User Reviews

This is Casanova Part 2 which has ben padded out to give us another film with the legendary John Holmes. This film supposes that Casanova has had a son who grows up to be Don Juan. Like father like son, Don Juan becomes another great lover and there are some good sex scenes to bear this out but the whole production of this inserted porn looks too clinical - as if it was made as a porn advert for a Glamorous Homes magazine. For me, the only good sex scene was the one with the injured swordsgirl (Cathy Linger) who wants to know what great sex is like before she expires. Who better to show her than our very own Mr John Holmes? Then he turns his attention to the Gypsy girl (Bridgette Felina). This scene was part of the original film. The rest of the film is a mess.

We get a series of so-called talking head experts (no, not that sort of head despite this being a porn film) espousing stuff that I have now forgotten about, but who wants that intellectual stuff in a porn film anyway? There is some old footage and lots of free love and a mushroom cloud! Yes, really. What's that about? In this case, more is less.

Though promised in the 1977 CASANOVA end credits, like the next Bond film is announced, CASANOVA II arrived five years later with a thud. Its mix of old and new footage is a mess, but makes it more interesting to watch for a cinema structuralist like me.

First edition credited to star Mr. John C. Holmes direction (using Carlos Tobalina's crew - I assume the great man CT was directly supervising) boasted relatively lavish production values for porn, then in its experimental phase of aspiring to box office legitimacy in the wake of Gerard Damiano's breakthrough hits. Part II credited to Tobalina (under his fake name Troy Benny; he takes full cinematography credit under his real moniker) begins with recycling of the locations, costumes and extras from the original, then spins off on a rather ludicrous set of story lines, somewhere between reality and those difficult-to- follow scripts of TV's "General Hospital".

Casanova supposedly fathered a son, adopted by a Count, who grew up to be Don Juan.The mother is a disguised as man dueler who Casanova stabbed but is nursed back to health and he humps her, resulting in Bjorn Beck, an unlikely non-actor with a big dick who doesn't remotely fit the role of a 21-year- old legendary sex symbol.

Beck's sexual adventures are pretty dumb: he kills a Count De Leon who has tapped him to surrogate-father his child (a recurring Tobalina movie theme concerns the Count's perennial limp dick). Tobalina frequently uses his horrible "distorting lens" effect which creates multiple haloed images during a sex scene in kaleidoscopic fashion, ruining lots of both Part I and Part II footage.

At the 55-minute mark (we're 60% done), Holmes returns to finish the cliff-hanger (but unsuspenseful storyline that finished Part I), cast in dual role as Casanaova's great grandson John. The fact that C was alive in 1751 makes this ridiculous, since at least five generations would have to pass between them.

At any rate, we have Holmes back with his sexy shrink ("Susan Silver", an actress who toiled in anonymity), reliving the too-close-to-Wadd's-real-life for comfort of having humped his partner, and thus afraid of incipient homosexuality. In Part I we actually saw said actor (Peter Johns) taking it in the posterior but are spared such formalities in Part II.

There's plenty of recap and highlights footage re-shown from Part I, including a Holmes threesome with two attractive daughters of his partner, while the incest theme of the first film is jettisoned. I have to mention another I told you so, as shrink Susan Silver has a beautiful assistant Miss Cohen who has nothing to do but is played by the great Kay Parker, legendary star who Kirdy Stevens made immortal in his TABOO series, while Tobalina was wasting both her talents and directing earlier incest movies that he botched completely. And the Oscar goes to...Kirdy, not Carlos.

Final reels of Part II contain ridiculous padding, most of it in Tobalina's favored soap box vein. To recycle endless cutting room floor and vault sex footage, of humping, big dicks more impressive than limp Wadd's member, and endless money shots, he has a TV panel of Bill Margold (reading dumb material), a future superstar director - and actress from both soft & hard X features - Ann Perry, plus cute but untalented Maria Pia, who I had just seen uncredited as that bug-eyed TV viewer at home in CT's UNDULATIONS.

The panel is broadcasting sex on the Boob Tube because, in a science fiction or at least speculative world of if mode, Tobalina has postulated that sexual freedom (spurred by the dumb Casanova aphrodisiac cologne that is the spine of both of these films' plots) has given rise to a utopia on Earth. Amusingly inane ending has a final image of a mushroom cloud, representing though ill-chosen by our not so brainy (and poor speller) auteur the abandonment of armies and war machines by both the Soviet Union and the U.S.A.

Morons supporting the current gonzo porn wave that has ruined Erotic entertainment in recent decades often sound the Battle Cry once voiced by top names like Jim Holliday and even Margold himself (self-appointed Adult industry historian and standard bearer that he is ) that porn's be-all and end-all is hot sex scenes, period.

Watching screw-loose entertainment even at a low level like CASANOVA II puts the lie to this attitude -the attempts at telling a story, albeit one with a morbid emphasis on sex, sex and more sex, is at the heart of pornography, period. Wall-to-wall sex reduces one's product to a mere instantly generic commodity, as purveyors of this material are learning to their chagrin in this all-streaming anywhere all-the-time on-any-device world we live in.