This Desperate Hours-type robbery/hostage number is D'Amato's spin on the Roughie genre – a crime and sex related genre piece with more than its fair share of gratuitous sexualised violence. Yet D'Amato's tale also stands as a critique of the kind of male fantasizing behind this kind of sex movie, always keeping itself self-conscious that this is some male inadequate's masturbation material.<br /><br />A couple of two-bit hoods rob a convenience store on the eponymous 7th Avenue but, as with Charley Varrick's plunder, the loot turns out to be mob owned, and the felons find themselves on the run from a local gang Boss. They hide out in a nearby sex shop, and kidnap the proprietess, who happens to be the Boss' lady. In the sex shop, one of the goons – a total creep named Bob – takes a peek into a hand-held cine-viewer, salivating at a What the Butler Saw-type sexual performance by two ropey models. The rest of the film might be taken as the events which would ensue were they to be aimed at the men who shop at the 7th Street pleasure shop… The goons and the proprietess plus a black con crony of the men drive to the woman's country home, where a trio of students are enjoying a vacation romp. The students are held hostage and subjected to an amount of sexual exploitation and humiliation at the hands of the goons, but by the end of their forced sojourn together, the women have paired off with the men and some satisfactory coupling has taken place. This strand of the story reaches its fulfilment in the coupling of the black man, who has taken a great deal of racist abuse from his companions, with a virgin student who has spent the bulk of her screen time masturbating over the sexual shenanigans of others. He turns out to be a thoughtful lover, introducing the nervous girl to the delights of cunnilingus and she reciprocates by giving him a handjob, as he is concerned with keeping her hymen intact! This positive view of sexual sharing is rewarded as it takes him out of the house when the mob catch up with them, giving him the opportunity to sneak back into the house, overpower the mobsters and make his escape with his buddies. The students are also rewarded by ending up with the stolen loot, just like the paid sex performers in a porn film are rewarded by their bags of (also probably mob) cash… D'Amato arranges a psychologically suspect but nevertheless adept plot of sexual partnering whilst continually re-enforcing the idea that the sexual scenes are just that, sexual scene in a movie. The virgin is often seen touching herself at the sight of other couplings, yet even here the viewer is struck (unless he's an idiot, like the goons) with the knowledge that a woman masturbating over sex could be merely a male sexual fantasy (which is not to say women don't masturbate about the most un-PC scenarios, but the occasions it happens in this film remain self-consciously self-serving). It is no mistake that the virgin's sexual release in orgasm by cunnilingus is accompanied by a montage of scenes that she'd/we'd previously witnessed. It was often a plot device of 70s porn to see a woman inducted into sexual enjoyment within the story, but few directors made as much effort as D'Amato to show that the woman is a character in a male sexual fantasy. To back this up, we see the first man she saw having sex, the student Frank, reflected endlessly in a mirrored bathroom after his bout with his insatiable companion, the sexually voracious student Sue.<br /><br />D'Amato's Pleasure Shop on 7th Avenue is an existential place in which fantasies can be enacted for and by the lonely men who walk the New York sidewalks. Some of the music score is eerily reminiscent of Herrmann's music for Taxi Driver, and the end credits show the movie houses and porno shops of Times Square, the market for the fantasies which D'Amato so self-consciously films in and for that Pleasure/Porno House on 7th Avenue.