The Tender Trap

Early into watching Young Lee’s THE TENDER TRAP I felt those pangs of deja vu that often come in such an unoriginal and imitative genre as porn: skeletal plot line of this picture is awfully familiar. Sure enough, this obscure movie is an unabashed remake (steal) of the bare bones of a nearly as obscure Gay porn movie HONORABLE JONES COMES OUT. After Hours Cinema has the remake, while original can be had from Something Weird Video.In JONES, the nebbishy title character is an ass’t district attorney in San Francisco ordered by his boss to harass the staff and patrons of gay cinemas as part of a crackdown to win political points with the assumed to be dunderhead populace (not a fair assumption, but it does set the story in motion). Comedically, the married Jones comes out of his shell over the course of the hour, enjoys the hard-trade movies being shown and has a new hobby: group-sex with fellow audience members. He does not put the squeeze on gays as per his orders.For the unofficial remake, a trio of Frisco vice cops: horse-faced Eileen Welles, John Seeman and Don Fernando are ordered to crack down not on gays but instead answer classified ads in order to entrap “criminals” including a pair of lesbians (pretty thin rewrite), a dominatrix (good old Aunt Peg dishing it out to a male sub in high style) and another miscreant played by local star Ken Scudder.As in the gay version, all three get co-opted and have sex (hetero) with their targets, coming back to the police chief empty handed. The finale is pretty ludicrous and overacted, as political in-jokes are injected in resolving a subplot concerning the battling between police chief and d.a.