Porn again?

An XXX visit to Instant Replay

They're more thrillingly decadent than the renewed vogue for cigars. So might not the next wave of retro-hip taste be for vintage porn films? For the XXX features and overworked sex stars of the wide-open Deep Throat 1970s?

I'm talking Ron Jeremy, Jamie Gillis, Marc Stevens, Johnny "Wadd" Holmes, Eric Edwards, white cats with silly Afros, sleazy sideburns, and well-oiled hard-ons. I'm talking Marilyn Chambers, Georgina Spelvin, Annette Haven, Vanessa Del Rio, Desiree Cousteau, and a dirty dozen other foxy ladies going down routinely on these guys, and on one another. In 35mm, at your Pink Pussycat moviehouse.

Boogie Nights, at your Sony multiplex this fall, could be the movie that brings prime porn into the spotlight. It stars Boston's Mark Wahlberg, plus Julianne Moore and Don Cheadle as '70s porn performers. "Back then they tried to have stories and romance and intrigue and mystery," Cheadle says in the August Interview, talking about those halcyon days of hardcore. "The actors took their jobs seriously. They wanted to look like real people, and they weren't just jacking off on film -- they were trying to make something sexy."

And in a 1995 Axcess interview, Quentin Tarantino calls '70s XXX cinema "the last bastion of interesting porno films. . . . Just the fact that they were all shot on 35-millimeter film goes a long way. . . . There was still a quality of anything can happen."

But where can you find porn movies from a better time?

"All-Time Classics!" shouts a newspaper ad for the Instant Replay video store, at 1334 Main Street in Waltham. The ad continues: "We've selected more than 800 of the very best titles from the past 20 years of adult cinema -- from Deep Throat to New Wave Hookers; from Behind the Green Door to The Creasemaster's Wife . . . So hurry on in and build your own collection of favorites!"

Hmmm, I wondered, is there a person behind this ad? An actual video-store curator of the Best of Porn?

There is. He's Arthur Workman, employed previously in laser-disc retail on Newbury Street. "But laser discs have gone down in sales, adult way up," he explains of his exit to the suburbs, as we begin a tour of this much-overstocked Waltham store.

The main floor at Instant Replay features an enticing array of sexploitation titles from the '50s and '60s, the whole catalogue from Seattle's Something Weird company. Impressive stuff! But it's down some stairs that Instant Replay becomes truly unbelievable, a huge, huge basement of wall-to-ceiling X-rated videos, and customers everywhere.

"For sale, we have 15,000 adult videos," Workman estimates. "For rental, 5000. We say in the ad that we're the largest adult store in New England. I think it's true."

All kinds of kinky videos rent; what's surprised everyone at Instant Replay is that the videos that sell the best are the ones Workman earmarked earlier this year as adult "classics." His explanation: "The rental crowd wants something new, the buyers something they remember from the theaters, something good. Many customers in the 50-to-65 age range won't go near the new tapes."

Workman is of that nostalgic generation who in the early '70s showed up for the first hardcore features in Boston theaters -- when those theaters weren't being busted on obscenity charges by the Hub police. "In 1971, I was in the audience here for Behind the Green Door. But I had to see Deep Throat in Detroit!"

He genuinely believes in the aesthetic worth of '70s porn. "You won't see actresses today of the caliber of my favorite, Veronica Hart, or Kay Parker. They're referred to as legends. Also Marilyn Chambers, Seka. Lesllie Bovee, another legend! They could have gotten by in regular Hollywood films. They had a natural look.

"But 1985-'86 was a watershed period for films-to-video. Stars retired, stopped making live appearances. Story lines were de-emphasized, production design went down. Now there's what's called `gonzo films,' wall-to-wall sex, no story, and they're certainly not romantic in any way. And when you skip the `cruising,' whether it's two guys, or a guy and woman, getting a person to agree to have sex, then you're left without eroticism."

Finally, he lent me a pile of his favorite '70s porns, including the all-male Sailor in the Wild (1972). What did I think? Little Girls Blue (1978) was, for me, the sexiest movie in the bunch. A musical of Alice in Wonderland (1976) proved the most ambitious, with Wonderland settings, nifty costumes, and original songs, music, and choreography. Kristine De Bell, a Playboy-posing preppie type, made a definitely okay Alice.

Eruption (1978) was the strangest picture: a flagrant ripoff of Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), with the story moved, expensively, to Hawaii. Lesllie Bovee (who began dancing topless at the Bucket in Inglewood, California) made a properly sordid, untrustworthy James M. Cain heroine. And the late Johnny Holmes was never better, I thought, than as the murderous insurance agent with the legendary 12-incher.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary[a]phx.com.