The Liberation of Honeydoll Jones (1977) watch online HD

Porn fans know the iconic hillbilly movies of Bethel Buckalew -soft X staples at drive-ins that played & played until the prints were worn out. Hardcore porn specialist Charles De Santos tries the same formula here, with mediocre results.

He has cast the fabulous Victoria Winter in the lead role, with marketing touting her appearance in mag layouts and FAREWELL MY LOVELY, which I'll have to watch again to see if she shows up (and for how many seconds). She plays the title backwoods girl caught between two feuding clans. Title is a pointless takeoff on William Wyler's final movie THE LIBERATION OF L.B. JONES.

The script and acting (with sloppily post-synched dialog) are extremely poor, but thankfully Candida Royalle, Winter and always-cute Tracy O'Neil make up for it in the sex department. Subgenre's theme of inbreeding is relegated to lesbian incest this time around.

De Santos throws in some car chases and action scenes, tolerable for porn though hardly up to the standards of a real movie. Perhaps he should have tried harder and fashioned an alternate hard-R/soft-X version for drive-ins.

Oddest element here is casting of non-porn talent, notably Shirley Stoler as matriarch of one of the clans. She had recently received international acclaim for her classic role in Lina Wertmuller's SEVEN BEAUTIES, but is completely wasting her time shouting her dialog in a non-sex assignment for De Santos.

Gary Goodrow, a staple of '70s indie productions (not unlike Steve Buscemi's presence in more recent times) is the head of the other clan, and I was surprised to see him participate in two sex scenes. Result is analogous to seeing Spalding Gray go XXX, as he did during the same time frame.

Soon after this De Santos tried to make an R-level drive-in movie, HONKY TONK NIGHTS, also with a mixed cast of porn veterans and straight talent, but it also suggests the Peter Principle at work -his métier was clearly perfunctory porn.