The Irving Klaw Classics: Volume 1-4

This four-disc anthology drawn from the 1951-56 oeuvre of Irving Klaw, the self-styled “King of Pin Ups,” is both exhaustive and exhausting, as Klaw's non-pornographic bondage and fetish films are among the least intriguing girlie movies in existence, featuring models who often appear to be either mildly distracted or just plain indifferent while posing for Klaw's 8mm camera. On “The Bettie Page Films,” “The Wrestling Films,” “The Fetish Films,” and “The Dance Films,” the Klaw cuties wrestle, vamp, dance, and jiggle with the mechanical monotony of theme park automatons, and even the elusive pinup icon Page (the only Klaw player to achieve any degree of fame, albeit belatedly in the recent theatrical release The Notorious Bettie Page) is so dull that one has to wonder how she was able to generate any degree of fan worship (the disc featuring Page includes some nude footage never seen before—hard to imagine since nearly all of the shorts here have turned up on video and DVD in earlier offerings). In fairness, these weird old flicks never looked and sounded better, thanks to a new digital transfer and original scores to enhance the dialogue-free antics. But after four-and-a-half hours, this collection becomes too much of a not-so-good thing and only the most diehard scholar of vintage fetishism could tolerate for long the antiseptic silliness that Klaw produced so obsessively. Not a necessary purchase. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)