with much underground cinema, this
synopsis can''t even begin to do justice to
the actual experience of viewing. While
unversed in traditional cinematic technique,
Halsted was rapidly developing a signature
all his own through vibrant ''n'' jittery
hand-held camera work and wild zooms
instilling significance into seemingly
random objects that was ahead of its time.
Though much of his subsequent directorial
output proved dire and unimaginative, his
last film BREAKER BLUE a dispiriting mess,
his cinematography remained fresh ''n''
exciting, especially when working on other
people''s projects, usually his longtime
lover Joey Yale''s film-making efforts like
TRICK TIME.
By far the most distinctive dirty movie
director to hail from California, Halsted
had drifted through a variety of odd jobs
before trying his hand at film-making.
Popular rumor has it that he worked as a
gardener to Vincent Price at some stage, the
feverish fairy imagination expanding on
Fred''s horticultural duties as to include
play for pay bedroom antics with the fading
horror icon ! The resulting resentment for
the "ruling classes" may have inspired the
rough treatment that befalls the rich kid
here. Be that as it may, Fred''s life
decidedly took a turn for the better when he
met and fell in love with Joseph Yale in
1969. "Poisoning" his legitimate career by
enthusiastically participating in his
Svengali''s matching all male masterpieces
L.A. and SEXTOOL, Yale remained Halsted''s
partner in both life and labor as Cosco
co-founder, established on Joey''s urging to
gain more control over their work and its
revenue, much of which had disappeared into
the wrong pockets until then. Virtually
unheard of in a pornographic milieu, without
distinction between the straight and gay
sides thereof, they proved inseparable until
Yale''s passing, with Halsted electing to
join him by his own hand shortly after in a
gesture equal parts poetic and pathetic.
Does it make me a sentimental sap when I
admit to hoping that they really did rejoin
forces in whatever constitutes an afterlife
? If so, color me corny !
Sex Garage. 1972.
Directed by Fred Halsted.
[Note: This was hown in a very bad preservation print.
It was in black-and-white and I am fairly sure that the
film was originally in color.]
This is a really strange film. It begins with a scene of
a woman giving a mann a blowjob in a car in a garage.
And this is supposed to be a gay porn film.
Anyway, this male-female oral sex is performed to some
really upbeat music. But then we are introduced to
another scene, that of a man jerking offin a shower. The
music for this scene is Bach''s "Joy of Man''s Desiring."
The film cuts back and forth between the two sequences
with very abrupt shifts in the sound. Sometimes there is
inserted a very brief cut from one sequence, its
accompanying music being a very short, jarring
interruption. For me personally these jarring shifts
take me out of the scenes and out of any involvement
with their sexual content.
The upbeat music is replaced in places with those
exaggerated sucking sounds which were so familiar in
oral sex scenes during the 1970s. Then we see the
heterosexual couple on the floor, man on top, and I
believe we hear a lot of heavy breathing at that point.
And then a man drives up in a car and the womkan runs
away. And that is the only good look that we get at her.
The fact that we hadn''t really seen her body up till
that point is another factor that kept us from getting
sexually involved. Why? Why does Halsted do it that way?
Or perhaps other people respond differently.
In a regular heterosexual film the man in the car would
have been the woman''s husband. But there is a twist here
and it is that he starts having sexual activity with the
man that was involved, not the woman. Perhaps the
heterosexual encounter is Fred Halsted rejecting the
simple categorization of straight and gay.
We see shots of a motorcycle riding the roads and the
two men are joined by a third, a biker type who brought
to my mind associations with Kenneth Anger''s Scorpio
Rising. He seems somewhat sinister and I believe that he
is wearing leather. They become a threesome. The sex is
rough with one man''s head being forced into a toilet
bowl by another man''s foot. One man dons black briefs
and one inserts his penis into an orifice on the
motorcycle. All of this is played out to the sound of
electronic music.
As one man reaches climax the electronic music fades and
we share the sense of release. We then hear his heavy
breathing.
I find that I don''t remember much of the details of the
sexual activity. This might have been because I was
turned off by the shabbiness of the print or it might be
that I just couldn''t get that interested in it. Or it
could be that my eyes were tired and my attention span
exhausted after L.A. Plays Itself.
Trailer :
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