Pandora’s Mirror (1981)

Take An Incredible Look Into A Mirror Of Lust!

Starring Veronica Hart, Marlene Willoughby, Kandi Barbour, Annie Sprinkle, Tiffany Clark, Hillary Summers, Merle Michaels, Frederick Foster, Jamie Gillis, Sandra Hillman, George Payne, Jerry Butler, Marc Valentine, Dave Ruby, Lacey Smith, Mowena March, Robin Sane and Robin Sane

First off, be forewarned that you are reading the words of a broad who's never shelled out the bucks to see a porn movie. Yes, not even Deep Throat! Or Super Vixens, or even Stewardesses in 3-D, all of which went on to become the sensation of the burbs. Sure, I'd gone to live sex shows, swing soirees, S/M clubs, and I've viewed a few dirty loops, because I have a quirky affection for dissonance - the uglier and hornier the characters, the better I like it.

Not to worry! There were no skanks in the twitchy cast of Pandora's Mirror, although a few of the masculine extras came close to my ideal.

Pandora's Mirror is a dreamy, druggy, soft-shoe mystery, a cock-and-dagger tale which is lifted straight out of Twilight Zone, so everyone knows what the "trick" ending is going to be and can lay back in relief and jerk off. Everybody had told me that the plots of porno movies were atrocious. Maybe. But I think the suspense genre should be a great natural resource for this maligned industry. Can't you just see a sex version of Night of the Living Dead? Or The Thing, for that matter?




The story of Pandora's Mirror involves an antique mirror through which certain individuals can view the orgiastic excesses of its (the mirror's) owners in the centuries past. Pandora (Veronica Hart) wanders into an old junk shop in New York with her whiny, catty girlfriend Liz (Sandra Hillman). Pandora is inexplicably taken with the mirror, although the shop owner fusses and faddles with the charm of Mr. Whipple over the "danger" of gazing into it for too long. He knows there are a gaggle of slut ghosts hanging out in the mirror. Man, and with a name like Pandora famous for her box, of course they'll want her on their roster. Meanwhile Pandora looks into the mirror. Fade the lights! Put on the eerie music!
The mirror is in a barn, the costumes American Revolution. A young wife's (Tiffany Clark) geriatric husband can't handle his little lady's demands for vaginal occupation, and so he trots out to kill some limeys in compensation. The young wife is vacantly jerking off in front of the mirror when three redcoats ride up and gang-bang her.

Bring up the houselights! Back in the junkshop of reality, it is clear that Pandora's friend Liz has seen nothing, busy as she is hatching schemes of taking over Pandora's boyfriend Peter, who turns out to be the one and only villainous, sexy slimester, Jamie Gillis.

Only Pandora and the owner know what she has seen. He refuses to sell the mirror, so everyday she camps outside the door of his shop, waiting for him to open sesame so she can sit in front of the mirror and get sucked into fucky suckies of the mirror's previous owners. Every day Pandora has a different "vision" and after every session, she does the same thing: she goes home, increasingly pale and distracted, peers out the blinds at two guys bodybuilding on the roof of an apartment building nearby and diddles herself with one foot in one dimension and the other in... the other.

The next mirror flashback was my favorite: a 40s major studio Hollywood thing. Marlene Willoughby was almost inadvertently funny as a bitchy starlet in her Hollywood mansion. A cross between Tallulah and Carmen Miranda - turban, raised eyebrow and all Willoughby is flanked by various itinerant stooges who caught my eye for their uncanny resemblance to Ray Jay Johnson. ("You can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay") You know, little guys - with big cocks - dressed up in grandaddy's clothes. All these characters are sort of snaking around the pool when Marlene's new make-up girl arrives. She ends up getting fucked backwards and forwards on her hands and knees on the diving board by two Bay Ridge-type flunkies in Frank Nitty suits. And loving it as initiations go. One nice shot here: a dude in mirrored sunglasses (Bon Jour!) watching the action. The camera zooms in on his glasses as they mirror up a distorted backend image of cunt and cock. Nice. So was the soundtrack of the film, an electric selection of rhythmic music which produces a trance-like state in the viewer.

Then there was the "flashback" of a theatrical audition at a Broadway theater, notable chiefly for the palpable sigh which arose from the audience when Kandi Barbour's puffy nipples were popped out of her dress.

The technical professionalism of Pandora shocked me. The lighting and the photography parallels still photography. I had no idea that porno films were so pretty. But I kept wondering why the time dragged on so slowly when there was no sex happening on the screen. The trouble, in this case, was that after every "vision" they sandwiched in the same "at home" scene: Pandora peeking out the blinds at the musclemen, telling Jamie to go fuck himself over the phone blah, blah. The idea was to demonstrate Pandora's increasing obsession, but since every one of these scenes were more or less the same the effect created was like seeing splices of the same battleship sinking over and over again in cheapo war movies. But okay, this was my first porn movie. I guess you fans are used to it.

Gradually the mirror's owners bring Pandora closer to present time. The last episode she sees (before she gets sucked in, well all know that, right?) was a wonderfully demonic debauchee at the Hellfire Club in New York. The voyeuristic rich go slumming - to the most popular S/M dive in Manhattan, no less. Merle Michaels plays the wife-of-breeding whose well-to-do husband wants to see her humiliated. She submits to the racks and handcuffs - which take the place of a pool table in these places - with a minimum of ladylike resistance. The lady is a slow burner, but Jesus! She sucked off more guys in this scene than I can remember. Strapped on her back to the table, she manages, while getting screwed at one end, to take two cocks into her mouth upside down. Yes, yes, her husband nodded, looking on in his tuxedo.

Fade the lights! Change the eerie music! On to the denouement. The shop keeper allows Pandora to take the mirror home for the weekend. There it is, finally, in her apartment, and there she is, as usual, spying on the bodybuilders across the way when... Poof! The two guys are somehow astrally projected into her room, standing by her bed. And finally, we get to see it being put to Pandora. They're all fucking and sucking and Veronica Hart's nice slopey tits are bouncing up to her chin from some solid pounding, when she makes the mistake of looking at the mirror. The mirror (or the sluts in it, rather) is looking at her, when again - you got it - Poof! Pandora disappears into it (come to us Pandora!) to join the ranks of the other eternal hot twats in Purgatory's Pound, leaving the musclemen kneeling on the bed with swaying hard ons, blinking vacantly for a few seconds before the credit roll across the screen.

Did Pandora's Mirror get me hot? Sure! But I'm still cherry in this department. For vital statistics please check the chart above - which was compiled in the dark, smelly moviehouse while I sat there open legged and mouthed - by editor Peter Wolff. I was in no condition to x-out the quantity of menage-a-cock episodes, while he scores these movies like the daily OTB forms. In short, I scurried straight home and jerked off. There was no weight lifters in my neighborhood, however. Only grimy air ducts and black chimneys, but such is Hollywood.