Retro Movie Recommendations

After Hours (1985)

After Raging Bull Martin Scorsese smacked his fans with one-two combo of brilliant pitch black comedies. He followed the masterful The King of Comedy with this underrated gem about a 9 to 5 office slave (Griffin Dunne) who can’t escape SoHo after a late night with Rosanna Arquette goes very very wrong.

The Naked Kiss (1964)

In Samuel Fuller’s kitschy yet hard-hitting pulp classic Constance Towers plays a prostitute who peddles Angel Foam, a libation that “goes down like velvet and comes up like dynamite." She turns her life around by teaching disabled children and marrying a local philanthropist/millionaire only to discover that he’s harboring one hell of a sicko secret. Shot in beautiful black and white by Stanley Cortez (the brilliant DP behind The Magnificent Ambersons and The Night of the Hunter), The Naked Kiss predated David Lynch’s creepy exposes of small town America by twenty years.

Score (1973)

By the early 1970s American director Radley Metzger had already established himself as a major horndog with the skin flicks Camille 2000 and The Lickerish Quartet. He outdid himself with the sensational sexploitation film Score, testing his audience’s tolerance by tossing some totally hot bisexual action into the mix. In a fictional European resort town called Leisure a swinging married couple lure prospective lovers to their home and persuade them to try their hands (and other body parts) at switch-hitting. I’ve only seen the soft-core version available on DVD from First Run Features, but if you search hard enough you might find the 91 minute original version, which contains some hard-core action.