Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace's one attempt to get out of the porno ghetto and make a mainstream motion picture proves only that the British didn't have a monopoly on bad sex comedies during the 1970s. The premise is fair enough - a convention of all the non-mainstream political factions in the US (American Nazis, gay rights, vegetarians, black power etc.) decide that the only person who they can all agree on as their presidential candidate is, you guessed it, Linda Lovelace. She accepts the challenge (after proving herself to be mentally challenged enough to think that a preacher speaking over a loud-hailer is a call from destiny or God) and the party sets off on a cross-country campaign tour on two cheap buses with Linda Lovelace for President painted on the side.
Most of the humour of the film concentrates on exploiting racial and sexual stereotypes: Chinese laundrymen, black hustlers, screaming queens and candy-handing-out perverts. There's an intriguing stream of cameos which suggest that America was still haunted by the images and characters Hollywood sold it in the 1930s (Tarzan, Dracula, W C Fields) but the idea isn't developed. Long episodes at a Southern racist rally (with Linda screwing below the stage), a farm full of Oakie inbreeds and a money grubbing church have promise, although only the last of these really fulfils anything, with its singing preacher prancing on a stage with dancing girls, coke adverts, money raising and rock gospel music (the amplified version of Let My People Go is pretty funky). There's a long and lame section in which an assassin, not very wittily named The Assassinator, stalks about a hotel corridor in search of his target, Linda (America still haunted by the Kennedy assassination), who failing here crops up a couple more times with some Wile E Coyote-type attempts to do away with her. It's staggeringly mismanaged comedy, with only the skills of the actor playing the Assassinator to save it from being complete dross.
Linda Lovelace for President does at least capture some of the outré craziness of American diversity, and is a time-capsule (and perhaps the last nail in the coffin) of a time when people actually believed that sex could free and unite everyone. But it's all filmed and scripted with such heavy-handed incompetence that it never becomes the Hellzapoppin' of the Deep Throat (Watergate and porn) age it aspires to be. Linda, bless her, was no actress, although she looks a lot more attractive here than she does in her pornos.
Worth seeing once. I watched it on election day 2008 and the joke whereby the Poles are desperate to get a Pole in the Whitehouse was pretty topical and a prediction of the identity politics to come and which perhaps reached its climax in the presidential candidacy of Obama.
Most of the humour of the film concentrates on exploiting racial and sexual stereotypes: Chinese laundrymen, black hustlers, screaming queens and candy-handing-out perverts. There's an intriguing stream of cameos which suggest that America was still haunted by the images and characters Hollywood sold it in the 1930s (Tarzan, Dracula, W C Fields) but the idea isn't developed. Long episodes at a Southern racist rally (with Linda screwing below the stage), a farm full of Oakie inbreeds and a money grubbing church have promise, although only the last of these really fulfils anything, with its singing preacher prancing on a stage with dancing girls, coke adverts, money raising and rock gospel music (the amplified version of Let My People Go is pretty funky). There's a long and lame section in which an assassin, not very wittily named The Assassinator, stalks about a hotel corridor in search of his target, Linda (America still haunted by the Kennedy assassination), who failing here crops up a couple more times with some Wile E Coyote-type attempts to do away with her. It's staggeringly mismanaged comedy, with only the skills of the actor playing the Assassinator to save it from being complete dross.
Linda Lovelace for President does at least capture some of the outré craziness of American diversity, and is a time-capsule (and perhaps the last nail in the coffin) of a time when people actually believed that sex could free and unite everyone. But it's all filmed and scripted with such heavy-handed incompetence that it never becomes the Hellzapoppin' of the Deep Throat (Watergate and porn) age it aspires to be. Linda, bless her, was no actress, although she looks a lot more attractive here than she does in her pornos.
Worth seeing once. I watched it on election day 2008 and the joke whereby the Poles are desperate to get a Pole in the Whitehouse was pretty topical and a prediction of the identity politics to come and which perhaps reached its climax in the presidential candidacy of Obama.