User Reviews

Being a woman, it's hard to find erotic entertainment that doesn't insult my gender or rely on the simple tastes of men (sorry guys, you know it's true). It's also very hard to find erotica where women come out on top, much less their needs even acknowledged. While het-porn is happy to explore girl-on-girl as long as she ends up with a dude at the end, god forbid there's guy-on-guy action for the rest of us to watch. Happily, Metzger is the exception: always presenting strong beautiful women, and adding style and substance along with the erotic bits. And in "Score" he evens the score (pardon the pun) by including vulnerable males, bisexuality, and more.

If you're reading this you're probably already a Radley Metzger fan or fell in love with his glossy erotic dramas like "Camille 2000" or "Carmen, Baby" and are looking for similar, but "Score" marks a turning point in Metzger's career from romantic tragedies to a full-on nudie comedy. It's still obviously a Metzger film, set in some unspecified Euro rental, with attractive people and another groovalicious soundtrack, but in "Score" the budget seems to have plummeted. Little or no time is wasted on rehearsing the actors, or dressing the sets with Metzger's signature mod furniture. The overall feeling is chintzy compared to his earlier efforts. The actors spend as much time naked as clothed -- it's not as explicit as today's porn, but it's clear that Metzger has abandoned his high concept orgies and classic 19th-century novels for full frontal nudity and frank sex talk.

But I'm not knocking "Score", it is a sparkling example of campy 70's porn. Compared with the icy "Camille 2000" or the pretentious "Lickerish Quartet", "Score" is a tongue-in-cheek party film! I watched it with my favorite gay and we howled with laughter-- more often WITH it than AT it. The hokey dialog is deliberate, and the conversations so over the top it almost lampoons adult movies. I've fantasized more than once about turning the script into an off-off-Broadway play....

THE PLOT: A married couple (Elvira and Jack) scoff at middle class morality, but she's become bored with the kind of easy swingers who've answered their ads in sex magazines. Seeking a challenge Elvira invites unsuspecting vanilla newlyweds over for dinner, drugs, and seduction (not necessarily in that order). As the young couple proves hard to crack due to a smorgasbord of immature sexual disorders, Jack bets that he can score before she does. Think "Lickerish Quartet" meets "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" with the script from "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" and you start to get the idea. It's extremely campy, and refreshingly unrepentant.

The sex is only simulated, but kinky and fetishistic, and it does not embarrass by being overly graphic or banal. The actors are reflected in sheets of mylar and other psychedelic touches (although Metzger has done better), and the editing inter-cuts between men's and women's bodies mirroring at times their positions and movements. There is a lot of nudity but it is never clinical. Metzger gets creative in the men's sex scenes: an undone belt is grasped as if it were an erection, and other phallus-shaped objects stand in for oral (including an amyl nitrate cartridge -- ooh, it's SO decedent!). Metzger attempts to keep even the straightest guys aroused during the guy- on-guy action with lots of abstract tension and no scary erect penises, meanwhile the women play complex top/bottom roles exchanging rapid fire dialog that draws you into their psychological games.

If you have friends who consider themselves the decedent type who might throw on a porno for laughs, try sneaking this one on them as a campy swingers movie and see who you can turn bi. Or make it into a drinking game (everytime they take a drink or smoke a joint in the movie, you do too! har har.) I give it 7 out of 10 stars: although the production is sad compared to earlier Metzger films, the result is a Trojan horse of a too clever script disguised as a trash-fest. "Score" makes you laugh and holds your attention, delving gleefully into taboos, drugs, and nudity that no "legit" movie could touch.

Plot Spoiler review.

The Blu-ray disc I watched was a restored copy of a film with the year 1976, apparently an edited version. Jack (Gerald Grant) and Elvira (Claire Wilbur) are swingers. She is bored by being able to easily score due to the Al Goldstein publication which lets them advertise. Elvira has been attempting to score with Betsy (Lynn Lowry) and Eddie (Casey Donovan). She likes the chase.

The couple swap didn't go as I would have liked as same sex couples paired up. The monologue comes across as a Creative Writing 101 project. I was not overly impressed, and in fact it brought a chuckle as I had to laugh at what passed for clever in 1970 something.

Guide Sex and full frontal nudity (M/F)

I have watched lot of 70's films of late and have enjoyed European titles across a number of genres. This film however was a great disappointment on many levels. The acting was laughable. The script was even worse. Not only was this trash but it was dated trash. The "sex" scenes contained lots of writhing and moaning but were just about as un-erotic as you could possible imagine. The gay characters dressed as a sailor and a cowboy and I hooted out load at times!! Dialogue was full of clangers and frankly boring, if not worse. Please do not waste your time or money with this film unless you want to see just how bad a bad film can get. Put it like this I would rather watch an episode on "On The Buses". That's how awful "Score" is.

Someone bashed "Score" for being a soft-core, "So What?" kind of movie. This is both unfair and uninformed. Image Entertainment's presentation of "Score" is a CENSORED print of Metzger's intensely more erotic and explicit work (particularly for 1972). Director Radley Metzger was, at this time, ramping up to his stint as legendary hardcore film maker "Henry Paris" (at which point in his career he would grind out some of the X-rated industry's most prestigious and sophisticated projects like THE OPENING OF MISTY BEETHOVEN and BARBARA BROADCAST).

In the UNCUT version of "Score" Gerald Grant and Cal Culver (nee Casey Donovan of gay porn fame) engage in explicit, X-rated sexual activity, much of which was sadly and unnecessarily excised from the chopped-up print released by Image Entertainment. The ladies' sex scene is also longer and feels more complete with the missing footage. I've read some hearsay online that Metzger actually approved of releasing the censored version of the film instead of putting out the full-blown hardcore version. Disappointing, if true, though it may have been made purely due to marketing and distribution (otherwise the title might have been lost amid countless, worthless smutty DVDs in the back-room browsing areas of video stores. (shrug)

Now more than ever before, "Score" needs to be re-released UNCENSORED; anyone who has seen the film in its entirety (as I have) knows that the sexual payoffs are part of the reason the film exists at all. Heck, it is still relatively tame by today's standards, so there was little reason to snip away the various erections and oral sex scenes (penetration, while it may well have happened between the men, is never truly explicit due to shadows, etc.).

"Score" can only be fairly judged seeing the film in its most complete form; otherwise it understandably plays as half-baked, which is unfair to the viewer, to Radley Metzger and his team of film makers, and to the stalwart cast. I say, if it was good enough to show in theaters in 1972, it's good enough to show on DVD thirty-one years later!

Sure, the bi-sexual theme still doesn't resonate well with a lot of folks and maybe that's part of the enduring charm of "Score". Non-traditional sex identities remain today a troubling and disconcerting taboo (particularly for men). It's sad that given as much progress as we've made culturally and scientifically, there are religion-bound folks out there still not willing to admit that *honest* human sexuality is rarely polarized (as hetero- or homo-) without *some* shades-of-gray... Because of this eternal angst, the uncensored version of "Score" is great for group showings. You'll watch with glee as your friends squirm as the last act goes into explicit high- gear.

By the same token, of the ultimate strengths of "Score" is that it boldly and unabashedly plunges into territory that has been for decades-on-end commercial suicide. "Score" straddles the world of porn on the one side with more serious entertainment on the other. Even now, this unfamiliar mix of genres seems refreshing; the past three decades have given us plenty of porn and plenty of mainstream entertainment, but very little that really dares to push the envelope the way "Score" did, combining the two extremes. Other groundbreaking movies of the 1970s like "The Story of O" and "Emmanuelle" also accomplished this (and disasters like "Wild Orchid" promised to, but didn't).

Today audiences are lamenting that more films like this don't exist -- films with admirable production values which nevertheless aren't afraid to take the provocation initially hinted at to an explicit level. Thanks to an unfortunate distribution choice by Image Entertainment (a company that made its initial living releasing XXX hardcore porno such as "The Girl From S.E.X. to video), audiences only get a "softcore" version and continue to miss out on the relatively mild (by today's standards) but ultimately necessary climaxes in "Score".

Even today, almost fifty years after Score was made, it pushes taboos. It's one of the first films to explore bisexual relationships, which is something movies still shy away from. And it was one of the porn chic movies of the 1970s Golden Age, a time when adult movies could both be adult and movies.

It was directed by Radley Metzger, someone who one can honestly say was an auteur of adult filmmaking. He told Cinedelphia, "When I was coming of age, eroticism was always in films, but eroticism was punished. The promiscuous girl never got the leading man, the woman who sold her charms, always had a bad fate. The "good girl" always achieved ends the bad girl never did. As a reaction to that, I tried to do the opposite. You could have a free attitude and behave in a free way and not be punished. A parallel to that is that it could also be light. It didn't have to be tragedy. You could look at sex in a fun way. That was a personal thing, to work against the clichés in cinema when I was growing up."

It's based on an off-Broadway stage play that ran in 1970 and even had Sylvester Stallone in a small part. The movie version was written by Jerry Douglas, who also wrote the original play, who would go on to create the magazine Manshots and eventually direct several of his own adult films.

In the mythical European city of Leisure - the play was set in a New York City apartment building - married couple Jack (Gerald Grant) and Elvira (Claire Wilbur, who originated the role and would go on to win an Oscar for producing Robin Lehman's The End of the Game) have a bet about who can pick up whom. She thinks she can win over Betsy (Lynn Lowry, who is still in so many horror movies and making them better just by being herself), a young bride who has just married Eddie (Casey Donovan, who was a popular gay adult star and the long-time lover of Tom Tryon).

Betsy might be a Catholic schoolgirl who doesn't know the world yet but she's fascinated by Elvira, who even seduces a telephone repairman (Carl Parker) right in front of her. That night, she catches her husband masturbating and confesses that she's not happy.

A costume party allows them all to change it up, as Eddie is dressed as a cowboy and Betsy a nun. They pair up with their same sex - just to talk, hmm? - and confess that they're unsatisfied. The pot helps. So does the poppers. Before midnight, the young couple is seduced. The shocking part - for some - may be that in the hardcore cut that the man-on-man sex is given just as much time as the female-on-female. By the end, Betsy and Eddie wonder which one of them is the strange one.

By the way, Lowry's scenes have a body double in them, as she didn't participate in the unsimulated coupling.

While yes, this is a dirty movie, one of the things you find in all of Metzger's films of this era are class. The budget is good, the setting - Croatia - is beautiful and there's more story than sin.

Predatory seductress Elvira (an excellent performance by the stunning Claire Wilbur) and her equally calculating photographer husband Jack (smoothly played by the handsome Gerald Grant) are an extremely liberated and uninhibited swinging couple who make a bet with themselves that they can seduce sweet and naive newlywed Betsy (a fine and appealing portrayal by the adorable Lynn Lowry) and her boyish ecologist spouse Eddie (a likable turn by strapping blonde hunk Calvin Culver) during a week-end get together at their luxury Riviera villa. Director Radley Metzger and writer Jerry Douglas expertly craft a sharp, witty, and utterly intoxicating tale that frankly addresses such bold adult topics as role playing, bisexuality, and open relationships with an admirable elegance and intelligence which lifts this film well above the level of your garden variety smutty skin flick. Moreover, Metzger astutely nails the blithely carefree try anything sexual experimentalism of the 70's and masterfully creates a deliriously erotic atmosphere that's both enticing and arousing in equal measure. The sensual set pieces are smoking hot stuff; the lengthy and strenuous lesbian session between Betsy and Elvira in particular delivers one hell of a scorching punch. Wilbur, Grant, and Lowry all do sterling work in their roles while Carl Parker ably acquits himself in a supporting part as cocky macho telephone repairman Mike. Frano Vodopivec's sumptuous cinematography makes the most out of the gorgeous seaside Croatian locations. Robert Cornford's jaunty and jazzy score hits the tuneful spot. Highly recommended.