Misleadingly and ironically titled, KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY is a hard-to-watch, mediocre 1-day wonder, best suited to the old mail-order porn business, but as a regular film revived by Something Weird on Vol. 27 of its Dragon Art Theatre series.
Styled as crypto-kiddie porn, it is merely 4 sex scenes, hooked by the premise of pedophile Peter (Pete Dawson, with a heavy Aussie-accent), preying on underage blonde girls he picks up in the park and lures home where he plies them with gin and rapes them. Title derives from one scene of him satisfying his wife, played by thick-eyelashed porn vet Jan Davis (Dawson's real-life wife and frequent costar), and one can infer that it is anal sex that keeps the two together.
This unwholesome mess comes to its conclusion when disillusioned (after two months of sex w/Pete) Karen, after a heavy masturbation session with a handy vibrator, encounters Pete and Jan on the street but gets no recognition from her bedmate. She's already been told the truth of the matter by another hapless blonde victim Diane.
Very poorly shot, this film shares the distinction of other carelessly made porn efforts by including a scene mid-way through the picture that begins with the director's voice shouting loudly "Okay, action!" off-screen. Dawson, who I saw in a self-serving interview with his wife on the After Hours DVD of FIRES DOWN BELOW, is so convincing in his ad libbed come-ons to the young women that you want to make a citizen's arrest. In one scene he suffers from premature ejaculation (!), left in the film because on these low-4-figures budgets there was no leeway for reshooting. However, the untalented porn actresses playing the blondes must have flunked the improv sessions at Stella Adler's.
Perhaps the hero named Peter with his antipodean accent subliminally suggested to me Kiwi Peter Hack-son's THE LOVELY BONES, but it is worthwhile to make the comparison. Stripped of its irrelevant and costly special effects fantasy sequences, and its numerous red herring "investigation" material by sister, father, weird goth girl and of course typecast cop Michael Imperioli, BONES is built on the same sort of torture-porn (off-screen of course) premise popularized in mainstream films ever since THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.
FAMILY goes the other route, favored by out & out pornmakers, of pretending that forced-sex and date-rape are mythical beasties, and that in fact a smooth-talking relentless creep like Pete Dawson is not only able to force young girls to have sex with him, but make them like it. That's why FAMILY falls into the category of "made by perverts for perverts", and is anathema to the regular porn audience. Of course BONES was a mainstream flop, probably due to inept, anti-climactic storytelling rather than its now-standard off-screen porn premise. I've calculated that BONES' bloated budget (it would have been a far better film without the SPFX), even accounting for inflation (its cost is comparable in '70s terms to the level of an AIRPORT or a PATTON), would have paid for ALL of the 1 and 2-day wonders of porn made during the transition to hardcore era of 1970 through 1973.
IMDb dates KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY as a 1973 picture, but Karen at one point is standing across the street from a theater marquee displaying Ingmar Bergman's THE PASSION OF ANNA, a 1970 release in the U.S., so unless it was a revival house the film was made in the 1970/1971 time frame when ANNA was playing off in art houses, first-run.
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