Title: Frat Pack Box Set Studio: HIS Classics Director: Mark Reynolds, William Hunter, Peter DePew, Jason Cast: Various Genres:: Gay, Classic, College, Food, Interracial, Latin, Masturbation, Twinks, Young Men Condoms: Questionable Reviewer: SexHerald Staff

Rating:

Box sets of older movies are an affordable way to quickly build your porn stash, but the tradeoff is that the quality can be hit or miss, often a mixture of the two within a single set.

Back to Basics is one of the titles that make up Frat Pack Box Set, a four-disc set of HIS releases spanning the 80s and early 90s. The cast is a mix of Latin, Caucasian, and possibly Native-American ethnicities. It also features a man with long hair—a rarity in gay porn. Unfortunately, Back to Basics is bad. It was made in 1991, and neglected videotape doesn’t age well, which means the colors look washed out and fuzzy. At just over an hour and suffering from cheap sets and bad lighting, Basics also suffers from incredibly low production values. The title sequence has that familiar synth porn music of the era (credited to “Meat Beats”) and looks like it was edited in a student A/V lab. The script seems improvised, if you’re willing to use that word loosely.

The first scene sets up the repeating plot: a young man complains vaguely to his friend about how hard his class is, then they pull out their cocks. This scene has the best bad dialogue in the entire film, when the student cries out in frustration, “Nose, tongue, taste, smell, touch… It’s mind wrecking!” His friend tries to fuck some sense into him, but the sex is shot from basically one angle over and over, and the men look awkward most of the time.

The one good scene features Joaquin Montoya as a handsome, ponytailed tutor who holds classes from his bed. After some standard 69-style sucking, the student fucks Montoya in several positions. The men seem to really enjoy each other, and Montoya is the kind of guy who kneels on his futon and grips the sheets in his fists as he’s being fucked. When he comes, he whimpers softly and sprays thick ropes of cum across his thigh and stomach.

Spring Fever is the second title in the box set. Back to Basics is the real lemon of the group. This one fares better, although it will appeal to fans of certain early-90s stars most of all. “Legend has it that there is a black leather mask that is the possessor of the power of true sexuality.” So begins, somewhat awkwardly, the dark and Gothic tale, the first scene of which involves David Griffin, Ren Adams and a very young Ted Matthews fooling around in a So Cal outdoor hot tub while pretty wind chime music plays over the soundtrack. 

Mark Steel plays the main character in Spring Fever, a man who’s bored with sex. This seems to be true for both the actor and the character he plays, but Steel is very handsome and fun to watch even when you wonder whether he’s really in the mood. He stands by the pool and absentmindedly rubs his pecs and plays with his cock through his shorts. Then he goes inside and stretches out in a chair by the fire. Steel wraps a two-way cock ring around his balls and shaft and spends the next ten minutes stroking. His dick isn't the biggest captured on video, but it's thick, straight, and red, with a well-flared head, and when it gets really hard (as he’s about to come), it’s a beauty.

Spring Fever isn’t a bad movie; it’s just not the hottest flick. Mark Steel is a great example of a certain type of lean, pretty man with just a tease of hair across the chest and ass, and if you’re a fan of Ted Matthews or Mark Andrews, you may want to grab this.

Student Fever is the third title in the set and like Back to Basics, it's mostly a clunker. It was shot in 1993, a period when too much gay porn had lost its classic dirty qualities—the unprotected sex, the ungroomed pubes—but hadn't yet heard of concepts like "high production values" or "veneers." The sex, as in all four of the Frat Pack titles, is straight-up vanilla, free from tattoos, taboos, and fetishes of any sort.

The movie begins with Skip Robinson asleep in his dorm room beneath a giant poster of The Smiths. Robinson wakes up horny, and slowly starts to stroke off. His dick looks fat and big on his fairly compact frame, and he has large nipples and a humpy body, with nice thighs and an impossibly flat stomach. David Griffen opens the door and peeks in. He looks like maybe he's a coach, because he's wearing a whistle around his neck and seems about 10 years older than Robinson. He enters, swallows Robinson's cock, then rolls Robinson over and dry humps him as he holds him down on the bed. The power dynamic is kind of hot, but everything is "kind of" hot in this scene, yet nothing really takes off.

The second, and better, scene takes place in a sports equipment room, where young Jimmy Dante and 30-something Dillon Ried suck and fuck from a hallway while they spy on Michael Gaylord and Johnny Rahm. The final scene is short and forgettable: Randy Storm grunts and slurps over Robinson, then fucks him, but Robinson just looks like he's thinking of how he'll spend his money after the shoot.

With no plot, no dialogue, and bad music, Student Fever is the kind of movie that you can't imagine ever having been sold or rented on its own. While the sex isn't as bad as what's in Back to Basics, the movie hardly feels like a movie at all, and more like three scenes in search of a compilation release.

Finally, the reason to get the set: hot fucking between attractive young men. Released in 1983, this is the kind of sex you'd have to go to Treasure Island Media or Hot Desert Knights title for today—there's not a condom in sight. But instead of aggressive pig sex with cum spraying everywhere as if from a garden hose (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing), All American Boys is a quieter, more innocent type of porn. These aren’t real guys living out bukkake or cumwhore fantasies; they’re fictional college students meeting up for scorching skin-on-skin sex in their dorm rooms.

Jacques Chalon plays a young French student studying for six months at UCLA, where all the guys have big, shapeless haircuts, tuck their shirts in, wear tiny running shorts and tighty whities, and cover their walls in posters of Pink Floyd, Kiss, Brooke Shields, and some baseball player I should probably know. Jacques arrives on campus and meets his new roommate, the dirty-blond John Jefferies, who’s sprawled across his bed in nothing but a gold necklace and Twinkie-colored running shorts.

The two men spend some time talking about campus nightlife while they size each other up with furtive glances. Chalon especially can’t keep his eyes from drifting down to Jefferies’ crotch, and when Jefferies strips to change clothes, Chalon watches him like a security guard from the other side of the room. The scene is a slow tease, and you can feel the sexual tension ooze from the screen. After Jefferies leaves, Chalon stretches out on his bed and palms himself through the running shorts his roommate has just given him, then kicks those off and strokes in slo-mo until he rubs out a load.

The next day, Chalon goes jogging and picks up Lee Ryder (in one of his first appearances), who he brings back to his dorm room.

Another student, Bob Wade, is already there, and the two men introduce Chalon to poppers. Ryder leans over and sucks hungrily on Chalon’s thick dick while Wade stands over Chalon and, with his jeans still on, feeds the dizzy foreigner his cock. Soon the two Americans have pushed Chalon’s legs in the air and are taking turns fucking him while they suck each other.

Often in films from this era, the audio is looped, but for most of this scene you can hear the men slurp and suck as they work over each other’s equipment, then pant as they pound away at Chalon’s ass.

Chalon and his roommate come out to each other, with predictable results that, unpredictably, border on being romantic (or maybe I’m a nostalgic sucker for lite-jazz!, kissing, and nipple biting). Chalon finally gets a chance to top, and afterwards, in an extended flashback, Jefferies reveals the kind of hand-balling he’s been playing in his free time with his secret lover, the dark-haired, tan, never-heard-of-manscaping Lyle Williams, who has a dick that’s thicker at the end than at the base.

Williams sucks Jefferies until he unloads in and over his mouth, then licks him clean before taking his turn in Jefferies’ ass. It takes some time for Williams to work his thick dick into Jefferies, and the camera captures each slow, cautious push, while Jefferies presses back with his hands when he can't take any more.

If you like classic porn at all, you should definitely invest in the Frat Pack Box Set for this movie alone. Think of it as buying the classic title for $20 and getting three free DVDs thrown in as a bonus—whether you'd want them or not.