Night Hunger, Uncensored (1983)

Description: A traveler stopping in at a roadside tavern overhears the bartender relating the tale of the local Blair family, whose women have been cursed with an insatiable desire for sex. He decides to do a little investigating on his own.
Scene Breakdowns
Scene 1. Nellie Gold
Scene 2. Laurien Dominique
Scene 3. Cheri Champagne
Scene 4. Honey Wilder, Eric Edwards
Scene 5. Laurien Dominique, Velvet Summers
Scene 6. Cheri Champagne, Laurien Dominique, Nellie Gold, Velvet Summers, Eric Edwards
Scene 7. Sharon Mitchell, Dan Stephens
Scene 8. Sharon Mitchell, Alan Adrian
Scene 9. Sharon Mitchell, Joe Santini
Scene 10. Sharon Kane, Michael Bruce
Scene 11. Sharon Kane, George Payne
Scene 12. Sharon Kane, Joey Silvera
Scene 13. Sharon Kane
Review:
Quite ambitious but not entirely successful -that estimation sums up much of Damiano's later works like this one and BEYOND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS. As has been said of other innovators like Fellini and Bergman, even a misfire from such an influential talent as Gerard Damiano is more important than any of the best work of his lesser contemporaries, so NIGHT HUNGER deserves to be seen and re-examined 30 years later.

For me the film was quite uneven, but aiming high at the tail end of the Porno Chic era, just as video production was about to take over. His structure starts with a Bunuelian cover story, amazingly folksy and targeted to draw in a beer-guzzling, "let's go see a dirty movie" audience of guys. Chubby, amiable rural barkeep hands customer Jerry Butler a series of tall tales about the local Blair Mansion, not haunted but notorious for the sex-crazed family that lived there through three generations.

Embedded monochrome flashbacks within flashbacks illustrate his stories, beginning with the partriarch Eric Edwards, working in tandem with wife Honey Wilder in the Victorian era; then daughter Sharon Mitchell running a brothel in the house during the Depression, and finally grand-daughter Sharon Kane as a vocalist with a band using the home as a music studio. Present day it's turned into a convent of sort for cloistered nuns, but oddly enough Damiano doesn't show that incarnation at all. Film ends cryptically with Butler in a phone booth making a mysterious phone call, apparently taking these b.s. stories as intel for some project he's working on.

After the ending we are treated to a brief, cute, fictional "behind-the-scenes" vignette where Damiano impersonates himself giving Candida Royalle direction on some future movie - removing the fourth wall. I recall hating this finale when I first saw the film three decades ago.

At times HUNGER conjures up the best of Damiano's work as in MISS JONES and MISS AGGIE a decade before, with purple-prose dialog (often unsettling in its explicitness) and pushing the boundaries performances by the leading actors. Edwards as papa Blair has the affliction of satyriasis which he hands down to his offspring in the form of nymphomania. The seriousness with which Damiano treats this topic is amazing, and the three talented actors give performances that, just like Georgina Spelvin as Miss Jones, deserve to be studied and admired by mainstream thesps.

Mitch is the most definitive, and one of her career highlights, while Kane has a field day, incorporating a split personality (named respectively Slut Pig and MaryLou) enacted via CCTV for the alter ego, insatiable sexuality and even singing a song, as well as incorporating quite amusing stream of consciousness cultural references.

The team of Edwards and Wilder is less adventurous, but quite polished in presenting Victorian personages that are believable rather than quaint.

Verging on high camp at times, based on Damiano's often over-the-top dialog, film's greatest asset qualifies it for my recently concocted Jazz Porn genre, with Eric Bouchet's varied keyboards musical score constantly changing to fit the scene and always invigorating -virtually a classic underscore that deserves separate recognition.

Like Orson Welles, Damiano's later career has been largely ignored, but films like this one plus his better-known video work like ALPHA BLUE, cry out for consideration. It is unfortunate that the most prominent archival video companies of the past two decades have focused on porno hacks instead of key figures like him, giving a highly misleading presentation of the genre's history (currently Stevens and Tobalina are all the rage with their assembly-line junkers).
Legendary director Gerard Damiano pulls out all the stops in this carnal classic. The flick follows the ups and downs of the Blair family -- a clan that has a sexual fever running through their bloodlines. The action begins when wealthy industrialist Eric Edwards builds a gigantic mansion to serve as the setting for his over-the-top antics. It seems that Eric feels compelled to have as many youthful beauties as his money can get him -- he just can't stop himself! Years later, the estate is taken over by his daughter Sharon Mitchell, a lithesome lovely who has become one of the leading actresses of the era. Sharon has that family fever in her though, and finds that she can't confine herself to just one man at a time. The story continues into modern times, as Eric's rock star granddaughter Sharon Kane takes over the house. She turns the mansion into a studio for her band -- although she spends more time working over various studs than working on her music. Eventually, Sharon's sultry alter ego begins to take over her entire life, driving her -- and the film -- towards an explosive, endlessly erotic finale. Beautifully shot on lavish sets and filled with gorgeous, enthusiastic performers, 'Night Hunger' ranks among the best sex films of all time.