Long before the Internet made tagging words a strategy for more clicks and visits, porn was using it for image association. The name Deep Roots is the perfect example for it. The tag line for the film on the movie poster is “Deeper than Throat, More Powerful Than Roots”, but it doesn’t have the faintest suggestion of Linda Lovelace or Kunta Kinte; just a way to put two famous visual images together and let the customer daydream on his/her own about what they might see.
But misleading titles aside, Deep Roots is a straightforward coming of age story. Billy (Jesse Chacan) is a Native-American who decides to get on his motorcycle and leave his girlfriend and his reservation behind in order to see the world, something his ancestors never got the chance to do.
Of course, that “world” just meant Los Angeles and he just spent his days riding his bike and finding young willing girls to hook up with. Billy found no problem adapting to L.A.’s mid-70s swinging scene lifestyle.
The movie has no plot, other than presenting Billy with enough sexual prey to keep certain continuity. Among these stood out a criminally unknown performer named Anita Sands, in the role of Joan, an engaged yet rather frustrated freckly redhead with gigantic tits. Her body-painting scene with Chacan was pretty hot, and you get to see her in action quite a lot throughout the movie.
In a great cameo that had no purpose to the story other than having her on screen, Andy Warhol’s actress Liz Renay had a small cougar-y diva part. All I could think of then was, “I bet John Waters is a fan of this movie.”
Like a lot of adult films of the time, Deep Roots built the momentum up for a big orgy scene at the end. Also like many of those, it’s a mix of drug-oriented fun, unbridled freedom, hot moments, gross moments, and enough absurdity to further prove the drug-oriented fun part. The orgy’s host is a Groucho Marx impersonator who intersperses jokes with tons of sex around them, which sounds a bit weird and hacky, but if you’re into 70s porn, this somehow passes seamlessly.
Director Joseph Bardo (whose auteur pseudonym was Lisa Bard) and his crew did a fairly decent job camera-wise, especially on the exterior shots, first in the desert, but especially in L.A., where Billy explores the city’s landmarks and hot girls with the same excitement.
Billy narrates the story, which may not have been the best idea. The acting is kind of terrible for the most part, but the plot is unpretentious and simple enough for it not to become an issue.
The music is full of classic 70s AM goodness, and really captures the Southern California vibe.
A lot of people focus on the trailblazing feminism of the 70s, but this movie also showed perhaps the first pubic hair trim done by a straight dude on camera — which also included blow-drying it, and sticking a comb inside the vagina. How about that for gender role empowerment! The actor playing the hairdresser is a short, bald, ugly, hairy Latino dude with a tiny dick and no charisma, whose name is listed on IMDB as The Amazing Ricardo — in the credits just humbly referred to as Senor Ricardo. The man’s presence is puzzling; it just leaves you thinking, “Man, that guy just had to be an executive producer in this movie, right?”
You gotta love the 70s.
