Scarecrow's Up at Night #1

This will sort of be one of those Friday/early Saturday insomnia kind of on/off again ongoing threads I might drop from time to time. After watching a block of X-Files, I decided on The HitchHiker and Black Tie Nights.

The Hitchhiker – Videodate

Gregg Henry is a sleazy electronics salesman with a clipboard at home featuring all the photographs of “chicks” he has bedded through manipulative means (like dating tapes) who doesn’t anticipate being the next “exhibit” for “video artist”, Shannon Tweed. Tweed seems to be a seductress and Henry only gladly obliges what he believes to be an easy lay. As you see initially at the start of the episode, he is able to bed a career woman he takes to Tweed’s art exhibit, which includes mannequins with television sets as heads displaying recorded scenarios and activity.

Henry doesn’t realize Tweed takes an interest in him as the next “star” of a new project. Henry is a creep who lives in a ratty apartment, working an arrangement with a maî·tre d who supplies him a loft to impress ladies he dupes into believing he’s some hotshot he’s really not. Tweed sends him a videotape with her removing her bra right before it blurs, just enough bait to lure him into a trap he’s unaware of. Bound to bed expecting something kinky he isn’t expecting a rigged bed set on a timer!!! This is still right before the Tweed era of dominating the erotic thriller/drama late night cable of the 90s, the first season of the anthology series, The Hitchhiker, in 1985. The emphasis on television and video really transplants you into what most of today’s tech age would consider a prehistoric time. Fans of anthology horror won’t find what they are looking for here. Paige’s lines as the host crack me up.

Black Tie Nights – “A Girl Thing”

While Cinemax would continue to push the envelope as the internet boomed with harder pornographic content, Black Tie Nights was still very much part of the lighter softcore content of the early 2000s. “A Girl Thing” will perhaps make particular sections of today’s audience cringe. This is very much of its time. Perhaps, despite really only being about fifteen years old, BTN might even be considered a relic of its era. Nonetheless, most fans of harder sexual content just probably won’t consider this series all that interesting. Cooper and Olivia meet with a businesswoman, Helen (Grace Tom), looking to date again after a two year hiatus. Cooper is sure she’s gay while Olivia humors her. Their male secretary, Ryan (Glen Meadows), isn’t so sure and Cooper makes a bet with him that if Helen has sex with the woman they set her up with (unbeknownst to Helen), Bobbi Ann Harris (my favorite softcore actress, Monique Parent), he must buy her an expensive dinner. The ongoing subplot of the series is the flirty nature of Cooper and Ryan, while Olivia takes Cooper to task for her one night stands and numerous sexual partners, no love pursuits as much as just satisfying her desires and cravings. Olivia can sense, though, that Cooper is interested in Ryan, offering to fire him to see if she would advocate for his staying.

Meanwhile Helen realizes, after a pleasant dinner with Bobbi (she is led to believe that she is meeting a guy named Bobby) where the conversation steers towards talk of coming out and charades leading to a sexual awakening (Bobbi was engaged to a guy but ends up making out with a girl he invites for a potential ménage e trios that doesn’t go according to his plan), that she might be interested in women instead of men. This leads to a picnic on the beach at sunset, culminating in Helen and Bobbi making love. Another matchmaking success! For those wanting to know about the “action”, you have Meadows imagining a romp with Hendra (Bolton at the time) on the stairs (he begins to fantasize about her a lot), Hendra briefly engaged in another stairwell makeout with some random no-name stud, Parent with her first woman (Arellano as Jessee Lynn), and Parent with Tom on the beach. Each sex scene is clipped together to last for barely two minutes, simulated with a little bit of kissing, some slight cunnilingus, but mostly undressing. The hardest was perhaps Meadows and Hendra. I think Hendra’s ease in front of the camera and her comfortable sensuality help a lot. I just can’t see folks who want a lot more explicit sexual activity finding the quickie routines sped through within the 25 minute running time all that gratifying. These shows were a dime a dozen on Cinemax during the era of “Passion Cove”, “Hotline”, and “Erotic Seductions”.