The All-American Girl (1972)
Written & directed by Mark Haggard

This softcore wonder would need a few edits to make its way onto Cinemax – in fact, it seems like a hardcore movie that has been cleverly edited into a softcore movie, although if any censors were presiding over the editing process I'm sure a bit more whittling would have been done. I wonder exactly how much "whittling" has transpired as the result of The All American Girl, which I can not imagine has had an audience of more than a couple hundred people since 1972.

I could be way off, of course. I mean, in 1972 I was little more than grown semen myself, and have little reference point for the softcore drive-in audience potential of a foul little movie like this one. As soon as I get my time machine up and running again I will certainly make it a point to journey back to 1972—not to see myself as an infant, but to smoke some joints and catch The All American Girl in the theater!

The movie centers around 16-year-old Debbie (played with all-American depravity by Peggy Chruch, who looks like Jennifer Jason Leigh with really bad teeth) embarking upon a series of sexual rites of passage while her boyfriend is off in Guatemala with the Peace Corps.

Debbie has a strict code: she will never fully undress in front of a man, and she won't go all the way until she's married. Unsurprisingly, these rules are gradually broken until by the end of the film she's discovered the pleasures of master-and-servant role playing as well as enjoyed wonderful oral sex with her neighbor's mother (not to mention the neighbor himself, and his father).

Things start off slowly enough with Debbie masturbating in an extended sequence that I swear must have been scored by a young George Winston; then, on her boyfriend Bobbie's last day in town we see how Debbie adheres to her code by the slightest of technicalities. She won't take off her shirt, but she gladly takes off her pants and the couple enjoy some manual stimulation.

There's a weird shot at the end of this scene where Debbie finishes jerking Bobbie off (nothing is actually shown on screen), then apparently eats his ejaculation out of a handkerchief – possibly just bad editing around a previous hardcore oral sex shot, or possibly Debbie's weird way of consummating this no-sex sex without compromising her code. In any case she ends up with spunk all over her face, which you won't see in an Emanuelle movie, that's for sure.

The film barely remains softcore throughout the successive sex scenes, which get creepier and creepier as Debbie takes on each member of her neighbor's family in an attempt to quench her raging hormones. Some of the set-ups are pretty far-fetched, but surprisingly the film is pretty believable overall, the sex scenes having a realistic quality to them that acknowledges (whether intentionally or not) the awkwardness and unpleasantness of a lot of these encounters.

For example, there is a really nasty french-kissing shot early on while Debbie is making out with her boyfriend that looks as gross and stupid as french-kissing probably does in reality. (I am still learning your planet's customs, so I am hardly the expert here.)

Then she sucks his toes, which in the moment might seem the thing to do, but it looks pretty yucky on film. But it is pretty rare to find an erotic film that actually attempts to present its subject matter realistically – fumbly foreplay, awkward undressing, and all.

The film gets a little too creepy when Debbie and her neighbor's dad get involved and he initiates a master/slave role playing scenario that is very uncomfortable to watch. Although it doesn't get out of hand, per se, it's pretty unnecessary to see Debbie forced to eat a steak dinner like a cat as some means of exciting foreplay. However, this experience does make for some nice humor at the end when Debbie finally goes all the way with Bobbie and is imagining potential three-ways and other kinky avenues to pursue.

The All American Girl isn't laugh-out-loud funny, for the most part, but there are plenty of aspects of it that are memorably amusing, especially the soundtrack, which not only features a thoroughly mediocre theme song that sounds like a cross between Three Dog Night and "Brandy" by the Looking Glass, but also features several instrumentals that accompany masturbation of various types – the best one is a furious guitar-and-bongo workout – and the songs actually speed up to coincide with the masturbation. That kind of attention to detail is refreshing. There are not too many quotably bad lines of dialogue, although I would say these two merit mention:

"All right, you're not a baby. Now be a good boy and let me give you a shower."

And:

"Let's make you presentable. Let's take your dress off."

All told, a fine erotic film (dedicated in the credits to "Joe Sarno, master of the erotic film"), executive produced by Bob Chinn (an inspiration for the Burt Reynolds character in Boogie Nights) with all the "close to the boner" action promised by the Something Weird Video catalog.

When movies like this one are watchable but not "funny," it's harder to justify saying that I watch them for their taste of fringe culture rather than for the full-frontal nudity, but then I've always argued that full frontal nudity is crucial to great cinema – hence Richard Gere's Best Actor Oscar® for Breathless. Well, at least he won at MY Academy Awards™ show that year.

Review by Ovaltine