Feeling like an unusually successful collision between an adult movie and a micro-budget arthouse flick, THE LAST THRILL is too limited in scope to qualify as more than a modest success, but it's interesting and contains the blueprint for something better.
More of a sketch than a full feature, the 50-minute film opens with some oblique footage captured driving through a cemetery, before switching to an anonymous high-rise office building, where a man narrates into a tape recorder his gradual introduction to homosexuality. Beginning with imagining what it must be like giving head while his girlfriend is blowing him (not shown), the guy is driven by these thoughts to a porn theater, where a tall stranger drops to his knees and grants the him his first male-male encounter. Still curious what it's like to be the one sucking, the protagonist fulfills his fantasy after-hours at an art gallery, where the guy whose paintings are showing also - rather improbably - owns the place and can shut it down for some privacy. An encounter with a pair of dudes follows, after which comes a bizarre interlude where a naked black man dances to Elton John's "The King Must Die" for several minutes (his moves suggest he's professionally trained). Things run off the rails into full-on existentialism afterward, with the protagonist ushered into a secret room where, having been unable to climax for the last few months, he's joined by all his former lovers to give him the titular LAST THRILL.
Shot almost entirely in a single white room, THE LAST THRILL seems to actively turn poverty into an asset. Usually, it's pathetic when you can recognize the same set re-dressed multiple times in a single film, but here the environs are so sparse that the nakedness seems to become the point: the "gallery" toward the beginning is merely a couch with a single painting hanging on the wall, while the three-way takes place in the same room with zero context as to what environment it's supposed to represent. The climax occurs here as well (the room is consistently recognizable by its badly-painted corner), with the cadre of former lovers worshipping the protagonist on a strange white altar. About the only scenes that don't take place in this room appear to be the narration interludes (which still well could - it's shadowy) and the theater scene, which is nevertheless just six folding chairs set up in front of a cheap window. Most early sex films are threadbare, but LAST THRILL turns it into an aesthetic, using the spartan nature of its near-single location as part of its attempt to play with memory.
Speaking of which, the film's overall project, even if under-sketched, is still laudably ambitious. While it's never quite clear where the movie ends up, its outline nevertheless functions as a forebear to a surprising number of hardcore hits, anticipating both Gerard Damiano's DEVIL IN MISS JONES with its NO EXIT-style existential angst as well as Anthony Spinelli's SEX WORLD in its (in this case very threadbare) depiction of a FANTASY ISLAND-style environment where one's desires (or perhaps needs) are fulfilled via a sexual scenario organized by a group of mysterious overseers. The existential dread of the graveyard footage even recalls the haunting ending to Jason Sato/Norman Yonemoto's BROTHERS which would follow a few years hence. Unfortunately, the mononymic Jai's work here isn't quite up to that film's standard, both throwing in goofy art school touches like needless French dialogue as well as failing its premise by inadequately fleshing it out (the film trails off into a vague non-ending rather than feeling like it's really concluded). Nevertheless, it's still a solid effort for the fledgling hardcore genre, which was still finding its legs ca. 1971. Jai's other known XXX outing, UP 'N' COMING, deploys a lighter of a touch in its depiction of an art world love triangle, but evinces a similar skill at delivering an entertaining and unusually fleet sex opus. My hope is this mysterious auteur moved on to bigger and better things under his real name, as based on the evidence here, he was certainly not without talent.
More of a sketch than a full feature, the 50-minute film opens with some oblique footage captured driving through a cemetery, before switching to an anonymous high-rise office building, where a man narrates into a tape recorder his gradual introduction to homosexuality. Beginning with imagining what it must be like giving head while his girlfriend is blowing him (not shown), the guy is driven by these thoughts to a porn theater, where a tall stranger drops to his knees and grants the him his first male-male encounter. Still curious what it's like to be the one sucking, the protagonist fulfills his fantasy after-hours at an art gallery, where the guy whose paintings are showing also - rather improbably - owns the place and can shut it down for some privacy. An encounter with a pair of dudes follows, after which comes a bizarre interlude where a naked black man dances to Elton John's "The King Must Die" for several minutes (his moves suggest he's professionally trained). Things run off the rails into full-on existentialism afterward, with the protagonist ushered into a secret room where, having been unable to climax for the last few months, he's joined by all his former lovers to give him the titular LAST THRILL.
Shot almost entirely in a single white room, THE LAST THRILL seems to actively turn poverty into an asset. Usually, it's pathetic when you can recognize the same set re-dressed multiple times in a single film, but here the environs are so sparse that the nakedness seems to become the point: the "gallery" toward the beginning is merely a couch with a single painting hanging on the wall, while the three-way takes place in the same room with zero context as to what environment it's supposed to represent. The climax occurs here as well (the room is consistently recognizable by its badly-painted corner), with the cadre of former lovers worshipping the protagonist on a strange white altar. About the only scenes that don't take place in this room appear to be the narration interludes (which still well could - it's shadowy) and the theater scene, which is nevertheless just six folding chairs set up in front of a cheap window. Most early sex films are threadbare, but LAST THRILL turns it into an aesthetic, using the spartan nature of its near-single location as part of its attempt to play with memory.
Speaking of which, the film's overall project, even if under-sketched, is still laudably ambitious. While it's never quite clear where the movie ends up, its outline nevertheless functions as a forebear to a surprising number of hardcore hits, anticipating both Gerard Damiano's DEVIL IN MISS JONES with its NO EXIT-style existential angst as well as Anthony Spinelli's SEX WORLD in its (in this case very threadbare) depiction of a FANTASY ISLAND-style environment where one's desires (or perhaps needs) are fulfilled via a sexual scenario organized by a group of mysterious overseers. The existential dread of the graveyard footage even recalls the haunting ending to Jason Sato/Norman Yonemoto's BROTHERS which would follow a few years hence. Unfortunately, the mononymic Jai's work here isn't quite up to that film's standard, both throwing in goofy art school touches like needless French dialogue as well as failing its premise by inadequately fleshing it out (the film trails off into a vague non-ending rather than feeling like it's really concluded). Nevertheless, it's still a solid effort for the fledgling hardcore genre, which was still finding its legs ca. 1971. Jai's other known XXX outing, UP 'N' COMING, deploys a lighter of a touch in its depiction of an art world love triangle, but evinces a similar skill at delivering an entertaining and unusually fleet sex opus. My hope is this mysterious auteur moved on to bigger and better things under his real name, as based on the evidence here, he was certainly not without talent.