FLUCTUATIONS (1970) **

This month is of course Skinamax-A-Palooza, but I also wanted to take some time to look at other avenues of erotica you might not find late at night on cable television. That not only includes some XXX films (which I’ll be covering in my next Legends of the Silver Screen column), but also some softcore oddities of yesteryear. And Fluctuations certainly falls into the latter category.

I don’t know about you, but every time I see a credit for “Karate Consultant” in the opening credits for a '70s skin flick, it just sorta makes me smile.

Fluctuations’ “narrative” cuts back and forth between a chick reading a smut novel to two dudes performing karate in their living room to a gal doing what has to be one of the most deliberate and drawn out stripteases in recorded history. Then a chick gets it on with two guys, only to be interrupted by her dominatrix, who whips them with her hair!

None of this is any good, but it does have a certain hypnotic quality about it. But after a while, the whole thing just gets frustrating. I mean you’re never sure if the chick reading the book is imagining all the sex or if it’s happening elsewhere in her apartment building. And the incoherent editing is the dead giveaway that the film is one of those deals where a director’s incompetence is trying to be passed off as “artsy”.

None of this would matter if the sex scenes where actually hot. The problem is that the sex scenes aren't shot very well and all the crisscross editing ruins their momentum. In the end, Fluctuations just jumps around so much that you can never get your bearings. It’s like someone took a half a dozen stag reels and haphazardly edited them into a karate instructional video or something.

The film does have one terrific line: “If there was only some way I could cut it off, I could throw the rest of you away!”