Nothing benefited the world of sexy cinema more than the sexual revolution, with filmmakers across the world hopping on the chance to make morally relevant skin flicks that could find a receptive audience and stand up in court. One filmmaker who took full advantage of the situation was English producer-director Stanley Long, who oversaw multiple films dealing with sexual hot topics of the era in a format not far off from what West Germany did with its Schoolgirl Report series. Initially a purveyor of mild nudie cutie shorts and a cameraman on numerous classics like Repulsion, he eventually made a mint in the late '70s with his Adventures sex comedies riding off the popular Confessions one. Before that in the early '70s, he teamed up with director Derek Ford, another big name on the sexploitation scene who would later go on to helm one of the wildest hardcore horror films ever, Diversions, which is still in desperate need of a good release somewhere.

The first teaming of Long and Ford was an instant smash: 1970's The Wife Swappers, an episodic look at the world of swingers in London essentially with a more sexually frank depiction of what had recently fueled the Hollywood hit, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. After a memorable prologue in which a blindfolded woman is driven across town, stripped naked, and led to a lake where she swims to a boat, the film delivers candid street interviews and a prim psychiatrist narrator to set up its four stories about the now-common practice of married people swapping sex partners all over town, "a minority group by no means typical of urban life." For example, you'll take a night drive to an established wife-swapping club for married fashion criminals Paul (Scum's Donnelly) and Ellen (St. John), who have lost sexual interest in each other after seven years and stay together for their child. Then there's their creepy neckerchief-crazy pal Leonard (Zulu's Taylor) who pops by and talks them into the lifestyle over a game of strip poker with his lascivious wife, Jean (Hayward). Ellen ends up getting initiated into a masked swingers' club where she has to perform with her first partner in front of her husband, which segues into a rapey foursome on a weekend boat trip down the river for another set of couples. And how about a "thrill club" where everyone gets dared to act out as scandalously as possible in public? Finally a game of blind man's bluff with an adult twist and the situation of Marion (Fraser), the woman we saw taking a swim at the beginning, who gets stern instructions over the phone as part of a kinky elaborate partner-swapping organization and eventually has a nervous breakdown.

Despite the subject matter, this one is tame enough that you can see how audiences could go to see it without getting too bent out of shape, and the moralistic narration comparing the practice to alcohol and drug addiction is enough to seal the deal. The tone here is quite serious apart from some funny street interviews, with about the same amount of nudity you'd see in a Hammer vampire movie of the period. The formula worked, and it ended up getting picked up for American distribution as well under the shortened title The Swappers. Occasionally there is a moment that might surprise, like a late one in which a pushy husband gets his sexist double standards about same-sex activity thrown back in his face by his wife Sheila (Garland). This one ended up on VHS in numerous editions over the years, eventually making it to DVD in the U.K. from Slam Dunk as part of its "X Films of the Saucy 70s" line, presented full screen with no extras and running 82m9s in PAL. The transfer here from the negative looks beautiful, is presented at the preferred 1.33:1 aspect ratio, and comes with a DTS-HD MA 2.0 English mono track and optional English subtitles.

Sharing space on the first disc is another Long-Ford film released later the same year, Groupie Girl, which is clearly aimed at a much younger market. Leaning heavier on the drama and delivering a minimal amount of nudity, Groupie Girl also earned an American release and circulated under the title I Am a Groupie, which often caused it to be confused with another 1970 film from West Germany, I, a Groupie with Ingrid Steeger. The major attraction for this one is actually its fantastic soundtrack, which earned a U.K. and German vinyl release at the time and later got issued on CD paired up with Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Real-life band Opal Butterfly appears in the film and contributed a couple of songs, but all the music here is top notch including three standout ones from The English Roses. The film itself basically plays like a more sad-eyed version of Almost Famous as young Sally (Johns) decides she wants to hit the road and become a groupie for Opal Butterfly, with all the free love and partying that entails. She essentially gets swapped around between rockers on the scene, complete with wild parties, lots and lots of van driving in the rain, a major traffic accident, a cat fight, a dogged police inspector, and other inconveniences before she ends up sadder and wiser.

Not too far off in tone from what Pete Walker would be doing for the next decade (especially Home After Midnight), Groupie Girl is quite a dark look at the day-to-day nature of being a band on tour, here with a very English flavor complete with the decadent, flurry outfit-wearing bad boys sitting around sipping cups of tea. After its initial theatrical run, this was a fairly tough film to see in decent quality with only a very fuzzy British VHS out there for many years. Eventually Slam Dunk put it out with no extras as part of that same DVD line, coming in at 83m3s in PAL speed. The Blu-ray looks gorgeous, with more saturated colors and stronger flesh tones compared to the DVD along with far more detail. Again it's accurately framed at 1.33:1 and plays better that way than matted off to 1.66:1 or 1.85:1. Also on the first Blu-ray are a major find, the once-rumored "Continental" scenes shot for both films which have never been seen on video before and were saved from extinction at the last second in 2024. The 10m11s batch for The Wife Swappers (10m11s) is strictly softcore (though one actor is visibly a lot more excited than what was probably planned) and pads out a group sex party scene and the boat sequence with additional actors groping each other. The extensive additional footage for Groupie Girl (17m42s) is simply insane, adding a lot of sexual activity with completely different characters in the van and at the house from the final third of the film; here the line gets crossed into unsimulated oral sex, albeit not very well shot, along with weirdness like a naked woman having eggs broken all over her body. How on earth any of this could have slotted into the actual is anyone's guess as it's so insanely removed from the look and tone. British film historian Gavin Whitaker provides an audio commentary for both of these segments, explaining what they were for, how they fit in with what Ford and Long were doing at this point in their careers, and the story behind how they were discovered.

Then on the second Blu-ray we start with 1972's Sex and the Other Woman, essentially a feature-length justification for men to have a wandering eye and helplessly succumb to any temptress who crosses their path. It's also another episodic look at British sexual attitudes hosted by a lecturer (British comedy staple Wattis) at a desk. A quick sketch at the beginning introduces us to hapless old Henry (Mullins) who likes to bust out his inflatable sex doll when his wife goes out for errands, which is no substitute for a bona fide mistress. After all, “man is essentially a polygamous creature… who finds it difficult to stifle his natural instinct when mesmerized by a beautiful female.” From there we get four vignettes illustrating the different types of “other women” out there who can lead men astray, starting with “gold digger” lingerie model Liz (The Love Box’s Wright) sets her sights on rich, married Reggie (The Deadly Bees’ Bailey) with a private charter plane on which she wastes no time seducing him away from his marital commitments. After they get photographed in the act by his wife, things don’t quite go as planned. Then “ready-made target” Chris (Dunn) starts his new accounting job and immediately gets distracted by “office vamp” Lisa the Teaser (The Flesh and Blood Show’s Cardew) who keeps squeezing by his chair. His homemaker wife Sue (Brown) says she’d be devastated if he ever started “larking around,” but when the inevitable happens, the result takes a turn back home. Middle-aged architect Guy (Young) goes astray next when his teenaged daughter Louise (Rush) brings home a friend, Sarah (Devonshire), who finds him “dishy” and makes a play for him during a painting session while the family’s away. Finally we meet Ted (Mason), who’s having an ongoing fling down the street with Shirley (Pajo), best friend of his wife, Barbara (Meale) under the guise of playing darts with his pub pals. When a nosy neighbor sends an accusatory letter in the mail, Barbara comes up with a novel solution to her predicament.

Surprisingly subdued on comedy compared to most British sex films but fast-paced and jammed with equal opportunity nudity, Sex and the Other Woman finds Long adapting ably in his post-Ford period including a great rock-heavy patchwork soundtrack from the De Wolf music library (with particularly great use of The Cool’s “Highway Song” and Alan Parker’s “The Hawk”). It also has a little more nuance than you might expect for the time, getting more complicated and fair-handed with its characters as the running time chugs along. Sex and the Other Woman appeared on DVD in 2003 the U.S. from Image Entertainment licensed from Salvation, featuring the trailer and bonus trailers for Justine and Prey. Cut down and running way too fast at 79m46s (as well as swapping the order of the first two stories), the transfer looked watchable at the time but gets completely trampled by the Blu-ray edition which looks like years better. The framing adjustment to 1.66:1 from 1.33:1 adds more on the sides while paring down a bit at the bottom, and every aspect you can imagine improves radically here.

Finally the second disc wraps up with another example of easily-confused movies coming out the same year. 1975's Eskimo Nell is way more comedy than sex film, ostensibly adapting the notorious dirty joke poem but instead using it as a hook for a farce about low-budget English filmmaking. For some reason, another (more faithful and nakeder) Australian film directed by Richard Franklin was released the same year, The True Story of Eskimo Nell. This British one was part of a brief early stint in sexploitation for director Martin Campbell (after the solid The Sex Thief with David Warbeck two years earlier, with the now-forgotten fun pop music comedy Three for All wedged in between) before he hit the big time with GoldenEye, Casino Royale, and The Mask of Zorro among others. Michael Armstrong, the sort-of director and co-writer of Mark of the Devil, appears here as ambitious aspiring director Dennis Morrison who goes to exploitation producer Benny U. Murdoch (Kinnear) and starts wrangling for cash with the aid of some of his buddies. Some embezzlement and an absconded leading lady later, he's left cornered and having to satisfy multiple backers by shooting multiple different Eskimo Nell projects injecting elements of a wholesome family romp, a kung fu, a gender-bender western, a musical, and other insane silliness.

Though it wasn't a big hit at home when it first opened, Eskimo Nell has had a long life including multiple VHS editions and a 2015 upgrade from 88 Films in the U.K. as separate Blu-ray and DVD options (with the Blu-ray now very rare and pricey for some reason). In the interim its reputation has improved among those approaching it more as a goofball comedy, in keeping with other cheeky looks at lofty folks getting mired in the adult films business like The First Nudie Musical and multiple French farces like 1976's The Bottom Line and 1974's criminally under-seen And What Do You Do with Your Ears? Kinnear is great here surrounded by a barrage of real and fake trashy movie posters, and everyone seems to be approaching it in the right spirit once the absurd film production actually takes off. Unfortunately pre-print material for this one no longer exists, so the Distribpix release's disclaimer that the transfers come from the "best available film elements" was likely motivated by this title which had to come from a theatrical print. It isn't the same source as the 88 Films release, with the framing shifted upward quite a bit and much stronger blacks by comparison. It's also much cooler in appearance though, which will likely cause some debate. The British release has an audio commentary with Armstrong and film historian Simon Sheridan, a 2m8s gallery, a trailer, and a Mary Milligan short, Wild Lovers (6m19s), tied in with the sex star's very quick appearance in the main feature. Instead the Distribpix features another double dose of previously lost Long Continental footage, here with a fairly strong softcore sequence shot for 1971's Naughty! (4m49s) and the most hardcore one of the bunch, a 23m18s slew of copulation filmed for 1974's On the Game (a.k.a. Sex Through the Ages). Whitaker returns for commentary on these as well, going more into the history behind these two films, the origins of the footage, and Long's very clear discomfort and/or disinterest in shooting explicit material given the weirdly oblique nature in which much of it was shot. A 3m57s image gallery of Long posters and articles is also included.

THE WIFE SWAPPERS: Distribpix (Blu-ray)

HE WIFE SWAPPERS: Slam Dunk (DVD)

GROUPIE GIRL: Distribpix (Blu-ray)

GROUPIE GIRL: Slam Dunk (DVD)

SEX AND THE OTHER WOMAN: Distribpix (Blu-ray)

SEX AND THE OTHER WOMAN: Image (DVD)

ESKIMO NELL: Distribpix (Blu-ray)

ESKIMO NELL: 88 Films (Blu-ray)

Reviewed on May 16, 2026