Several years ago, amid great (and deserved) hoopla, Bill Osco, that San Francisco-based titan of primordial porn, release the first nudie-pornie musical, Alice in Wonderland. Rated R and full of lush sets and plush ladies, the flick featured a relative unknown, Kristine DeBell, as Lewis Carroll's classic heroine.
Alice in Wonderland was a slick production as you will ever find in X-land. Accomplished actors in non-sex roles, a spectacular score and truly clever songs, a highly sophisticated script all helped to make the film a highly entertaining softcore romp.
As a testament to the professionalism of Alice, young Kristine De Bell, a somewhat wooden actress at the time, went on to become a popular TV star. She's currently a featured performer on the day-time sudser, "The Young and the Restless." Kristine had the perfect "look" for Alice, a strong childish body and a convincingly stumbling innocence. In the porn business, Alice has always been written off as a sexploitation film, not a real honest-to-Goldstein fuckflick. And DeBell has protected her rep as a legit actress by pointing to the softcore nature of its presentation.
In truth, the film may be as slick and funny as say, Tony Newley's "Hieronymus Merkin." The writers, lyricists, the choreographers, the art directors all did Studio-quality work. In short, the actual quality of this production is so far superior to anything before it that it stands as a landmark in the history of adult films. That is not to say that there haven't been other excellent blue movies, but nobody has tried anything so complicated, ambitious and large-scale as Alice and succeeded so nicely.
For years, whenever anybody complimented Alice or waxed poetic on Kristine De Bell's lively performance and well-turned limbs, the standard response was: "Nudity. Simulation. suggestion. It was not an X. It was a movie."
Well, now that the videocassette of the film is available for commercial fare, this particular canard can be laid to rest. Alice was shot hard and released "soft" and, for proof, one has only to buy the videotape.
The videocassette Alice is X all the way, featuring insertions, cum shots, blowjobs, and a wide variety of sexual happenings which do not, for one moment, detract from the sophisticated charm and lavish production values of the theatrical version. Kristine, fucks, sucks, takes a wetload in the face and, at the time, she was probably a better fornicator than an actress.
The cast includes many X-rated regulars, especially among the ladies, and all produce exemplary performance. Three of them - Terri ("Story of Joanna") Hall, Juliet Graham, and Sue Richards, former publisher of "High Society" magazine - have long since disappeared from porn. Hall is especially impressive in the dance numbers and Richards, while not looking her best, is utterly delightful as half of Tweedledum-Tweedledee. She does much of the hardcore in the film.
The voided Alice has a lot of nudity, occasional get-down fucky-sucky, the kind of music that soothes my savage breast, and a premise that is believable and effective. It's probably not a meat-beater but it's a very pleasant couple of hours of TV watching - Boz Crawford
Review Originally Published in December 1982
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