Sweet Dreams, Suzan (1979)

MS. PETTY IS A CONFIDENT, AGGRESSIVE SEXUAL DYNAMO!

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Starring: Rhonda Jo Petty as Suzan also starring: Brooke West, Blair Harris, Dorothy LeMay, Laurien Dominique, Sharon Kane, Star Would and Penelope Jones

To make a good sex film you need a good premise, one that gives the characters in the story a reason for full-tilt fucking. Some of the more familiar devices are: aphrodisiacs, hypnotism, 'magic' talismans that make the wear unbearably horny, sex machines, nymphomania - these are a few of the reasons characters may have jumping into bed and going at it hammer and tongs.

These gimmicks are useful because the performers can pull out all the stops in the sex scenes. If, on the other hand, the set-up has built-in conflict - if, for instance, the guy is trying to bed a woman who is unwilling, angry, or indifferent - the players can't really bust loose.

SWEET DREAMS, SUZAN, with Rhonda Jo Petty in the title role, has a premise that lets everyone in the picture get down as deep and dirty as they want. The sex scenes are dreamed by the leading lady, and as dream characters the performers are not bound by reality. They do what they want, with the result that the sex in this film is intense and the involvement appears genuine.

Director Leoni Valentino has had the good judgement to give his players a fairly free hand in the bedroom scenes. He favors long full shots, rather than quick-cut close-ups, and a few extended sex scenes, rather than many truncated ones. All of this is to his credit , and makes Suzan's dreams hotter than the core at Three Mile Island.

She relates three of them to her shrink over the phone. While he listens with more than professional interest, his secretary, played by the breathtaking Dorothy LeMay, masturbates and sucks the doctor's dick.

Suzan's first dream has to do with  a stripper entertaining at a party for rich folks. She watches herself watching Laurien Dominique strut her stuff. Then Suzan's brother gets on stage and tries to fuck the dancer. Fucking for films is hard enough, but doing it on the stage in front of a sizable audience is a challenge this handsome newcomer is not quite up to.

Even When Rhonda Jo slips out of her fur coat and climbs on stage wearing a black garter belt and stockings - even when she joins Laurien Dominique in giving the guy's cock a good tongue-lashing- even then it refuses to stiffen much.

It would have been better at this point to finesse the awkward moment; instead, the intrusive voice-over narration, intoned by Petty, like a high school dropout, raves on about the guy's "big hard cock," thus calling embarrassing attention to the gap between a dream and reality. Finally, the poor fellow gets it up long enough to squirt his load onto their flailing tongues.

Too bad about the erection problem, but understandable. The dumb narration is less easy to forgive. The scene is otherwise excellent, shot in hot colors that make Rhonda Jo and Laurien Dominique look like hellcats. Photography and lighting are tops throughout this Freeway Films release, and all of the flesh looks good enough to eat. Colors are rich and saturated, tending to make the viewer feel super horny.

In Suzan's second dream, there are no cocks to worry about. She entwines her gorgeous self among three steaming, foxy women, and the daisy chain the four of them wave is one of the best we've ever seen.

Dream number three has Suzan trying in vain to get her piano teacher's mind off the music. When girl scout Mary Ryan shows up selling cookies, Suzan watches as the teacher ignores the cookies and eats the scout. Then the young girl, who is really a good scout, returns the favor, while Suzan observes and masturbates. The girls blow the guy, then he fucks Suzan from behind, while she is soixante-neuf with the girl. He pulls out in time to thrust his pulsing cock into the  nearest hungry mouth, where it spurts copiously.

These dreams, told to the head-doctor while he's getting head, seem to him not symptoms of dysfunction, but rather signs of mental health. His advice to Suzan: "If it feels good, do it."

She follows his advice to a hill where she can look down on three muscular men doing a bit of landscaping. Suzan, no fool on a hill, decides to help improve the view. She sits down, removes her panties, and spreads her legs so wide the men can see all the way to Eureka! They approach her. She runs. They catch her and tie her to four stakes in the ground, like a tent.

Then they treat her rough, slapping their stiff  rods against her perfect face. All three come on her, leaving splashes of semen from nose to navel.

At the fadeout, it looks as though Suzan will be dreaming less and fucking more. Thus the good doctor has effected a miraculous cure with one phone call, and even managed to get off himself! No wonder, a the film's conclusion, while Dorothy LeMay is blowing him, the doctor is chuckling gleefully, saying over and over again, "I love my job. I love my job!"

(May 1981)