Sin Magazine is a rather strange 1965 American sexploitation feature.
It opens with a nightmare sequence. The guy having the nightmare is Ross. He wakes up in bed with his mistress. She’s not very happy. He’s not performing in the bedroom.
We discover that Ross has a double life. He has a wife and a farm in New England and a reasonably respectable existence there, but he also has a mistress and a less respectable existence in Manhattan.
Ross is a writer. Naturally he thought he was going to be a critically acclaimed author, winning literary prizes and being lionised by the literati. Instead he writes for a scandal magazine. He runs the magazine with his two brothers.
The two brothers also live on the New England farm. One of the brothers, Otis, does the photography. The brothers have found commercial success by transforming the magazine into a bit of a girlie magazine.
The domestic arrangements involving Ross, his wife, his brother Bill, Bill’s wife and Otis are tense. Otis is a womaniser of the love ’em and leave ’em variety. Ross does not approve. Otis also has more than a passing interest in Lisa, Bill’s wife.
Ross has a bit of an interest in Lisa as well.
So we have the makings here of a romantic-sexual melodrama and it’s done in an overheated (hysterical might be a better word) style.
The movie also tries to be a portrait of a man (Ross) slowly disintegrating. We get the feeling that Ross has probably never been particularly stable. Now he’s tortured by shame, guilt and resentment because he’s churning out sleaze instead of writing the Great American Novel.
Ross becomes progressively more angry and bitter. He takes out a lot of his resentment on Otis. It’s not just that Otis is a womaniser. Otis is the one who takes the nudie photos. That’s how the magazine makes its money and that’s the money on which Ross lives but he cannot accept that.
He gets even more upset when Lisa starts posing for Otis. Lisa is a bit conflicted. She’s happy to pose for Otis because if she acts as the magazine’s main model it will save money. She does however worry abut the morality of it all. She worries that they’re corrupting their models. After all once a girl has posed topless for a magazine her future can only be a descent into utter degradation. No man is going to marry a girl who has bared her breasts for a magazine.
We know that major trouble is brewing but the over-the-top ending still comes out of left field.
Mostly the acting is what you expect in an ultra low budget movie but the performance of the actor playing Ross is something else again. It starts off totally unhinged and gets progressively more so. It’s not good acting but it sure is memorable.
This seems to be writer-director Al Mitchel’s only credit. He certainly had a different approach to sexploitation.
There’s very little nudity. In fact the lack of nudity makes one wonder exactly what market was being targeted.
Sin Magazine is included in a Something Weird triple-header DVD release which also includes The Sin Syndicate (1965) and the oddly depraved She Came on the Bus (1969). They all fit vaguely into the roughie sub-genre. Sin Magazine gets a fullframe transfer which is quite correct. Image quality isn’t exactly great but it’s acceptable and this is a movie that works better for looking a bit rough.
Sin Magazine is an oddity. In fact all three movies in this set are slightly odd and they’re all pretty scuzzy in their own different ways. All I can say about Sin Magazine is that it isn’t particularly good but it is different and if you like your movies a bit deranged you might well enjoy it.