The Lickerish Quartet Review

• 16th Feb 2013

More 70s soft porn from Arrow Video. The latest releases by Arrow are three films by Radley Metzger, an American filmmaker and purveyor of soft porn in Europe. Following the cult success of Camille 2000 (1969) (also released by Arrow) came his next feature made in Italy, The Lickerish Quartet. This film has pretensions at arthouse porn with its story about erotica. The film opens in an Italian castle where a decadent aristocratic couple and their son are watching a stag film with an alluring young blonde seducing her male suitors with some light bondage going on. Later the family decides to go to the local fair. There they see a girl riding a motorbike around a Wall of Death. At the same time all three suspect that amazingly this is the girl from the film they were watching earlier. They invite the girl back and she accepts. Throughout the time of her stay the two men and woman project their fantasies onto the girl. Always omnipresent is the nagging question: is this the girl from the stag film?

By the late 1960s censorship in western culture was relaxing and by the latter days of the decade it was becoming looser and looser. In France Jean Rollin was making his erotic vampire films, Denmark and Sweden as well as Germany were releasing increasingly erotic films with the blurring lines between soft porn, titillation and sauce with hardcore pornography. The Lickerish Quartet falls within the realms of erotic fantasy. When it was released it was considered quite daring and failed to get a release by BBFC. But this is a couple of years before Deep Throat or Behind the Green Door, two American films which pushed the boundaries to further in hardcore porn. Soft porn merely titillates, but there are a couple of moments where this is not about titillation but exploring erotica and intimacy. Overall, as with many films of this ilk the acting is quite dreadful and the script more than amusing. However, in spite of the poor acting and dubbing there are one or two inspired moments. The best is the scene in which the husband (Frank Wolff) is in his library with the girl (Silvana Venturelli). She is upon the library ladder and after some fooling around she undresses they eventually have sex on the floor. The floor is made up of words and dictionary definitions including the obligatory naughty words such as ‘fornicate’. Although the porn as it is is soft, it never the less does have its erotic moments in an otherwise silly film.

Shot in Abruzzo in Italy like many of Metzger’s films it is stunning to look at and the presentation looks quite nice on Blu-ray with only some of the lines and cracks visible – but these merely adds to the dated charm of the picture. As with many of the Arrow Video releases there are many extras which almost points to these films being important including a commentary by the director himself as well as a couple of trailers and the edited softer version of some of the sex scenes and a worthy making of documentary. As noble as Arrow are in having these extras including a director’s commentary is it really worth the effort to follow the director’s ‘craft’.

Chris Hick