Reviews

The sex scenes aren't the greatest, but I have a weakness for movies of this type: a wonderfully, needlessly complicated plot about rich degenerates who pay huge sums of money to attractive young people to have sex with one another, and with them. Stephanie Beaton is a gorgeous redhead who's apparently used self-tanner to get her skin the same shade of red as her hair, so that in her several nude scenes, she looks like a coppery pool of lusty womanhood, especially the writhing scene at the very beginning of the film. There are a few nice twists and turns at the end. It's not Body Heat or anything, but it's pretty damn good for a Skinamax soft core flick.

You can always tell a B-movie that takes BDSM for a theme is gonna be a stinker when it quickly becomes clear that the filmmakers don't know the difference between bondage and SM, because they use the terms interchangeably. If the plot involves an SM snuff flick, you know it's gonna be an evil stinker.

Primal Instinct is the story of a parole officer investigating the death of her sister, who was a bondage site model. The portrayal of the bondage site reveals that the creators had never been on the Internet, much less visited a porn site, and had gotten all their info about what porn sites are like from the real-life equivalents of Maude Flanders.

This film is even more mean-spirited, stupid and ignorant about its subject matter than 8mm was. (8mm also deals with an investigation of the death of a professional woman specializing in BDSM whose death shows up in a snuff flick.) Primal Instinct is not the worst movie ever made but it does suck in every respect. Michael Madsen and the female lead do their best, but god, it just isn't even close to being enough to stand down the cretinous dreck that's being shovelled here.

Somebody attempted to praise "The Outer Limits" by saying that "It doesn't use science fiction." By which I think they meant it didn't rely heavily on spaceships and man-eating monsters and such. But if you'll read the written SF of the 50s and 60s, you'll discover that SF didn't used to consist of repeated plays on well-defined themes. SF was once a writer going slam-bang against the unknown, trying to create worlds that don't exist. It was exciting to read because you never knew WHAT the hell you'd find in the next story.

The Outer Limits is the same way. There's the usual dross, some weak episodes, but some of them are just mind-blowing, like "Demon With A Glass Hand." There's still some SF writers -- Vernor Vinge, Iain Banks, Greg Benford -- who can write stories that bring your mind smack up against the unknown. But no TV series has ever matched the Outer Limits.

Twilight Zone? Pfui. Basically a horror series.

The "active fantasy life" the male protagonist has is that of being sexually submissive to women. The gangster plot is dull and contrived, as are the slo-mo vanilla sex scenes. If you're into femdom/malesub, you might like this film, but even then the male bondage scenes are lame. Loridawn Messuri is a treat, but not enough of one to redeem this boring sex film.

This is one of those SF movies that continues Hollywood's decades-long tradition of making fools of themselves in the SF genre. It's the story of Kari Wuhrer, sexy as always, who's a secret govt. agent blah blah blah. It opens with tasty footage of scantily clad women in metal chastity belts and collar and gag sets and skimpy T-shirts working on emeralds, which was obviously borrowed from an earlier Simandl flick, "Sleeping Dogs." It's by far the best thing in the movie, and Simandl did in fact make some subsequent movies that use them much more effectively, i.e. Rage of the Innocents.

The plot about the spaceship crashing into Los Angeles, which takes up the bulk of the movie, is really dull. It mostly involves people arguing, running, hitting each other and shooting each other, for no apparent reason. There are some delightful MST3K bits, like the official butt inspector and the shot of the Argos Women's Prison Colony dated 2029. Apparently, we will have interstellar colonies within thirty years, and the first thing we will build on them will be women's prisons! This is definitely a movie to mock as you watch it.

Losing Control is about a romance writer who's losing her stuff and who gets it back when she enters an affair with a mysterious man whom she oly knows as "Jack." Jack tells her to go places, she goes there, they have sex. That's about as kinky as it gets in a film that's basically about a maledom/femsub relationship. No submissiveness on Kira's part, other than going to the rendezvous, and no dominance on the guy's part, other than telling her where to rendezvous and smirking a lot when they talk.

Because it did not have the honesty or the understanding or whatever to tell a maledom/femsub romance story, which even ROMANCE writers are quite capable of doing, the film fails even as explotation. What's more, the sex scenes are very skimpy for a Skinamax erotic thriller. In fact, there's a scene toward the end in which Kira hunkers down on her man, still clothed, and then the next thing you see is her leaving the premises. I think the people who suspect censorship may have something here. The film I saw on U.S. cable ran 1 hr and 25 minutes from the start of the opening credits to the last of the end credits, which would make a version that includes longer scenes unusually long for a Skinamax flick. If anyone out there has seen a longer version, well, that would be revealing.

The movie is beautifully photographed. Kira Reed, Anneliza Scott and Doug Jeffery do a far better job with the lines than the script deserves, and yet it's a total nothingburger. Worst of all, a waste of Kira Reed.

This women in prison film, clearly sold to SOMEBODY as "Flashdance goes to prison" is a midlly entertaining noodel that takes itself way 'too seriously. It's got the full round of women in prison Usual Suspects, including the nude shower/delousing scene, the body cavity search scene, the knife fight scene, the attempted lesbian rape scene/fight scene, the corrupt prison guard, the evil lesbian bitch prisoner that runs it all, etc., lacking only the jailhouse riot to round out the cliche roster.

Considering how by the numbers the movie is, and how silly the conceit is (dance as rehabilitation for hardcore prisoners) you'd think they'd have had more fun with it, but the movie is played kinda straight, which is its downfall. Plus the acting is generally so bad that the voices all sound dubbed even though they're not.

It's not exploitive enough to be a good exploitation flick, and not enough of anything else to be any other kind of flick. If it's on cable, might be tuning in if you have something else to do in the meantime.

Some of the more talented women knocking aroudn in show business apparently decided to see if they could produce some top of the line erotica and the result was Women: Stories of Passion. The stories are uneven, but almost always have the strength that they focus on the psychology of the characters and get their eroticism from the characters' erotic responses rather than from some abstract sex act or fetish, as many other Skinamax series and films do.

Two of my favorite episodes are "The Gigolo" and (can't recall the name exactly, think it had "Paradise" in it somewhere). In "The Gigolo" a top female studio executive likes to script bondage scenarios in which she's a damsel in distress. She has a gigolo who acts them out for her, and who eventually teaches her the pleasure of losing control for real, rather than in her carefully scripted fantasies. Nice story with some lively acting by the female lead. "Paradise" follows a young woman's fascination with what goes on in a bordello, a fascination which eventually leads exactly where you think it will. But instead of having the dark overtones of "Belle du Jour" it has a lively feel for the erotic fantasies that drive the woman, making it a pleasant watch.

It's an ambitious series, watching it with your eyes open will be rewarding.

Well written story, good acting, moves right along. Better than 99 percent of theatrical "thrillers" that have nothing going in the way of plot or characterization. I liked the subtly quirky characters and Caruso's too-cool-for-words character. Marge Helgenberger was a fun sighting -- hadn't seen her since she was an alien sex slave in Lexx.

The plot and characterization of Virtual Encounters isn't worth mentioning, so I won't. But the sex scenes featuring Nikki Fritz and Chrissy Styler are worth mentioning. A wonderful golden light fills the scenes, bringing out the beauty of Fritz and Styler's skins (and the guy's too, to be fair). The sex scenes are more in the nature of tableaux than actual depictions of sex, composed for their beauty and for showing off the beauty of the actresses. I will also say this -- Nikki Fritz is not at all shy about giving up her butt to the camera, and she's got a gorgeous butt.

Worth seeing strictly for the sex scenes, the Virtual Reality stuff is the merest rationalization for all the action.