Booted from her comfy house after her mom (Linda Vale) catches her fucking her boy friend (Jamie Gillis), sweet suburban teen Sandy (Lysa Thatcher) decides to hightail it to New York to live with her twin sister. After a brief stop-off at the house of a friend (Kandi Barbour) who's too busy sticking her ass in her tennis instructor's face to be of any real help, Sandy catches a ride with a hippie magician (long-standing “old guy in porn” Jake/Jack Teague) who gives her a bed for the night before whipping out a little sex magick with his old lady (Jody “The Singing Cocksucker from Missouri” Maxwell) and, um, levitating Sandy for good measure. Hippie Magician and Mrs. HM are nowhere to be found when Sandy wakes up, so she catches another into NYC, where she hallucinates receiving a bouquet of balloons from a mute young woman (Arcadia Lake) who's dressed like a little girl. The woman meets up with a sinister-looking disco dandy named Snow (Eric Edwards, Lake's real-life paramour), who turns out to be the right-hand man and above-referenced private fucking machine of a high-class madam (Veronica Hart). After putting her machine to work with some vigorous ass-fucking in the middle of a raging thunderstorm, the pair is visited by Sandy, who doesn't seem to catch on that her sister is a hooker in Hart's employ. From here on, it gets kinda freaky (that is, if you don't consider everything else that's happened on the freaky side): Madam Hart dispatches Snow to take some photos of prospective girls to her money man, a gent named Mr. Prince; at Prince's pad, Snow meets up with Lake again, who's painting a portrait of a huge cock. This inspires Snow to whip out his own personal model, and the two bang like well-oiled spark plugs. Later, Mr. Prince shows up - and holy shit, it's Jamie Gillis again! Is he also Sandy's mom's boy friend? Just what the fuck is going on here? Well, wonder all you want, because it doesn't get any clearer - Sandy is sent to Mr. Prince's pad - or maybe Mr. Prince shows up at Veronica Hart's, I'm not sure - but all of a sudden, everyone's tricked out in glitter wear and fucking each other. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but then, producer/director Cecil Howard puts a whammee on the entire thing by whipping out a skeleton from Sandy's closet that just may be the key to the whole film? Or is it just a dream? Do you care? Hopefully, you aren't too confused, but if you are, just keep jerking off - it'll all make sense eventually. 

A heady bitches' brew of gritty New York style movie sex, freak-era fantasy, and sorta-Freudian psycho-sexual weirdness, Neon Nights is widely regarded as one of the best XXX titles from porn's “Golden Age,” and I'm inclined to agree with that assessment. It's ambitious as all get out - Howard's attempts at subtext and metaphor may not be 100% successful, but the mystery that he builds and draws out over the course of the film is certainly compelling, and even more so because he never offers an explanation for Sandy's fantasies or the strange things that happen throughout the film. It's also exceptionally well made, with much of the credit for the glossy look going to cinematographer Carl Smith (a.k.a C. Davis Smith, who also shot many of Doris Wishman's '60s softcore atrocities). And it's hot as hell - it seems that whenever a porn film attempts this trifecta, it invariably drops the ball on this particular point (case in point: Andrew Blake, whose smut is visually gorgeous and fascinating to watch, but about as sexy as a block of Lucite), but not so in the case of Neon Nights. Howard cast great-looking performers who knew how to ignite the screen, and he gets superb action from Thatcher, Maxwell, and Barbour, who maximizes her brief role by oozing a lethal dose of jailbait sex vibe from every luscious pore. But it's Hart's scene with Edwards that wins the Most Strokeable Award from me, probably because it's the longest in the film, it's the most action-packed (with the anal coming as a complete surprise), and Hart and Edwards are clearly enjoying themselves in every frame. After watching 21^st century cookie-cutter porn for hours on end today, their scene was a blast of scorching hot refreshment. Right the fuck on.