Smoker: The Hallucigenia of Early Porn Films

Poor Angie. Kidnapped, tied up and raped, and a lot more of that in store for her in the film.

Vidcap from Smoker (1983).

I don’t really know a LOT about porn from the 1970s and early 1980s, but I do know one thing about them: some of them were weird, deeply weird, in all sorts of unexpected and sometimes wonderful ways. Just like the animals of the Cambrian explosion.

And Smoker is just such a film. It has a plot, and dialogue. A ridiculous plot and some pretty good dialogue that led to one unexpected great scene in the film that almost every reviewer missed.

OK, here’s the ridiculous plot: The parts needed to build a device that can blow up the world (yes, the entire world) have been implanted in a bunch of working vibrators and sold to innocent customers. The bad guys, are led by Sharon Mitchell (who can actually act) as Madame Suque. Suquie is after the world-ending vibrators so her two henchmen (Ron Jeremy and Eric Edwards) are running around kidnapping the women who have unwittingly bought the vibrators and tying them up and fucking them to get the locations of said vibrators out of them.

Well I SAID the plot was ridiculous.

One of the women captured is Angie, played by Troye Lane. Troye is an unhappy captive, her expression and attitude expressing mostly indifference and dull anger which is carried on throughout her big sex scene, which is an amazing scene, actually. It’s the reason I decided to write this review. Here’s a vidcap of the scene:

Poor Angie. Naked, tied up, and sucking on Ron Jeremy's cock while Eric Edwards fucks her pussy and Sharon Mitchell soliloquizes. 

The reason the scene is so good is that as Madam Suque’s henchmen are raping Angie head and tail at the same time, Madam Suque delivers a strange little soliloquy. To wit:

Lady Suque: In the end it is good not to care at all. But I can't help it, I get caught up in caring.

Henchman: What do you care about, boss?

Lady Suque: I care about power. I want my power to run though myself alone. I can't wield my power effectively through others. It's limited to me, my own control over my own actions. I find myself powerless. I can hate as much as I want, or want something as much as I like, but all this humanity gets in the way. You know, I actually feel completely and effectively trapped.

Angie: Mmmph!

Lady Suque: Poor dear. You feel the same way, too, don't you??

Actually, there’s more, but that sets the tone for you. And while it’s not the greatest soliloquy since Shakespeare, it’s so far ahead of most porn movie dialogue it might as well be. What makes it especially effective is poor hapless Angie hanging in the ropes and being fucked in the mouth and pussy and being unable to move. Mitchell plays her role as almost a comic book villian, speaking almost all of her lines archly. Think kinky Cruella DeVille. It works strangely well for the soliloquy, her archness contrasting sharply with Angie’s stubborn anger despite her helplessness.

I’ll put a link down below so you can watch Smoker on your own and decide for yourself if I’m right about the scene. The soliloquy starts at the twenty minute mark, though there is a lot of sexual bondage with Angie prior to it, and some more nice dialogue from Sharon.

The writing and directing credits are given to Veronika Rocket, a female director in the early days of porn. I don’t know if the scene was a happy accident or an intentional success. I would like to think it was an intentional success, and given how powerful it turned out to be, I hope it was. But many scenes argue otherwise.

However, Veronika Rocket knew EXACTLY what she was doing when she wrote that soliloquy, and I suspect she knew what she was doing when she directed that scene with Angie suffering helplessly as Madame Suque spoke.

Here’sthe URL for Smoker 1983 on the PornOne website. The action starts exactly twenty minutes in.

However, the rest of the movie has flaws, serious flaws, even by porn standards. The worst flaw is that much of the movie is seriously underlit. Some of the scenes are almost entirely dark. The worst example is an earlier scene in Angie’s bondage rape, where she’s tied standing up in the doorframe and is being DPed by Jeremy and Edwards. Early on they shift the camera POV to on the floor looking up from between everyone’s legs so everyone can get a good view of Tabs A and B going into and out of Slots C and D. The lighting is so bad that many of the frames are pitch dark, many other are just pink blobs in the darkness. I don’t think there is a single scene where you can see both cocks going in and out of both holes. One or the other is always in shadow.

The best lit vidcap I could get of this scene. I didn't make any vidcaps of the worst lit scenes because you can get the same effect by imagining a black square. I kid you not.

If there were a video on how not to shoot a DP scene, this movie’s scene would DEFINITELY serve as an example.

There are other issues, too, but let’s talk now about Hallucigenia. Hallucigenia is an animal found in the Burgess Shales that dates back to the Cambrian explosion. Here’s an artist’s reconstruction of it:

Hallucigenia. What a hopeful little monster. Very well named little fella!

Image source: From this Youtube video.

You have to admit, it’s one of the weirdest things to ever crawl on the ocean bottom and suck mud, and that’s saying something in a world where creatures like this exist:

Image source: I found this image on Youtube somewhere a long time ago, and I couldn't leave it behind.

The Cambrian explosion ran from 541 to 485 BCE, and was characterized by a huge burst of evolutionary diversity, as all of the major kinds of animals that now exist evolved. And in the process, many species that are absolutely weird evolved, as there were a lot of new ecological niches to exploit with no competition yet. Hence, Hallucigenia and quite a few other animals that make even paleontologists go, “Bwuh?” The sharp evolutionary competition that allows only the most efficient animals to survive did not yet exist.

And I think Hallucigenia is linked to Smoker in that Smoker also came into a time when porn had made a leap to a new cultural niche. The home videotape machine brought porn into every household. Every guy who wanted to watch porn could do so, easily, with the purchase of a VCR and a videotape. Or later, the rental of a videotape. Porn suddenly had a huge new market to exploit, and no one was sure what form of porn would work best for that market.

That’s why we had a lot of porn films that were kind of like real movies. That had plots and dialogue over and above, “Wanna fuck?” Yeah!” boomchickawowow.

And I think Smoker was one such film, if only in the mind of Veronika Rocket. It never caught on, but it had something to it. What if that dialogue had been noticed, and emulated in BDSM videos? Could have been a whole different world.

Best Use of "Mmph!" In A XXX Film, EVAH!

One of the most humiliating bondage positions ever. Talk about "Assume the position!"

Way back in 1983, when feminists were getting their back hair up about maledom/femsub bondage imagery, there were some XXX films that pushed the envelope in that regard, and Smoker is definitely one of them.

It was also quite funny at times.

Smoker was a XXX spy spoof about a McGuffinesque series of bomb parts disguised as vibrators that would be used in a bomb designed to blow up the world.

A box of these devices accidentally gets sent to a sex shop and sold to various hotties, as often occurs in XXX land. One of the hotties is Angie (played by Troye Lane, apparently her only movie role ever according to IMDB. I personally don't buy it ... this face looks familiar. (See below.)


"Have you seen me? Really, if anyone recognizes this actress, please post a response.

Angie's innocent purchase leads her to a whirlwind of spy intrigue when spies get the idea that she has accidentally purchased one of the bomb parts. They kidnap her, tie her up and attempt to get her to divulge the vibrator's location by having sex with her while she's tied up, as any group of villainous spies would.

Unfortunately, Angie's vibrator has been stolen by a voyeur and she doesn't know where it is. Of course, the spies just think Angie's protestations of innocence mean she's a really tough nut to crack, so it's lots more bondage and sex for her.

This sets up our great use of "Mmph!" The head of the spy ring is Lady Suque, ably played by Sharon Mitchell. She's assisted by two goons, Freddy played by Ron Jeremy, and "Henchman" played by Eric Edwards.

At one point, Freddy and Henchman have Angie tied up as seen above. Freddy is getting head from Angie and Henchman is taking Angie doggy style, both at the same time. Angie's just taking it, about all she can do, bound as she is, while Lady Suque ... soliloquizes. Angie's predicament is much more clearly illustrate here. Note the way Lady Suque joins in dominating Angie by controlling the ropes around her chest.

Lady Suque's speech is your classic villainous self-justification bullshit soliloquizing:

Lady Suque: In the end it is good not to care at all. But I can't help it, I get caught up in caring.

Henchman: What do you care about, boss?

Lady Suque: I care about power. I want my power to run though myself alone. I can't wield my power effectively through others. It's limited to me, my own control over my own actions. I find myself powerless. I can hate as much as I want, or want something as much as I like, but all this humanity gets in the way. You know, I actually feel completely and effectively trapped.

Angie: Mmmph!

Lady Suque: Poor dear. You feel the same way, too, don't you??

It's hard to believe that porn films used to have writing like this. This is one genre that has not improved over time. US porn went on a reckless race to the bottom and stayed there. What a shame.

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A word of caution. According to IMDB trivia, the most current version of this film has all the sexual bondage imagery excised. That means the particular scene I've cited and a subsequent one of Lady Suque in four point suspension, ballgagged and molested with a bomb part/vibrator, are both gone. The censors may have left in the scene of Angie lying naked on a cot, one foot cuffed to the wall, and one of the Sloan twins tied arms over head with her entire head wrapped in a bandage. This version has a 66-minute run time, I would advise against buying it.

In the interests of full disclosure, the version I have of "Smoker" is censored, too.
It has had all the explicit hardcore imagery removed -- there are no genitals "in action" to be seen in the version I watched. I am sure there must have been an uncensored version released on VHS at one point, but try finding it nowadays. This is a film that the censors just can't keep their grubby little paws off of. In short, a good film.