Last week I took the Red Line down into the Combat Zone, to check out an "art film". What I saw was barely filmic, let alone artistic. The Astor Theatre on Tremont Street was showing Private School Girls, a German import. I had not been enticed by the silly ad in the Globe ("Karen made the Dean's List... and a few others"), but by a simple desire to see what skin flicks were all about.

I suppose that even pornographic movies must be judged contextually. Unfortunately, their context, if it exists, lies somewhere outside the scope of conventional criticism. What, after all, is good porn? Does it stimulate you? Does it make you (as some puritan souls seem to think) run out of the theatre mad with lust, ready to violate the first female body that comes along? Ironically, if pornographic films had this effect, perhaps one could ascribe some specious artistic quality to them. Good art, as they say, possesses the power to make you ruminate, react, and reach out.

About all you get from the likes of Private School Girls is a laugh (albeit a hard one). The dialogue is atrocious. Between exclamations of ecstasy, almost every audible line is little more than a sick, flaccid joke. Two examples from Private School Girls will show you what I mean.

One scene shows a man and a woman mountain climbing. After reaching the summit, they stop for lunch. The man eats a sandwich but the girl (Karen I guess, but who really cares?), pulls out an oversized sausage and begins munching at it suggestively. Then, without reason, the camera cuts away for a few seconds to some scenery. When it returns, the couple is having intercourse. The girl shouts, "Oh... this is better than climbing the Matterhorn!"

Later a man and woman fully clothed in wedding garb are crawling around in a field, for some reason inseparably joined at the loins. Another couple finds them and helps them out of their predicament. How? The young man goes back to his car, returning with an automobile jack with which he duly pries apart the bereaved couple, His line: "Now I'm going to jack you off."

Whatever humor is present emerges not from the director's intended wit but from the viewer's incredulity that anyone would deliberately film something so ludicrous. A special idiocy derives from the disparity between the Alpine-Munich situations and the dubbed American English. Just imagine a German mountain guide in shorts and Tyrolean hat giving directions in flawless New Yorkese.

Figuring that I should compare Private School Girls with something else, I ventured out a couple of days later to see what The Cocktail Hostesses at the West End Cinema had to offer. I should have known better. This bit of cinematic diarrhea runs about 80 minutes. The "plot" is merely an alternation between the cocktail room where the heroine (played by ample Renee Bond) makes $50.00 dates and the bedrooms where she earns her pay. The camera-work and editing are so porn-sloppy that they soon destroy any illusion of real intercourse, and any erotic value quickly dissipates.

The fundamental artistic problem with skin flicks is that every situation has to offer an excuse for sex. The whole purpose of the film is to titillate, and everything is distorted and stylized with that goal in mind. The dialogue, the action, the settings--bedrooms, forests, deserts, in short anyplace a secluded camera can be set up--all lead to the inevitable loveless consummation. The camera is incessantly at low-angles to catch the flash of panties or the roundness of a buttock. One soon learns to expect gratuitous shower scenes and absurd double-entendre conversations. The best films are usually unpredictable, but when all roads lead to the bedroom one need not be oracular to foresee what's just beyond the next hump.

These films depict, after all, nonsensical, episodic, comic sex -- hardly the stuff of "adult" life. I can't imagine what kind of perversity or anti-social behavior they could generate except, perhaps, an occasional fist through the ticket-window in blind rage at the exorbitant prices charged to see them.

But the most reasonable objection to pornographic films is to their sordidly chauvinistic, exhibitionistic portrayal of women. Depiction of the female body as existing solely for male satisfaction makes much chewier grist for one's moralistic mill than mere nudity or sex. Unfortunately, many self-styled guardians of the public taste seem to flail aimlessly at the naked flesh without real attention to the way it -- and the viewer -- are being exploited.

And finally, skin flicks are simply a poor investment. At three to five bucks a head, only the wealthy can afford a steady diet of this kind of voyeurism. If you have a few dollars to spare, stick with the legitimate stuff. If you must get your jollies, trek over to Nini's and buy a book. It's cheaper; you won't even have to take the subway.