Retro Porn Review - Lunch

For some reason, when I first saw the Lunch title from this 1972 movie, I thought it would be a Naked Lunch porn adaptation. It actually has nothing to do with William Burroughs — or actual lunch, really. But there might be more drug-infused sexual fantasies in this than in any beat novel out there.

Lunch is the first feature from director and visual artist Curt McDowell, who’s probably more known for his experimental short films (some of them with graphic sex in them; some not) and his lengthy and ambitious later cult classic Thundercrack! (which we’ll review in the future).

Lunch certainly fits better within the experimental film world than the porn one. Sex is not scarce here, but the approach is far more whimsical and outside the box than your average smut.

Dave Powers (played by McDowell regular Mark Ellinger, the only cast member who acted in anything else aside from this movie) is an avid sex daydreamer with a lot of free time on his hands — which in porn usually means that you’ll see him fucking a lot in the next hour. Effectively, Dave peacefully lets the day go by as he delves into fantasies with his neighbor across the street, his landlady, and other assorted sexual partners that would be convenient enough to not have to ever leave his apartment building.

Dave’s girlfriend comes home at times, grounding him into the unwanted reality his life is really about. “One of us has to get a job,” she hints, as Dave painfully acknowledges before letting his imagination ramble again.

Retro Porn Review - Lunch

But life goes on outside of Dave’s place, too. When the landlady arrives to her apartment, she finds an envelope by her door with a note that says: “Gloria, I hear you like to suck dick,” a pick-up line that works surprisingly well every time it’s used in this movie. Gloria masturbates while dreaming of a guy walking in on her, climbing on her and starting to hump her mouth while she lies down. This position is something Gloria clearly thinks about often, as it comes up repeatedly as hairy guys keep showing up in her fantasies — live-in hot girlfriend notwithstanding. Their lesbian scene is intermittently cut with a plethora of blowjob dreams.

In an interesting twist, we go into another apartment. Jody, a… let’s say “peculiar” fellow, who’s accumulating a number of envelopes with the same message that worked so well with Gloria. Jody takes “being neighborly” into a completely different territory. He picks up the one that says “Dave” and heads out.

The fact that all the dudes in this movie are skinny and bearded definitely provides a Game of Thrones-like character confusion, but even if you’re not that invested on who’s fucking who, it actually doesn’t matter all that much. Lunch is a movie about the sexual urges that come to people’s minds throughout the day, and the dread that comes from having to do anything else; it depicts a normal apartment building and the odd people who inhabit it, while specifically addressing their sexual urges.

I feel that Lunch is what Andy Warhol’s movies would be like if they cut half of the dialogue and had more hardcore sex in them. There are no stars, no huge dicks, no athletic camera angles; just a haze of sexual daydreams in a stream of consciousness storytelling style. If you’re into early 70s experimental films and would like to add some hardcore sex that might take things to another level, then Lunch is definitely for you.

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