“No doubt about it, sweetheart, you’re a whore, and I know it.”

Intense sexual migraine headache about a deeply disturbed security guard (Jason Carns) who tricks himself out as a police officer to pick up hookers and blackmail them into fucking him. We see him in action at the film’s opening, lying in wait in the murky dark of Hollywood Boulevard, muttering incessantly to himself as he eyeballs a hooker peeling off a string of quick pick-ups. He quickly reaches his seething point and grabs the girl (Betty Childs), and takes her up into the Hollywood Hills where he lays out his rap – either suck his dick or do the time. The prostitute, who’s been turned out by her deadbeat boyfriend, sees she’s in a trap and compiles to Carns’ wishes, which escalate in insanity from head to aggressive fucking and forced anal with a gun pointed at her head. Unable to reach climax, he takes out his frustration by forcing her to stand in the pouring rain and diddle herself in a mud puddle. After several long, agonizing minutes of this, our boy in blue tosses her threads into the mud and takes off for his depressing rathole apartment to listen to the police scanner and dream of meting out some real justice.

His chance comes (or so he thinks) when he spies a woman shooting her abusive husband in their home. Enraged by the concept that she might be escaping justice, he puts on his cop duds and strongarms his way into her house, where he quickly tosses aside the ruse and unleashes a torrent of bondage and angry forced sex until the inevitable Heavy Downer conclusion.

Directed in a testosterone headrush by sexploitation vet R. Lee Frost (Love Camp 7, The Thing with Two Heads), A Climax of Blue Power is probably the hardest and most aggressive hardcore movie to come out of the West Coast scene in the ‘70s. At the time, the real vicious smut came from New York, and the San Francisco and Los Angeles product had a lighter, more hallucinogenic slaphappiness. But Climax more than rivals the Avon Films for sheer human ugliness combined with unhealthy sex; the opening assault on the hooker should make the skin crawl on even the most jaded vintage porn hound. It’s possible that the overall sado vibe is more intense here because the film was originally shot as a softcore title; the gynecological shots are all obvious inserts using actors who more or less resemble the film’s billed actors. But even the inserts have a dingy, hands-all-over feel (the final grapple between Carns’ and Carnon’s stand-ins is particularly lengthy and sweaty), and the overall vibe is 100 % Hate Fuck, distilled to its purest and most bilious.

Alpha Blue’s fullscreen DVD presentation looks good, with no major wear; extras include a battery of stills shows scenes involving Uschi Digard (who makes a brief appearance at the massage parlor) and another actress that was probably excised once the film made the jump from soft to hard, and AB’s own trailer for their ‘70s XXX roughie collection. In short, another perfectly sick package. Enjoy.