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Released by: Peekarama
Released on: September 20th, 2024.
Director: Don Walters
Cast: Jennifer Welles, Jamie Gillis, Kim Pope, Helen Madigan, Ming Toy, Gloria Leonard, Sharon Mitchell, John Leslie
Year: 1976/1978
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Little Orphan Sammy / The Little Blue Box – Movie Review:
Vinegar Syndrome’s Peekrama sub-label offers up comedic mid-seventies adult features from director Don Walters, newly restored and looking good.
Little Orphan Sammy:
A genuinely strange gender-swapped parody of the Little Orphan Annie comic strips, director Don Walter’s 1976 film, Little Orphan Sammy, opens at a night club where a stripper distracts a man who is then pierced with a long finger nail and knocked out. What happened here? He was hiding some microfilm in the heel of his boot and the sinister Hata Mari (Jennifer Welles, in a dark wig) wants to get her claws on it. Mission accomplished.
From here, we cut to an orphanage where we meet the titular, and remarkably naïve, Sammy (Rocky Millstone), an orphan soon to go off to his new home – he’s been adopted by none other than Hata Mari herself! Before he goes, however, he has to say his goodbyes to one of the orphanage doctors (Helen Madigan) by having sex with her. Meanwhile, Hata Mari has a local politician named Daddy Sawbucks (Andy Milligan regular Neil Flanagan, credited as Lin Flanagan), in her pocket. He’s not just a politician, he’s also an oil tycoon and he wants nothing more than to grow that fortune as best he can. How is he going to do this? He’s come up with a way to turn garbage into fuel, thus securing American’s energy-independent future.
Hata Mari, when she isn’t having sex with her chauffeur (Jamie Gillis) or her maid (C.J. Laing), intends to use the dimwitted Sawbucks to sell some of the top secret information that she now has in her hands to those who would do harm to the United States. Sammy, ever the patriot, is as clumsy as he is always ready to go, was adopted by Hata because she figured he’d be a great way to cover up her evil schemes – but his constant bumbling clumsiness proves to be a lot more trouble than she expected. Meanwhile, a very horny telephone man is having almost as much sex with the ladies in and around Hata’s compound as Sammy himself.
This is a really fun watch. It’s light and breezy but has enough of a plot to keep you entertained and on top of that, quite a bit of the humor is genuinely funny. No one involved in this is taking anything in the least bit seriously and the performers, Welles in particular, seem to be having a whole lot of fun doing their thing. The sex scenes are well shot and varied enough that they don’t become repetitive (though some may complain that the editing is too choppy, as we tend to cut back and forth between one scene to another rather than see the scenes play out from start to finish without interruption) but overall, this works quite well. Production values are pretty solid here as well. The movie has what appears to be a completely original score, good costume work and some amusing opening credits and intertitles that tie into the comic strip inspiration for the movie.
The leads all do a great job here. Welles looks fantastic in her black wig and gives her all, while C.J. Laing does a nice job in her supporting role as well. Gillis is a kick as Hata Mari’s right hand man and the supporting players – including Lynn Bishop, Kim Pope, Helen Madigan, Jennifer Jordon, Andrea True and Nikki Hilton, are also in fine form.
The Little Blue Box:
Once again directed by Don Walters (using the nomme de porn of Arlo Schiffin!) in 1979, Little Blue Box takes a pretty fun premise and… doesn't do much of interest with it. When the movie begins, we meet John (John Leslie). He's a writer who mostly works from home while his wife, Jen (Jennifer Welles made up to look rather spinstery here), is away at work. Upstairs lives their foxy tenant, Leslie (Leslie Bovee), who doesn't mind teasing John a little bit now and then. He fantasizes about her, which we see in plenty of explicit detail, but despite his temptations stays kinda-sorta faithful to Jen, even if she fails to satisfy his manly wants and needs.
Late one night, while John is home alone, there's a knock on the door from Ms. Azure (Welles again, looking much more like her delightfully curvy blonde self). He lets her in, even though he knows there's a sales pitch coming, simply because she's a fox. She introduces him to the titular Little Blue Box - a device that connects to his television that will show him pretty much anything he can think of in terms of carnality. During the demonstration things get hot and heavy between John and Azure, until Jen comes home and ruins their fun. But John's into what the box can offer and he gets to check out a few steamy encounters - a biker couple going at it in a barn, a security guard boffing a shoplifter in a dressing room and even an adult film audition (featuring Jamie Gillis and Ming Toy).
What Azure, who returns the next night for more quality time with John, doesn't tell him is just what the button on the box marked "will do!"
The movie has a good premise - it's sort of like a dirty Amazon Women On The Moon, just not as funny. Putting Welles in a dual role was a good idea in theory, but it's never exploited all that well. Her bitchy wife persona is unlikeable, we never really feel much for her so when John starts playing around with her hot blonde doppelganger, you can't really blame the guy. There is some mildly effective humor here and there but not enough of it to make this as entertaining as it should have been. Once the Little Blue Box is hooked up and John starts channel surfing, most of the focus shifts to the scenes that play out on his TV. It doesn't take a porn scholar to notice pretty quickly that most of this material was inserted from different sources - the scene in the barn feels European and the scene in the dressing room features French language signs and hairy armpits! These scenes don't jive with the rest of the movie very well, the clash with the attempts at humor and stand out, they really just don't feel right for the film.
The scene with Gillis and Ming Toy is pretty decent. She's auditioning for a modeling gig and the man on the other side of the desk (Jack Teague) wants to be sure she's got what it takes. He calls in a guy named Stacy (Jamie Gillis) to make sure she does and then he joins in on the action himself. Ming's an unusual looking but attractive Asian gal whose stint in the adult film business doesn't seem to have yielded more than a handful of titles but she's fun to watch here. The finale (we won't spoil it but it is very predictable and one giant cliché) is well shot and features Gloria Leonard and Sharon Mitchell alongside Welles, Bovee (who steals every scene she's in) and John Leslie himself.
The movie isn't a complete waste of time - it actually has some decent moments - but it's probably not something you'll go back to time and time again and it unfortunately fails the make the most of a pretty damn solid cast.
Little Orphan Sammy / The Little Blue Box – Blu-ray Review:
Vinegar Syndrome brings Little Orphan Sammy and The Little Blue Box to Blu-ray newly scanned and restored in 2k from their original 35m negative and framed at 1.85.1 widescreen. The transfers are good ones, offering up the movies in very nice shape and with good depth and detail. Colors look great and skin tones are always lifelike and accurate. The movies always look like proper film transfers, showing no obvious noise reduction or edge enhancement, and the images are free of compression artifacts or crush. There’s some minor print damage here and there in the form of the occasional small white speck, but that’s about it, the images are otherwise very clean, aside from the natural film grain that you’d want preserved here.
The only audio options for the two movies on the disc are 24-bit DTS-HD 2.0 Mono tracks in the films’ original language. Optional English SDH subtitles are included, though there are a few typos in them. Audio quality is fine. The levels are generally well-balanced and the dialogue easy to follow and understand. There aren’t any problems with hiss, distortion or sibilance, the track sounds pretty clean.
In addition to trailers for each feature, the disc includes an interview with director Don Walters. Here, over twenty-seven minutes, he talks about how much he enjoyed working with Jennifer Welles and the importance of getting her in his movies, creating a story around outtakes that he had from other films to create The Little Blue Box, directing the film under an alias, memories from the shoot, what some of the other performers were like to work with, stories about how professional John Leslie was, getting the cartoons and illustrations together for the Little Orphan Sammy, financing the movie, wanting to make a truly comedic feature, casting Rocky Millstone as the male lead, how much fun the movie was to make, the costumes featured in the film, working with Jamie Gillis, who did what behind the scenes as far as the crew was concerned, some of the locations used for the movie and more.
This release also comes packaged with some reversible cover sleeve art and, if purchased from the Melusine website, an embossed slipcover designed by Rich Long that is limited to 2,000 units.
Little Orphan Sammy / The Little Blue Box - The Final Word:
The Peekarama Blu-ray release of Little Orphan Sammy / The Little Blue Box is worth checking out, particularly for fans of Jennifer Welles, who is the female lead in both features. The transfers are strong for both features, the interview with Walters is interesting and a very welcome addition to the disc, and the two movies are both quite entertaining and amusing.
Click on the images below, or right click and open in a new window, for full sized Little Orphan Sammy / The Little Blue Box Blu-ray screen caps!
