Alex De Renzy's position in the porn pantheon is secure, both as a pioneer and just for delivering the goods. LITTLE SISTERS is a prime example of the inventiveness of the man, combining irreverence and an anything goes approach with some real feeling for the film medium.
Intentionally sloppy, the movie for all its XXX explicitness in content actually resembles an underground film -closer to Robert Downey Sr. than to porn. Why it has been all but forgotten is likely due to availability -only showing up currently in a truncated version on an Alpha Blue Archives two-fer, rather than getting the deluxe reissue treatment so many mediocre films receive from ABA's relatively pretentious video competitors.
With the cast bursting into song at will and generally looking like hippies, druggies or even bikers that De Renzy recruited for walking-around money, film is even more loosey-goosey than its later East Coast counterparts, as in the work of Shaun Costello. Like Fellini, at times De Renzy doesn't seem to be directing at all, but rather throwing a party or orgy where his players are left to their own devices.
Excuse for a story is built around a protective mom and her two young daughters living on a farm. Nearly the entire film is shot out of doors, which gives it a fresh look. She goes to visit the local miller, and a gang of long-haired creeps kidnap her girls in her absence, for gang-raping purposes, including plenty of mixed-combo action. Beautiful Clair Dia is the redheaded youngster, tagged as only 12 years old (no kiddie porn fears here) and her older sister is a beautiful brunette whose nipples briefly take center stage.
The gang leaves a nasty note for mom to find, signed "The Dykes" in order to divert her attention and assign the crime to a rival gang of a dozen lesbians, who loll around a pool making love all day. Mom has the predicted altercation with the lezzies, but oddly enough they are moved by her maternal story and head out en masse to rescue the young damsels in distress, while mom searches alone.
The lesbians make short work of the bad guys, who are led by familiar GREEN DOOR graduate Tyler Reynolds, beating them all to a pulp. However, they follow suit and subject the two girls to violent lesbian rape! However tasteless the material becomes, De Renzy maintains a light-hearted "all in fun" mood, with several overt comedy sequences. For example, mom heads to a local friar (always humorous Dale Meador) to seek help, only to find he's presiding over a satanic-styled homosexual cult with a nude guy on an altar being readied for presumed sacrifice.
Mom escapes the clergy's clutches and a fantasy figure Derek the Dwarf appears magically. Since maintenance of the morals of the Woods is under his care, he takes charge to save the day. With comically speeded up footage Derek beats up all the lesbians, saving the girls who are reunited with mom. Derek reads the riot act about the sanctity of the Woods to everybody and the gang of rapists hand out flowers to one and all, singing "America the Beautiful" at fadeout. It's heartwarming family (Manson family?) entertainment, De Renzy style.
Though not really providing the sex-as-aid-to-masturbation contents the audience would expect, LITTLE SISTERS is a time capsule of a period when hardcore porn was still in a damn-the-torpedoes mode. Moreso than the year's breakthrough hit DEEP THROAT, it provides a continuity to what was going on in the rest of post-EASY RIDER cinema, not so much the mainstream Hollywood attempts to ape Peter Fonda & Dennis Hopper's fluke success but rather the introduction of new and unrestrained voices which have morphed in the intervening four decades into what is commonly lumped as the independent film movement. But I'd like to see a new indie movie as rambunctious as this one!
