Pretty Peaches

[StevePulaski]

Pretty Peaches (1978)
Directed by: Alex de Renzy

Desireé Cousteau.

Rating: ★★

While Alex de Renzy's Pretty Peaches may be one of the most daring films from the Golden Age of Porn, it's also one of the most contemptible, as well, dismantling its eroticism by not only making many of its sex scenes, for lack of a better term, tongue-in-cheek, but fixated on rape and incest. The film finds moments where it works, keeping a sunny and relatively positive aura throughout the entire eighty-eight minutes, but when the time comes for the characters to engage in the obligatory act, more often than not, the erotic factor is corrupted by some sort of mean-spiritedness that has to do with the erotic act.

Case and point, the first sex scene of the film involves the rape of Peaches (Desireé Cousteau), a beautiful, young girl who crashes her Jeep in a woodsy area and is knocked unconscious. She is fondled and screwed by one of two men who are simply perusing the area before she wakes up and realizes she can't recall her name or anything about her. All she wants to do is get to her father's (John Leslie) wedding in time, but manages to find herself in compromising situations (and positions) thanks to the two men, who agree to look after her following her accident.

Pretty Peaches, however, features one of the most amusing scenes I've seen in the Golden Age of Porn, involving an exaggerated portrayal of an enema in such a way that is best seen rather than explained. Scenes like this provide the kind of reminder of what the Golden Age was like, and reaffirms porn star Ron Jeremy's long-held opinion that the pornographic films of decades past had a quality to them that at least matches the quality of Hollywood b-movies at the time in tone and aesthetic. Even if Pretty Peaches isn't particularly good, it has a charm and a feel that simply doesn't exist in contemporary pornography (which, as I've seen, has gotten a lot more violent and mean-spirited in some cases).

Nonetheless, we cannot fault Cousteau, who is a real beauty in the film, capturing the kind of arousing innocence aura that her role calls for in a way that makes her thoroughly watchable in the film. Even though her character is vastly limited to the sum of her parts, she still finds ways to be funny thanks to the "innocent girl" image she conveys so often. However, the film loses its gusto due to the fact that it has to attach some sort of unattractive albatross to its selling points, which make for an offbeat and thoroughly unremarkable affair, especially if you're looking for, hmm, a complete experience during the film. Pretty Peaches ends, however, with an amusing, if impersonal, orgy sequence that tops the film off in a way that almost, almost makes us forget about a lot of the preceding events leading up to this orgy scene. But, as you can see from my rating, it didn't quite work in the long run.

Starring: Desireé Cousteau and John Leslie. Directed by: Alex de Renzy.