User Reviews

We located this movie in Montreal in 1994 in French with NO English subtitles......This was an NTSC VHS released in Quebec probably in the 1970's.....WRITTEN & DIRECTED BY JOE SARNO....Quebec French Title is not KARLA........The Running Time that we have located is 1 Hour 13 Minutes...CAST includes.....Susan Thomas.....Betty Whitman......and Danielle Leman as Karla.....Karla opens by the pool of the sprawling Florida house shared by Jackie Windsor and Lorna Tanner. During the opening conversation we find that Jackie is a child psychologist and Lorna a successful writer. As Lorna prepares to keep a mysterious appointment, Jackie questions her about her destination and is put off with a vague answer, which heightens her curiosity.

The next scene finds Lorna in the darkened living room of Karla Herrick's house. A maid escorts her in and leaves her standing alone in the dimly lit room. Suddenly two naked girls spring on her from the darkness, throw her to the floor and undress her. When she is completely stripped the two girls begin to kiss and arouse her until she is moaning with pleasure. At this point a man enters, also naked, and mounts Lorna as the two girls hold her down and continue their caresses.

Karla, owner of the house, stands near the scene, smiling with satisfaction .......No English version has been sighted in Quebec.......Have never seen a better quality version in our 15 years of driving around Quebec and New Brunswick looking for old French movies..........We do not buy films on the internet so not sure what was released on European format.......

KARLA is a curious film in Joe Sarno's career, its original version lost at present but extant in a French-dubbed XXX Quebecois video edition titled LIAISONS CLANDESTINES that features a dozen brief hardcore sex inserts. It displays both his strengths and weaknesses as a (now-legendary) pornographer.

The only color film among a quartet of Florida-lensed '68/'69 projects, it features the same leading non-actresses as THE LAYOUT, who bring beauty but zero dramatic talents to the project. Suzan Thomas plays Jacqueline, a child psychologist, rooming with lovely Lorna (Betty Whitman) in their Florida home located on the intracoastal waterway.

SPOILERS AHEAD:

A teaser pre-credits sequence shows Jacqueline (nickname Jackie) and another woman (who turns out to be Donna Smith) on a speedboat with a sugar daddy. This is repeated later in the film and in retrospect appears to be a postscript -sort of a flash-forward in context. Most of the action is less photogenic, confined to the trademark "bathed in darkness" Sarno/d.p. Steve Silverman's group sex scenes shot indoors.

Lorna visits the bordello run by Karla (cute Danielle LeMay, in the film's best performance), where she is serviced by three women and then a guy: cue the first 10-second closeup insert of hardcore humping.

Next day lolling at their swimming pool Lorna tells Jackie of her tryst at Karla's pad. A second visit has Lorna simulating fellatio, with a 15-second deep throat closeup insert included that doesn't match the master shot (or Lorna) properly. It is obvious that Sarno shot his usual X-rated softcore porn, with XXX action added anonymously several years later. The video runs 73 minutes, only 2 of which are hardcore porn in content, averaging about 10 seconds per each of the 12 inserts.

Jackie gets Karla's phone number and calls her, but Karla pretends not to know of a client named Lorna. She visits, calling herself Jacqueline Wood rather than Windsor, and explains she is a psychologist interested in the attitudes and behavior of Karla's clients. Karla is naturally suspicious, but calls Jackie back and invites her to work as an associate in the brothel, doing "psychological research", a very typical porn premise.

Donna Smith (Rene Howard) is a new client (the girl featured in the speedboat prologue), and Karla has Jackie participate in a five-some with her. By this point Jackie has become enthusiastic in her new work. Though they share the same bed we never see a lesbian scene between Lorna and Jackie back home.

Lorna does have a boyfriend, hairy-chested Jeff (Joel Saltz). Oddly enough they have a softcore sex scene in which there are no XXX inserts.

Sarno follows a repetitive format of the group sex scenes at the bordello presented with different combinations of women and usually an unidentifiable man added, with even more repetitive musical accompaniment (a trombone solo plus bass and timbales), generally reaching the same crescendo for a climax. The frequency of these sex scenes, plus the oddity of filming in color, made this particular film an easy target for conversion to XXX by unknown hands years later.

This unauthorized "spicing up" of the footage also reveals the shortcomings of Sarno's style. Even if the two minutes of pornographic footage were eliminated, the film's lack of dramatic content and poor acting make it resemble the dozens of clutzy all-sex videos Joe cranked out in the '80s. Silverman's ominous female tableaux of groping in the dark remind us of its '60s origins, harking back to the mid-60s classics of Sarno's oeuvre.

Plot thickens when Donna takes to obsessively tracking Jackie, evidently having fallen for her. Donna visits Jackie and has a boyfriend attack her and tie her up. We've already seen bondage introduced as part of the service at Karla's brothel, and now the situation is reversed as Jackie is the victim. Donna dominates Jackie and uses a patented Sarno vibrator/massage machine on her, but when her b.f. takes over, after just 5 seconds of XXX humping insert footage Donna gets mad and throws him out, wanting Jackie all to herself.

She unties Jackie's bonds, apologizes and even breaks down in tears. The twist is that they plan to go away and live together in the lap of luxury (with the speedboat guy, named Parker) -THE END. This busy finale is ruined by Suzan Thomas's non-acting as Jackie. It also only makes sense in pornoland-logic, not in the context of Sarno's vaunted "understanding of female psychology".

The title song (retained in English, even for Montreal-based fans) about Karla belies the fact that the film is not about that character. It would have been a much stronger drama, given Danielle LeMay's interesting depiction of the title role, had Karla not gotten lost in the shuffle. The rest of the library music is poor and counter-productive.

Paris Hilton-type Suzan Thomas as Jackie ruins the film and is indicative of Sarno casting merely for attractive faces/brick-house bodies in these low-grade Florida projects. KARLA holds up, if at all, as pornography, whether it be the softcore type prevalent in 1969 or as souped-up hardcore popular a couple of years after. It simply doesn't fit into the arena of "real" filmmaking as latter-day revisionist Sarno enthusiasts would have it.

I look forward to seeing the original soft version someday with English-track, but it is clear from this adulterated version plus the slightly unreliable AFI Catalog 1961-1970 synopsis that the repetitious sex scenes crowded out any meaningful narrative.