Week 7 (Aug 2 – 8) – Muscle Distribution Catalog
Muscle Distribution is an exciting new venture that’s hard to sum up with words alone, but if you dig into the catalog, you find a shape that’s more well-defined than any mission statement. Liz is keeping it hot for us. From Muscle’s website: Muscle is a new film distribution company with a heavy repertory slant from historian, programmer, and filmmaker Elizabeth Purchell. Borne out of an understanding of the role that accessibility plays in shaping cultural histories, we’re dedicated to complicating and expanding the canon by shining a light on works that either never received their proper due or that have unjustly faded into obscurity, and championing uncompromising new works by some of today’s most exciting underground filmmakers. We love scrappy, misfit films that don’t fit into any particular box.
Steven (Alan Marlow) is a textbook misogynist and ruthless playboy who treats women as entirely disposable. The moment his latest girlfriend breaks the news that she is pregnant, he heartlessly kicks her to the curb. Karma catches up to him immediately afterward when he steps into the street and gets plowed down by a van—whose driver was thoroughly distracted at the wheel by getting some road head.
Steven wakes up in a gauze-draped vision of the afterlife, where he meets a scantily clad celestial guide known as Angel Number 9 (Jennifer Jordan, Abigail Leslie Is Back In Town). Finding his absolute lack of empathy intolerable, the celestial hierarchy hands down a poetic sentence: Steven is sent back to the mortal plane reincarnated as a woman named Stephanie (Darby Lloyd Rains, Devil’s Due). His mission is to experience firsthand the sting of betrayal and learn what it truly means to have a broken heart.
Of course, he sleeps with the angel before he gets sent back to Earth. This is a porno, after all.
Naturally, Stephanie immediately explores her new form, but the reality of her lesson hits home when she falls hard for a manipulative, smooth-talking photographer named Jeff (oh man, Jamie Gillis), only to discover precisely what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a callous jerk.
This is worth watching because it was directed and written by Roberta Findlay. She may have hated her own work, but she’s a monumental figure in independent and underground cinema. Beginning her career in the rough-and-tumble nudie-roughie” era alongside her then-husband Michael Findlay, she transitioned into a pioneering female director within the adult film landscape of the 1970s. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Findlay approached adult cinema with a distinct eye for composition, lighting and narrative framing, eventually pivoting into low-budget horror.
Findlay famously remarked in period interviews that she preferred working with dramatic actors who could handle performance alongside the adult elements. Because of this ethos, Angel Number 9 functions heavily as a subversion of traditional gender-swap tropes, drawing comparisons to theatrical comedies like Goodbye Charlie, all while injecting actual emotional stakes, discussions of pregnancy and a distinctly feminine perspective into the 42nd Street grindhouse ecosystem.
It’s also super trans coded, as Steven has no problems instantly becoming a woman past some grumblings in Heaven. Before you can say divine intervention, he’s over it and quickly making love to any man (and woman) who wants him. Or her. You know what I mean.
Obviously, Blake Edwards saw this movie, even if he just noticed the orgy scene uses Ravel’s “Bolero.”
Regardless, whenever you hear Golden Age of Adult, you have to wonder if that’s just rose colored lenses. This movie reminds you that even with those glasses off, some of the films were pretty darn good.
