Inside Deep Throat | Review

History is “opened wide” with studio-made documentary.

She’s the granddaddy of them all, the one that sucked off thousands for a real mother load of money and she brought some chic to porn industry. Inside Deep Throat explores the stigma and enigma behind Gerard Damiano’s cult x-classic and while the project directed and written by the team of Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato may help audiences answer the Trivia Pursuit question of which independently produced movie had the biggest profit margin in history of film – it won’t necessarily be the doc that enlightens the mystic behind the whole experience of going to see a nudie movie in the 70’s. The duo behind Party Monster do what they can at squeezing out all the anecdotes out of this one – sticking to the traditionally told documentary format of researched stills, footage of television debates from the 70’s and talking bobble heads of a bunch of Florida-burnt figures who are in some way or another very connected to the events that surround Deep Throat.

Narrated by Dennis Hopper, the film does a good job at explaining the hype and the fallen stars of the 25,000 dollar project that could, although without Lindy Lovelace in the fold or a more concentrated effort in trying to connect the dots with what the mob did with the gazillions of dollars that it made – then audiences are left with counting the number of bad jokes that were unearthed. The filmmakers take a position that avoids risk – Deep Throat’s most explicit moments are firmly presented and the production history and social implications are well addressed, but there are no can of worms that get opened here. Even the repeat sequence featuring the montage orgasm rocket launching fails to ignite the doc and it seems too easy to put an eager crazy Christian conservative to come in front of a rolling camera. You know that a film is searching for itself when a little too much of the film’s time is spent on a cranky old housewife nagging her not-so-hushed-looking-for-someone-to-talk husband who made a buck about three decades back. Inside Deep Throat is good for a couple of chuckles, and would certainly be an interesting flashback into history for those who dared to venture inside the x-rated movie playing theatres – but for the after-generations of others, this is some mild, fact-feeding entertainment that is far less exploratory than the recent Kinsey.

Rating 1.5 stars