One of the great cult filmmakers has passed on at age 89.

Decades before the Lifetime Movie Network, he had the vision to combine two female-centered genres—soap opera melodramatics and softcore sex.

The visual, narrative, and acting styles of his ’60s New York films (Moonlighting Wives, The Love Merchant, Red Roses of Passion, etc.) borrowed heavily from the era’s daytime TV soaps. Harsh lighting; long speeches; single-camera-angle dialogue scenes with people talking to one another but looking out in the same direction.

The women and men in these films had a lot of sex, but it was obsessive-compulsive sex, which often inflamed his characters’ feelings of guilt and helplessness.

As the grindhouse film circuit turned to Eastmancolor sunniness later in that decade, Sarno came to spend his summers filming in Sweden. These films (Swedish Wildcats, Butterflies, Young Playthings) now had bright skies and green scenery and pouting young blonde stars. But they were still rooted in pathos and dramatic conflict. And they still depicted their heroines and heroes as fully dimensional people, torn between conflicting desires, or between desires and obligations.

When theatrical softcore faded as a commercial genre in the ’70s, Sarno turned to directing hardcore porn under pseudonyms—first for porn theaters, then direct to video. He kept at this until 1990. But hardcore’s stag-film aesthetic of frenetic fake “heat” and forced “happiness” wasn’t really his style.

By then, Seattle’s Something Weird Video had issued several of Sarno’s softcore dramas on VHS. With these releases, and later DVD reissues, Sarno became known as someone a cut or three above the genre’s formulaic hacks.

Retro Seduction Cinema (part of the string of video labels started in New Jersey by William Hellfire and Michael Raso) acquired other old Sarno films, and reissued some that Something Weird had put out before.

Then in 2004 they brought him out of retirement to make one comeback opus, Suburban Secrets. It was shot on handheld video cams, with much of the regular cast and crew from Raso and Hellfire’s lesbian horror-spoof vids. It’s two and a half hours long. While the cast isn’t as adept at dialogue histrionics as it is at body bumping, Sarno’s signature touches shine through. Where Raso’s movies usually hide behind the safe emotional costumery of “meta” parody, Suburban Secrets treats its characters, and the sex they’re having, as if they actually meant something.