The Good Old Days weren’t always good: “The Senator’s Daughter”

Studio: VCX/Cal Vista
Director: Don Flowers
Starring: John Holmes, Leslie Bovee, Linda West, Peter Whigham, Gloria Throate, Monique Little, Berk Hopley, Denis Machant, Lori Moteurmuth, Buff Lesbos

It is 1978 and the Senator’s daughter has been kidnapped by a Russian syndicate seeking to make a cyborg copy of her! Enter John Holmes, rebuilt bionically after a blowjob accident deprives him of his schlong!

Make no mistake, dear readers: despite the cash involved in casting and filming this epic from Jimmy Carter’s administration, “The Senator’s Daughter” is a pretty horrible movie.

It represents a time in porn, I think, where the counterculturists were easing out, taking porno chic with them, and leaving only the people who couldn’t get jobs anywhere else.

Holmes plays an erotic film star whose cock is bitten off while it, and he, are being blown. Take a look at the size of the margarita Holmes was drinking before he got behind the wheel and you’ll see why he got what was coming to him.

A team of Army scientists, meanwhile, has developed bionic limbs and schlong for just the right person to wield in the rescue of the Senator’s daughter, held somewhere (by the Russians, remember) in Tangiers.

“What you were was a freak,” says Major Donovan to Holmes after his surgery, “and now you’re good as before.”

Naturally the new Holmes is a hit with the nurses. We are treated to shots of the robo penis erupting to the nurses’ squeals. There is also a weird date rape scene, after which the victim seeks comfort in the arms of another nurse.

“The doctor locked me in the linen closet and jerked off on me,” weeps the wretched girl.

“You can’t let that upset you, Honey,” her mentor says.

After making his way by car through Los Angeles (older porn movies are great for outside shots – even better that the industry hadn’t moved to the Valley yet), Holmes hops a flight at LAX to Tangiers, where he encounters resistance that he quickly neutralizes with his bionic laser eye. Then he finds the cyborg double and shoots her with his bionic penis.

Holmes is being monitored via his onboard electronics so, back at Mission Control, the scientists are pretty jazzed at Holmes’ success. They decide to have a party where this line is uttered:

“Nancy, since you’re the only girl, we’re all gonna kind of gangbang you.”

“The Senator’s Daughter” keeps trying to convince us it’s cool. The name of Holmes’ character is John Galt, for some reason. Now I only read the Cliffs Notes for “Atlas Shrugged,” but even I know that there is no resemblance between these two characters. And the phony doctor pages at the hospital were probably not even funny to 1978 audiences.

The sex is plentiful and the women are pneumatic and fully thatched. The problem is, it’s difficult to see most of it. Director Flowers frames sex shots in a way that made me think that he found different things, like chins, more attractive than I do.

Hopeful signs, like a very Jerry Goldsmith-style opening score and a rape conducted by Russians, peter away into a film that just seems doomed (by today’s tight-pursed standards, anyway) to be the victim of too few choices in the face of too much money.

We really feel it at the end of the movie. The titular character is saved and marries John Holmes. She is fully decked out in a wedding dress and the couple rides through the empty streets of Century City in a convertible limousine, waving to no one. It’s like the money ran out.

Buy “The Senator’s Daughter”

Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Porn Valley two-headed donkey tour: The Wonderland Murders; John Holmes book also measured in inches
See also: VCX (vcx.com)