Reseñas (1)
The porn movie Johnny Wadd is noteworthy primarily for being the first in a historically celebrated series of ultra-low-budget skin-flicks with a titular protagonist and serving as the main inspiration for Paul Thomas Anderson in making Boogie Nights. Anderson's fictional, yet brilliantly reflective of reality, treatise on the porn industry evokes negative reactions among devotees and, primarily, survivors of the porn chic era, precisely because of how brilliantly it is able to use creative license to capture the era it depicts, or rather a certain segment of it and phenomena that occurred then. If we compare the flicks of the time about private eye Brock Landers with their models on which they were based (though in the narration of Boogie Nights, the characters say they are conceived in opposition to Holmes and his Johnny Wadd movies, Anderson styled them based on Holmes’s pictures), we find that Anderson was still very lenient. His depiction of the lousy acting and cheapness of the productions cannot be compared with the bottom-of-the-barrel work that Bob Chinn turned out in this ultra-fast and cheap production (in the DVD commentary, he recalls that the film was shot in one day on a budget of $750) that in no way stood out at the time. The first Johnny Wadd and the sequels loosely based on it were popular with the trench-coat-wearing clientele that valued shallow exaggeration that brought something new to the narrative rules of porn with a vague framework modelled on the gritty noir school. Peculiarly, however, the films never enjoyed the massive attention that the later Deep Throat received. Though all of Chinn’s films are characterised by a certain degree of exaggeration and humour, they remain among the ranks of insipid futile sexist jokes that form a generally tasteless atmosphere. Conversely, the success of Deep Throat was derived from the fact that it broke through the previously restrictive ceiling of porn movies and come up with the concept of parody and downright imaginative visual gags, which drew to the film crowds of viewers outside the usual clientele of porn cinemas (even though it was still otherwise a very cheap and qualitatively unalluring production). The first Johnny Wadd thus remains a reminder that Deep Throat was far from being the first porn flick with a plot, as is often mistakenly said, but it also well illustrates what made it different from other contemporary productions. In Bob Chin’s filmography, it shows consistency in his directorial and screenwriting futility, which only minimally changed for the better, albeit mainly due to the technical demands of the market. Where the movie’s porn qualities are concerned, these are nullified by the anti-erotic cheap aesthetics and Holmes’s incredibly repulsive slimeball hairstyle.
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