Star Virgin

"After the resounding success of his outrageous parody FLESH GORDON, Howard Ziehm teamed up with producer Peter Locke (THE HILLS HAVE EYES) for six more explicit films – which, in contrast to the hastily shot films from Ziehm’s early days, had rather lavish budgets. STAR VIRGIN, shot on 16mm for $70,000 within a week at the end of the 1970s, was the penultimate porn film of Ziehm’s career. It was made at a time when the disreputable sex film industry was still releasing several urious productions; soon they were to be replaced with far cheaper videos, and the cinema was losing its relevance as a venue for the genre. Of Ziehm‘s episodic films, this one is certainly his most eccentric and striking.

– after all, the journey takes us, among other places, to a black-and-white silent film segment telling its own hair-raising version of DRACULA. Even songwriter J.C. Phillips (‘GREEN-EYED LADY’) and, under make-up and pseudonym, character actor Charles Dierkop (BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID) are involved – and Jason Mayall, son of Blues legend John Mayall, built the sets!

Ziehm’s irreverent, subversive wit is rather obvious in STAR VIRGIN as he ploughs through familiar iconographies – whether STAR WARS, GREASE, or THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, the biblical story of paradise or the near sacred football ceremony in America. The fact that the manager in paradise is actually a vice cop, or that a helper with a Nixon mask sneaks around in the satanically evil castle, mimicking his famous “Victory” pose during sex (‘Tricky Dick’!), are just two examples of Ziehm’s audacious appearances as a porn satirist here. More subtle are the ways in which he exploits and at the same time subverts common sex film images, for example, notice who gets the biggest and – as a real ‘big-bang’ – most visible thrust of pleasure.”

Christian Genzel