“Lemme turn you over – I wanna check your oil.”

An ambitious hodgepodge of artistic-leaning erotica and plain old smut, Gerard Damiano’s People is a collection of vignettes that stands out from the rest of the ‘70s fuck-and-suck brigade by virtue of its star-studded cast, solid production values, and a fairly successful attempt to add some depth of character and dialogue to the hardcore action. There’s even a theme of sorts lurking around the edges – the role that sexuality plays in different people’s lives. For real-life couple Jamie Gillis and Serena, who star in the first episode, it’s a release from their mundane lives (Serena is a stressed-out homeowner, and Gillis is the horny housepainter who pops her cork under a torrent of verbal abuse and forced cocksucking); for R. Bolla and his (uncredited) on-screen paramour, it’s a way to preserve the happy memories of a failed relationship. Samantha Fox uses it to maintain her adulthood and independence as she struggles to please her nostalgic father (Damiano himself, who’s a decent actor), and Eric Edwards discovers (the hard way) from Kasey Rogers that sex and death are often very closely intertwined.

So what you’ve got is a lot of heady emotional material, and it’s all very well handled by uncredited director Anthony Spinelli (Damiano is listed as writer, producer, editor and director in the end title credits, but more than one source lists Spinelli as director, which makes sense, given his penchant for mainstream-style storytelling with his adult films). And if you’re a serious student of ‘70s hardcore, you’ll definitely appreciate the level of filmmaking that’s brought to People, especially in the vampire fantasy with Rogers, Edwards, Herschel Savage, and Marlene Willoughby, which sets some spectacular oral action to Ravel’s “Bolero” (and hey, credit to Spinelli for tapping this piece’s erotic qualities several years before Blake Edwards did in 10). But not everything works: the final vignette, with Bobby Astyr doing his best Moe Szyslak impression as a kvetching average Joe who gets hustled by an innocent-seeming hooker, is funny, but clashes with the serious tone of the rest of the film, and the R. Bolla scene, while well acted, sacrifices heat in favor of artiness by filming the actual sex in painstakingly slow motion. Lovely to look at, but ultimately, too glossy and artificial. And that’s pretty much the biggest complaint I can lodge at People: the attempt to bring a sense of quality and class (okay, I’m gonna say it: Art) to a porn film yields uneven results. There are hot fuck scenes and flat fuck scenes, and impressive visuals and performances, and completely off-kilter ones. What’s interesting is that Video-X-Pix advises in its chapter menu that viewers watch the film from start to finish without skipping ahead to certain chapters, but in the case of People, that might be the best way to enjoy it.

As with all Video-X-Pix DVDs, People is rounded out by a pair of vintage trailers from their massive and drool-worthy back catalog: included here are Slit Skirts, with the forever yummy Joanna Storm (and dig the background music that plays over the spot – it’s a dead ringer for an extended Minutemen jam), and Slippery When Wet, a wall-to-wall fuckfest with CJ Laing and mmm-delicious Annie Sprinkle.