Sometimes a movie’s title really says everything, and hardly any formal review is necessary. Such is the case with Vintage Lesbian Erotica.
A Cult Epics home video title that collects two-plus hours of peep show reels and other naughty black-and-white sapphic short films spanning almost 40 years, from the 1920s into the 1960s, this slapdash set is a weird peek behind the curtain and under the bedsheets mostly of our grandmothers’ generation, and of arguably little value, even as some sociocultural relic.
Unfolding in bedrooms, opium dens, parks and other outdoor locations, the almost two dozen shorts here are fairly wide-ranging in set-up and accoutrement, let’s say, and yet also curiously of a piece. A small handful are surreal (one incorporates body painting), but the majority of are of the wiggly-silly variety, and seem to play like an older variation on Girls Gone Wild, with women groping each other for giggles or play-acting and doing things that they believe men want to see. But hey, a banana does get worked into the mix, for those wondering. Still, none of this is particularly interesting or titillating, apart from the thoughts it provokes in regards to the cameramen and production teams behind this material.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Vintage Lesbian Erotica comes to DVD on a region-free disc, and is presented in a matte-framed 1.33:1 full frame aspect ratio. The quality of the source material varies widely, as one might surmise, but it certainly doesn’t look as though there has been any effort made to clean it up. Much of it is flat-out terrible, sub-VHS grade. The audio track also fluctuates a good bit, since some of the shorts are accompanied by madcap orchestral selections, and others barely scored at all. A main menu screen gives way to a separate selection screen which purports to divvy up the selections by decade, but this is needlessly muddled (sections within other sections), and in French to boot, which makes little sense, given the international, ahem, spread of the material. Finally, there are no other supplemental bonus features. So is it really true that Vintage Lesbian Erotica elicits chiefly a yawn? Yes, yes it is. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, however, do your thing and click here. D (Movie) F (Disc)