HILLBILLY SEX CLAN GRINDHOUSE TRIPLE FEATURE

Those crazy dudes at After Hours Cinema are at it again. Bless them. Anyone who feels their life is incomplete until they can own three more no-budget redneck pornos from the 1970s in their DVD collection, prepare to rejoice ... HILLBILLY SEX CLAN is here!

The shenanigans begin with COUNTRY DOC.

There’s no information to be found online regarding this one, but my guess is that it was made in the very early 1970s. It opens with the adults of a small town community gathering at a local farm for a party which involves couples pairing off and retiring to nearby barns to fuck.

A male voiceover suggests we’ve often asked ourselves how these parties come about (I hadn’t, but I do now), and proffers the answer: it’s all to do with the local doctor, an elderly gentleman who is the living definition of a "dirty old man".

We see the doctor on his house calls, and soon realise his bent for ogling over good-looking women disrobing. In one instance, he gets three teenagers to strip and bend over so he can administer injections in their rears. In the finest porno tradition, they then chastise him for his pervy ways by stripping him naked (don’t eat while watching this bit) and bonking his brains out. If only the real world was like a porn film...

The film continues to ramble on in episodic fashion, with the doctor’s new protégé being introduced to the film, and to the horny local women of this backwoods community.

Swinging, doctors being seduced by their patients, up-for-it teenaged girls ... COUNTRY DOC probably sounds a lot more fun than it actually is.

The film has no pace. The humour isn’t funny or spirited, and – worst of all – the sex, its reason for being, is rubbish. Not only are the performers rather grotesque, but the camerawork and editing are such that many scenes don’t conclude satisfactorily, and the bits you hope to see are often obscured by the filmmakers’ ineptitude.

Worst of all, the film is criminally overlong at 78 minutes in length.

Next up is HILLBILLY SEX CLAN, which at the very least is more palatable at only 34 minutes long.

This one wastes no time getting down to business, literally opening to the sight of a couple shagging outdoors. Nice face on the woman, nice figure and skin too – things are looking up. The man, Harry, spunks a big load onto her pelvis, though the over-exposed photography does make this hard to make out.

Elsewhere, pistol-packing redneck Lester (resembling Jason Lee in ‘My Name Is Earl’) is looking for his sister, the local virgin Daisy. Lester promised his late dad that he’d protect his sister’s virginity until the day she got married.

However, while Lester’s distracted by getting sucked off in a scrap yard, Daisy stumbles across Harry, still naked, and curiosity gets the better of her. She is, after all, the most sexually astute ‘virgin’ I’ve ever seen.

Inevitably this will lead to trouble when Lester finds them ... but first he has to fire his bolt in his girlfriend’s mouth: "that’s the best head I’ve had in a coon’s age ..."

Of course, everybody ends up fucking everybody else, and the ultimate point of this otherwise pointless but fun diversion is for Lester to deflower his own sister.

Southern accents and a looped ukulele score tick the hillbilly boxes, while the dry fields backdrop and outdoor nudity recalled classic Russ Meyer to this mind. The cast are better-looking than in DOC and there’s a vibrancy to performances that keeps this all agreeable throughout its meagre running time.

BARE COUNTRY wraps things up, clocking in at 59 minutes in length.

Despite a brief attempt at cinematic deceit in its opening moments, giving us stock footage of local wildlife, this one soon settles into familiar territory: here, a travelling salesman encounters young Ellie May (in the woods, by the looks of it) and invites himself back to her house to show her what he has to offer.

The fun begins with the salesman – a sweaty moustachioed type – encouraging Ellie May to stifle her deeply Southern accent by accepting his willy in her mouth. She follows this with possibly the most pathetic tit-wank committed to celluloid ("kinda made me feel like I wanted something else", he politely protests) before he takes to her cunt with his tongue.

At this point, Ellie May’s folks (barely older than her by the looks of things) return home but, believing her to be out for the day, get it on together in the kitchen.

But less about them, and the other characters that are introduced (ugly fuckers – literally). The real interest here is in Ellie May herself. She’s a gorgeous unassuming redhead with a great figure and perfect skin. She’s also blessed with a comely blend of naivety and an eagerness to learn how to please. You can’t not love her...

Everything about BARE COUNTRY is random. The acting is truly diabolical, the filmmakers having to edit the action so that each character gets no more than two lines of dialogue in any single take, such is their ineptitude. Alas, the editing is so slack that this often leaves actors looking awkwardly into the camera after having said their lines, lending proceedings an unintentionally hilarious staccato effect. Music (library score; old public domain songs) flit in and out of scenes with no context or purpose. Scenarios begin mid-flow, adding to the feeling that everyone involved in the making of this film was off their tits on something or other.

It all ends as abruptly as it began.

Bad editing, single take sex scenes that suffer from incompetent camerawork and editing that frequently misses the money shots: none of these films are well-made. The performers are for the most part faceless, ensuring the crummy humour and listless lovemaking remain charmless throughout. What’s more, the cast of all three films are ugly ... unless pasty white pimpled-covered flesh and aged, pot-bellied men happen to be your thing. And the hair! Some of the men in these films resemble Sasquatch. Fuck!

Each film is presented uncut in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The transfers are touted on the back cover as being brand new Telecine affairs struck from the original film elements. They certainly appear to be that way, looking very natural and film-like throughout the show. Colours are strong even if blacks are often faded. Images are a tad soft for the most part, but that’s to be expected with obscurities of this ilk. Print damage is also a given ... we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Pops and crackles on the English mono soundtracks don’t hinder the action any. Occasional drop-out and muffled audio (symptomatic of how these home efforts were recorded) didn’t bother me either.

This region free disc opens to an animated, window-boxed main menu page. From there, there is the option to view each film either individually or as a triple bill courtesy of the "Grind It! Play All" function.

Although there are no scene-selection menus, each film can be skipped through by use of your remote control handset (COUNTRY DOC has 16 chapters; HILLBILLY has 7 chapters; COUNTRY has 12 chapters).

The only extras on the disc are a handful of trailers for other After Hours titles: SLAVE OF PLEASURE, A NIGHT AT THE VENUS, RENE BOND’S SLEAZY 70S, HOW TO MAKE A SEX MOVIE and DIRTY DETECTIVE.

This particular triple bill isn’t the best that After Hours’ canon has to offer, granted. But it’s quirky and dubious enough to be of interest for any serious sleaze fans out there. And that girl playing Ellie May IS hot.

Review by Stuart Willis