"Another Roll in the Hay" is a screwball porn comedy pretty much lost due to Traci Lords having (illegally) starred in the picture, but four decades later presents a fascinating and entertaining example of how times have changed. I saw many a Traci Lords movie back in the day, when she, Ginger Lynn and Christy Canyon were introduced as fresh new talent and quickly conquered the fans' hearts, but I missed this one.
It begins as a road movie, with Eric Edwards hitch-hiking as a sort of Jack Kerouac left over three decades past the due date. A pig farmer (talented character actor playing rubes: Elmo Lavino) gives him a ride, and Eric marvels at Elmo's current wife (Kristara Barrington) and busty daughter (Heather Thomas) making love in the back of his van. Elmo regales Eric with a clever and vulgar shaggy-dog story about what happened to his previous wives, and the amusing segment ends with Eric hopping into the back of the van for an impromptu threesome.
All sorts of incest are included in the scatterbrained plot and it quickly becomes clear that we're being treated (in 1985, no longer possible now due to censorship) to all manner of irreverent attitudes and behavior, presented in a completely amoral anything-goes package. That's what makes the movie refreshing when viewed today.
Eric's next ride is in a Cadillac courtesy of Paul Thomas, who plays a wealthy owner of a stud farm. He's expecting delivery of a $4,000,000 horse named The Shah, and hires Eric on the spot to do chores around the place. It's slightly confusing about the exact relationships of Paul's female relatives, but Brit porn actress Stevie Taylor plays his uptight wife, and the younger generation comprises Traci Lords as daughter and Rachel Ashley as sister or perhaps Stevie's cousin -lots of dialogue is contradictory. No matter, as everyone has sex climaxing with a fiver-person orgy (including outsider Eric) in this family that lays together.
Script makes fun of itself and everything else, mocking "talking dirty", having Traci boast about her natural breasts (and they are photographed arousingly in all their glory) versus Ashley's augmented ones, and criticizing the prudishness of Stevie's MILF character. Ultimately, a fed-up husband Paul rapes his wife and treats her to violent sex, and of course in time-honored porn tradition she loves it. Much of this content, not just the obvious child-porn presence of Traci, makes this unsuitable content today.
Movie's carefree amorality plays second fiddle to a tiresome plot introduced when the same actor Lavino returns to play a different role: villain Charlie who steals The Shah and later kidnaps Ashley, all to gain ownership of the valuable horse. The antics of his two bumbling goons reduces the show to the level of a Bowery Boys (or perhaps more aptly a 1970s Bethel Buckalew cornpone) movie, or much lower, and much of its slapstick porn comedy style still persists in many a lowest of brow Brazzers vignette.
Hardly a work of art meant to be taken the least bit seriously, this movie has fine production values, expert performances and a liveliness that is hard to resist. It effortlessly demonstrates the difference between "Golden Age" porn where making an actual movie was not a sin versus the current emphasis on the commodified (and oh so boring) all-sex approach.
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