Sextool (1975) - Fred Halsted-Erotica Films

06/08/18

Sextool (1975) - Fred Halsted

The last of this loose trilogy is Sextool. This is probably the most complex of Halsted's films, with radical narrative shifts and some of the — still — raunchiest sex scenes in all of non-amteur gay porn. Sextool features the director's trademark faceless machos: a pair of cops who shove their nightstick up a trick 's ass, and a group of sweaty gangbangers who whip, fuck, and fist a cornfed blonde sailor on a bunk bed without a mattress. This scene offers a distillation of Halsted's world-view. The ruthless abuse of the neatly dressed, boyish, sweet-faced sailor is the director's most pointed assault on everything wholesome that he hated in postwar American culture. The sailor-boy's enthusiastic acceptance of his abuse is Halsted's proof that the mindless "goodness" and optimism of the rising middle class deserved to be attacked, and he does it with gusto. Like the sailor, Joey Yale appears as a too-willing bottom, eagerly embracing the authentic abuse that the real Fred Halsted dishes out. Sadly, the culture wasn't as accommodating as Yale; these films were censored and remain difficult, and in the case of Sextool, virtually impossible to see (much less own) even today outside rare cinematheque and museum screenings.