In THE VELVET TRAP, Julie (Jamie Karson) is a looker making a living in a roadside diner pouring coffee and getting ogled by the clientele. Her drunken short-order cook boss is jealous of every man who looks at her and accuses her of sleeping with them. When he rapes her, Julie flees into the arms of Brad (Alan Jeffory) a photographer who has been wanting her to pose for him. No sooner does he abruptly marry Julie and they head off to Vegas than he tricks her into doing a bikini photo shoot (when the non-existent model does not show up). On their wedding night, he also snaps some photos of her while she is showering and then runs off with all of her money in the morning. Julie pawns her wedding ring for $7.50 and buys a bus ticket but she is then robbed by a purse-snatcher. The man who comes to her aid (in league with the purse-snatcher we discover) offers her a ride and takes her to a desert bordello where she is forced into prostitution. And then her first client dies...

THE VELVET TRAP's femme-noir setting is a world where "Love is the king of four letter words" where women don't so much "get what they deserve" for being tempting so much as they are from the outset assumed to be whores and the rightful prey of conniving men and complicit women. Without exception, the men in Julie's life use and abuse her for money and kicks. Things are grim and stay grim. Nudity is rather chaste for the most part. The shower scene is the film's big peekaboo moment in which what seems to be a hose sprays water onto a glass plate in front of the nude Julie (who never seems to get wet). All of the interiors are transparently sets (very likely the same ones redressed) and while that means controlled lighting conditions resulting in a nice-looking film, the settings also lack a palpable squalidness and the lighting looks very much like a sixties TV show rather than the grim nudie noir piece it wants to be.

In HOT NIGHTS ON CAMPUS, country girl Sally (Gigi Darlene) heads to New York to start college. John, a friend of the family and professor at her college has arranged for her to share a large apartment with several other girls. She quickly discovers that college parties are racier than anything she's ever encountered before as her roommates conduct an orgy in the middle of their apartment living room while she makes small talk with sensitive athlete Stan. John tells her that this is all part of growing up and that she will have to face it (and then he puts the moves on her). Pretty soon Sally is seeing both John and Stan (who meet her for encounters in the apartment which seems to always be conveniently empty despite the fact that five other girls live there). When Sally's funds run low, she models for a mens magazine and discovers that her attack of nausea isn't from guilt. She's pregnant and she doesn't know whether John or Stan is the father (especially without Maury Povich's DNA paternity testing available).

While not as well-made as THE VELVET TRAP, HOT NIGHTS ON CAMPUS (which only ever shows us the same campus exterior and two blank walls for a classroom) is shot on real New York interiors (and grabbed exteriors) and has more of a time-capsule quality to it. Star Gigi Darlene looks a bit like eighties Madonna (including the pointy bra) and the rest of the cast are generally attractive but are not called on to do much emoting since the entire film is narrated ostensibly by the protagonist (with the exception of the opening narration by an authoritative male voice warning of the temptations to the youth who flock to college towns every year). Shot in 1966, the sex and nudity is still very much of the teasing variety but was probably quite surprising at the time and considered abundant by those standards. While the film alone might not make for the most stimulating viewing -- intellectual or otherwise -- HOT NIGHTS ON CAMPUS works well as a co-feature (and it probably was when shown back in 1966). Director Tony Orlando is not THE Tony Orlando but a sixties filmmaker with three nudie features to his credit (including this one) and the cinematographer/editor was the prolific C. Davis Smith who collaborated on several works by prolific sixties female exploitation director Doris Wishman (of which, several of her features contained narration and entirely post-recorded dialogue with the camera never focusing on the mouths or sometimes even the faces of the actors during spoken exchanges).

Eric Cotenas