Joe Sarno week (June 16 – 22) Joe Sarno was called the Bergman of 42nd St, but don’t let that stop you from watching his movies! He was able to shape dramatic stories that were entertaining and of-the-moment while working with tight budgets and inexperienced performers but he never lost sight of why people were buying the tickets – HOT SEX!

In the sex films of the 60s and 70s, the line between sex and the occult is as thin as the flimsiest of garments. Carla (Laurene Clair, who was also known as Patricia McNair and is also in director and writer Joe Sarno’s Deep Inside) goes from visiting a Tarot card reader with her friend Enid (Carol Holleck, who was in Sarno’s The Swap and How They Make It) to joining The Cult of Pan,a coven of sexually open ladies led by card reader Martha (Helena Clayton, Suburbia Confidential) and who draw on the power of red roses for their psychosexual energy.

What she doesn’t know is that Enid and Martha have worked together to bring her into the orbit of these women, all to get her away from living with her dominating Aunt Julie (Liz Love, also known as Bella Donna — and not Michelle Sinclair — and who was in Sarno’s My Body Hungers and the Joseph Marzano version of Venus In Furs) and cousin Tracey (Laura London), who is constantly reminding people that she’s met a nice boy and plans on marrying him.

That’s not the life that Carla wants but she has no idea how to get there.

“Once you have tasted the wine of Delphi and touched a rose from the garden of Pan to your breast, you will forever be a priestess of Pan.” That’s what the ladies say and soon, they’re drinking, rubbing flowers all over their barely clothed bodies and everyone gets as kinky as a one room shot 1966 softcore movie can get. I mean, the very idea that women had that secret garden and weren’t dependent on men for their pleasure, much less could get even more orgasmic bliss alone or with another woman, takes the very idea of fantasy and makes men force head on that they really aren’t necessary unless they rise above their normal roles and become enlightened.

Even the suburban women so ready to spend the rest of their lives in a minute every few nights of the missionary position soon realize that striking one another with thorned blooms and committing blasphemy as they praise Pan. Before the end of this movie, Aunt Julie and Tracey have abandoned their chaste ways and are after every man they can get, as well as becoming addicted to those roses that come every day to their door.

How amazing is the world of Sarno, another below the Hollywood budget filmmaker who created black and white worlds of dubious women who are content to not live in the world of black and white, no matter how they’re shot, and become something else, something other?