The late great Chuck Vincent concocted a wide variety of superior hardcore sex comedies, the likes of which tend to divide critics between those who can appreciate the addition of a certain wit and elegance to standard sexual set-ups and those who find that these same additions only detract from what porn's supposed to be all about in the first place. Yet both camps seem to agree however that JACK 'N' JILL easily qualifies as his overall best achievement.
Samantha Fox, turning in an absolute career best performance, and Jack Wrangler, who had just crossed over from the gay side of the adult industry via Sam Weston's criminally underrated CHINA SISTERS a year before, strike sparks off one another as the titular couple, forever looking for additional thrills to spice up an apparently healthy and playful relationship. They swing awkwardly with best friends Merle Michaels and Eric Edwards, their monumentally teasing game of strip poker providing the perfect build-up to a beautifully heartfelt, side by side mix 'n' match pay off. A bungled experiment with voyeurism hilariously leads to the kind of mistake we would all like to make as Jill puts the moves on bewildered but eminently boink-able phone repair guy Ron Hudd, a real life sculptor who did porno on the side to make ends meet !
Perhaps ranking as the best of all is the couple's deliriously disastrous experience with an oddball pair of theatrically inspired swingers, played to the hilt by Vanessa Del Rio and "Roger Caine" a/k/a Al Levitsky from George Romero's vampire cult classic MARTIN, whose idea of a raunchy good time is to put on a sexed-up rendition of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. Honestly ! Porn's all time sweetest kink queen, the inimitable Annie Sprinkle, plays nice to Rikki O'Neal's nasty butch as dueling dirty phone callers who reveal themselves as Jill's first year anniversary presents to her spouse. Submissive slave boy George Payne, another refugee from gay porn at the time, represents Jack's surprise for the wife in a deliberately slow, almost mesmerizing encounter that makes for the sweetest change of pace.
No mere rundown of the film's erotic events can properly communicate the infectious sense of fun and mischief with which Vincent approached this even way back then already hackneyed material. Dialog duly sparkles, cast chemistry is close to perfection and the sex has a curious innocence current carnal epics could never recapture even if they were so inclined. One just shudders to think what a present day pornographer would make of this film's justly celebrated opening gag that has an as yet to be narratively introduced Jill posing as a spectacularly foulmouthed hooker called Lucy out to harass poor Jack, who then turns the tables on her by giving every bit as good as he got. Vincent treats the resulting scene with a frothy lightness of touch that creatively counteracts the progressively raunchier interaction between the two, effectively eliminating the potentially tasteless sting from its tail. Classic carnality that will truly continue to stand the test of time !
