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When Something Weird’s dis­tri­b­u­tion deal with Image Entertainment breathed its last, fans lamented the loss of one of the few sources for early 1970’s American skin-flick weird­ness.  Sure, you have Severin Films to cover the Euro-trash end of things but who would pick up retro-sexy titles with a domes­tic, Harry Novak kind of feel to them?  Thankfully, Synapse’s sexploitation-oriented off­shoot called Impulse that has thrown its hat into this ring with their recent release of Aphrodisiac! The Sexual Secret Of Marijuana.

This disc fea­tures a full-frame trans­fer.  It unfor­tu­nately looks a bit rough because the only avail­able ele­ment was a beat-up print.  That said, it looks as good as it can under these cir­cum­stances: detail is solid and the flat color scheme is merely a reflec­tion of the kind of quick-and-dirty shoot­ing style used on a cheapie like this.  More impor­tantly, it is fully uncut, fea­tur­ing the brief hard­core bits that were edited out when the film made its prior appear­ance as a bonus fea­ture on a Something Weird disc.

The only real dis­ap­point­ment here is the lack of extras.  Though it would prob­a­bly have been dif­fi­cult to track down any­one liv­ing and will­ing to talk about their work here, it would have been nice to have a porn expert do a com­men­tary track or text essay to offer the viewer some basic infor­ma­tion on the film.  At the very least, they could have had fun talk­ing about the cast, which fea­tures a who’s who of per­form­ers from the 1970’s West Coast skin-flick business.

To sum up, it would have been nice to see a lit­tle more mate­r­ial on this disc (par­tic­u­larly since it has a $25 retail price) but fans of this era of sex­ploita­tion will no doubt be happy to have a solid, uncut ver­sion of this film avail­able.  It’s get­ting more dif­fi­cult to find and dis­trib­ute this sort of sexed-up odd­ity in the DVD dis­tri­b­u­tion busi­ness so it’s nice to see some­one mak­ing the effort.