A truly lousy porn experiment, wildly pretentious, had me wondering about what standards movies, or in this case VHS porn features, should be held up to. Perhaps I'm being too harsh in my assessments, or maybe way too lenient. This is a good test case for such meandering thoughts.
Directed by Jack Stephen, it's ostensibly a throwaway Zara Whites vehicle, presuming that if you dig this Euro beauty, then watching her have explicit sex is all that matters.
But what's contained in this surprise package is an experimental porn movie, taking itself oh-so-seriously, but turning out to be impossibly bad, thanks to the familiar extreme overacting by Joey Silvera.
The entire movie seems to be taking place inside Joey's mind, as implied in a dreary opening scene of him alone on the phone on an abstractly bare set, calling his sister-in-law, desperate to see her.
DIrector Stephen jumpcuts from scene to scene without any transitions at all, daring the viewer to keep up. In a mainstream movie, this technique would command one's attention and encourage extra effort, but here it seemed confusing, bordering on clumsy.
There follows a series of sex scenes and role-playing, often cryptic, but all seeming to be meaningful to the Silvera character. If a talented actor were in the role, it might be watchable.
Instead we have a mess, pretty much all summed up in my least favorite ending, so often used as a crutch in porn: it was all a dream (or nightmare)!
When it finally ended, only an hour or so wasted, I realized with this structure/editing and neurotic content, had the cast been European and the dialogue in French or Italian, this could have been passed off as avant-garde filmmaking. But absent such accoutrements, which to a film buff like me automatically command a level of involvement/respect (I would cite directors like Paul Vecchiali and Philippe Garrel as prime examples, both of whom dealt with sexual subject matter), we're left with inept delusions of adequacy.
Many a filmmaker has succeeed to "fool" the audience with avant-garde trappings (Lars von Trier's The Element of Crime and David Lynch's Eraserhead (both of which I detested on first-run viewings back in the day) to launch a highly successful career, built on quicksand. As Ayn Rand used to stress (I took her very seriously when I was young, before understanding the shallowness of her Objectivist philosophy), "check your premises".
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