Andy Milligan brings true pathos to the denizens of the FLESHPOT ON 42ND STREET in Vinegar Syndrome's incredible Blu-ray restoration.

Dusty Cole (Laura Cannon, FORCED ENTRY) is a former street walker shacked up with middle-aged Tony (Richard Towers, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT). While he complains that she does not clean and has not found a job, Dusty thinks sex should be enough and decides to rob him and pawn his belonging when he gives her an ultimatum. She similarly robs pawnbroker Sammy (Earle Edgerton, CARNIVAL OF BLOOD) when she thinks he is trying to fleece her and only promises to give her more money if she gives him a blowjob. Dusty runs into old friend Cherry (GURU THE MAD MONK's Neil Flanagan billed under drag name "Lynn Flanagan") and they decide to split the rent as roommates. Dusty proves more popular than Cherry, turning one of her regular tricks Jimmie (Paul Matthews, THE ORAL GENERATION) whose tastes run to the rough and kinky. In the interim, she meets straight-laced lawyer Bob (Harry Reems, DEEP THROAT) who whisks her away to his late mother's home in Staten Island where they share a passionate night that has Dusty contemplating settling down ("We're all hustlers," Bob says when she reveal that she is a prostitute). Torn between her love for Bob and her obligation to Cherry, she decides to take one fateful last job for Jimmie and his poker buddies (Tony Johnson, VAPORS' Ron Keith, and ALTAR OF LUST's Fred J. Lincoln).

Although Andy Milligan is primarily known to exploitation fans for his dimestore gothic melodramas like BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS, TORTURE DUNGEON, and THE GHASTLY ONES, the off-off-Broadway actor/playwright/chic dress designer had started out started out in the late sixties helming half-a-dozen sexploitation films for producer William Mishkin with irresistible titles like THE DEGENERATES, DEPRAVED!, GUTTER TRASH, and THE FILTHY FIVE. Unfortunately, all but the short film VAPORS and an incomplete workprint of Milligan's magnum opus THE COMPASS ROSE survive from this period, the others either lost or destroyed by Mishkin. 1973's FLESHPOT ON 42ND STREET was a return to the genre in between Milligan's horror heyday and his later, lesser but no less quirky horrors of the mid-to-late seventies and eighties like BLOOD, CARNAGE, and the duo of MONSTROSITY and THE WEIRDO (both on Blu-ray from Garagehouse Pictures). FLESHPOT is not so much of a departure since his horror and sexploitation films are thematically consistent no matter how disparate the content. They focus on various kinds of outcast, either born with the deck stacked against them or alienated from conformity; and often labeled as deviants while being victimized by the hypocritical whose better conceal their own degeneracy. Dusty seems very much an unsympathetic character but we come to understand her worldview in which, servicing various henpecked men who look to her to do what their wives will not, she comes to picture marriage as a variation on prostitution in which the wife trades ass for comfort and those who do not should be "trained" to so by husbands who do not deserve any better if they do not assert themselves. Her affection for Bob seems genuine, but seasoned Milligan viewers know that characters who seem to good must either reveal a monstrous side or meet a tragic fate from an unforgiving world. Milligan's whores, from Flanagan's Cherry (who we are not quite sure until late in the film whether he is supposed to be passing for a real female or whose character is actually a transvestite) to the Simmons sisters (M.A. Whiteside and Dorin McGough), are flamboyant and frumpy but reveal pathos beneath their bitterness and bitchiness. The film is technically hardcore but penetration does not occur until fifty-odd minutes into the film and there are no money shots, but the short sequences manage to convey a believable sense of tenderness.

FLESHPOT ON 42ND STREET was released by Mishkin's company in a hardcore version with the FLESHPOT title (~87 minutes) and a softcore version as THE GIRLS OF 42ND STREET (~78 minutes). While the hardcore version disappeared from circulation, the softcore version turned up in a hardmatted VHS/DVD-R transfer from Something Weird Video. The damage to the element whittled the film down to roughly seventy-four minutes. A better condition element of the softcore version turned up from Vinegar Syndrome on their now defunct streaming service running the correct seventy-eight minutes. A Blu-ray edition was announced by American Genre Film Archive but they pushed it back when they were dissatisfied with the master and would eventually remove it from their slate while endorsing Vinegar Syndrome's announced Blu-ray. For Vinegar Syndrome's Blu-ray/DVD combo, they were able to access the original uncut 16mm camera reversal element with the hardcore scenes intact. No final mix was available with these materials and no 35mm intermediate or print materials survived for the hardcore cut, requiring Vinegar Syndrome to reconstruct the audio using the original recorded audio, pre-mix music elements, and sections of a 35mm release print of the softcore version. Although there are one or two instances where the music on the DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono track sounds as obtrusively "apart" from the rest of the mix as some of the additions Alternative Cinema did to their Sarno transfers to copyright them and the original audio has its limitations (with some location dialogue occasionally sounding minutely clipped), this is overall an admirable job of restoration that amounts to a rescue. The superiority of the picture element seems almost secondary, but the material is almost spotless with the occasional jitter and some very prominent hairs in the gate. The film was composed to 1.33:1 and we get a 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC pillarboxed option for that along with a 1.85:1 one simulating what would have been seen theatrically (with prefatory text noting that the release prints were not only hard-matted but also slightly zoomed in, possibly to crop out some glimpse of genetalia). Optional English SDH subtitles are included for both viewing options. The softcore version is not included, but the differences amount to deletions rather than alternate footage.