Love Slaves 1 - Torture Therapy - 8mm adult film restoration sample

Here's the opening scenes of the first film from the LOVE SLAVES series of bondage loops from 1980. Alan Adrian (@JAMWorksPresents) is getting a physical from Lisa Baumgardner when she begins putting restraints on his wrists. Just look at the surprise and shock on Alan's face! We can't show you the rest, but he's taken to a dungeon with another unknown woman and they both proceed to whip him in some very sensitive male areas as he squirms in pain (but we all know it's really pleasure, right?) Poor Alan even gets smothered by Lisa’s tail end. I'm not sure if his insurance is going to cover this...

According to Alan's incredibly detailed notes about his career, he was hired for this by the owners of Esoteric Press, who had some partnerships with Andre D'Apice (a soldier for the Colombo crime family). D'Apice's office manager, Steve, would produce and co-direct the series of films. This loop was filmed on January 12, 1980 in the apartment of a dominatrix named Christine, on East 21st Street in New York City. The film was shot by a guy named Russell and Joe Davian, who directed a few "roughies" in his time, including several films for the notorious Avon Cinema theaters around Times Square in New York - some of which (or maybe all) had live sex shows between film screenings.

Unfortunately, the Love Slaves series (consisting of only 5 films, likely all shot withing a couple of days) appears to have been manufactured poorly. It's hard to say if the films always looked like this or if their cheap manufacturing is to blame for the films turning purple. All of the films in the serie,s and the duplicate copies I've found, are in the same general condition, which is unfortunate. As for our restoration, this created a lot of problems. Being so dark, the film scanner had some trouble registering a steady color. You can see in our "before" clip an example of the color/condition, and that raw scan is actually better than what the original film looks like. The "after" shows the "clean up" of the film, removing damages with a little bit of noise reduction. A lot of the grain was left in as we oftentimes like our "dirty" films to look that way. After all, this is an underground bondage movie, and keeping it gritty retains that aesthetic. When it came to color correcting the film, the variables in the color were a bit of a challenge. Generally, if the source is in consistent quality, it's possible that color correcting one scene will work for the length of the film. Not in this case. For the most part, after tweaking the color, many scenes had a green hue to them, sometimes significantly so and even shifting a little mid-scene. It was necessary to then adjust the color of each scene individually (reducing the green hue as needed for each shot) as well as stabilizing the image by scene as all that movement of whipping and squirming would confuse the software. It took several hours to get about 8 minutes of footage into its final condition, which considering how it began and what it is, gave us pleasing results. Each restoration is a new adventure and many things were learned from working through this and the others in the series. Enjoy!