Reviews

Jeanie Pepper has a juicy (or should I say sweet?) role in "Chocolate Kisses", one of the better VHS features spotlighting Black actresses early in the VHS era.

It starts with a montage of Hollywood, oddly beginning with a closeup of Red Buttons' plaque on the Walk of Fame (that's a pretty random choice of movie star), then the corny shot of the Capitol Records building, followed by "Jagged Edge" playing at Grauman's Chinese.

Story concerns Herschel Savage's failing Kisses Chocolates candy company. After he humps his secretary Heather Wayne, whose top billing is definitely unearned, we go directly to Ron Jeremy at a motor hotel with two Black hookers: Jeannie Pepper and Purple Passion. He balks at paying $200 for both but they insist (amounts to about $560 in today's money).

Mean banker Rick Savage turns Herschel Savage (hmm, I wonder how many movies feature both savages?) down on financing, giving him only 30 days till foreclosure, and Hersch decides salesmanship might save the business. He advertises for two gung-ho salesmen, with Pepper & Purple responding -after they f*ck him silly, they're hired.

Sex is their sales weapon, with big orders from Tom Byron, Buck Adams and Shone Taylor resulting. Rick is so impressed that he invet the bank's money into the business and is rewarded by two Kisses Girls (working at the chocolates plant) Bunny Bleu and Jennifer Noxt shtupping him. Ending has money "Where are they now?" credits for each character.

Quite enjoyable, and the oddest touch was a building facade in the middle of the movie -a building for See's Chocolates! Don't tell me that was accidental.

Can't say I've heard of London Bridges, but the Black burlesque artiste gets the "Unfiltered" video podcast treatment here from Holly Randall. An accompanying "Mommy's Girl" sex scene was issued by Adult Time on the VOD "Sitting on a Secret" just a month prior to this reissue.

London tells of her rough background, finding success both in burlesque and teaching dance classes but suffering as a victim of sex trafficking. Her rather out-there conversation lost me somewhere between her rambling explanation of the glory of being a sub and her discovering spirituality.

Chloe Surreal, she of the huge, floppy breasts, has fun with her stepmom Penny Barber in the lesbian sex vignette directed by the Anatomik Media team. Not sure why the Girlsway and Adult Time folks decided to recycle it so quickly, but as a Chloe fan I can't complain.

This is a throwback porn feature, that if it was a fish would have been thrown back into the pond. Amateurism on parade.

It reminded me of so many softcore 1960s flicks, an unprofessional showcase for various beauties, mostly sporting thick bushes and with a couple of beautiful ringers like Nancy Suiter and Nancy Hoffman. The male cast is strictly beasts, giving the movie a pro-am feel overall.

Ridiculous story has a unappealing guy (obscuro Martin Long) reminiscing in flashback about his gig as a photographer for a waterbed company's promotional campaign built around a Miss Sleepwalk beauty pageant. Sleeping with the judges is mandatory here.

The all-time great Kelly Stewart has a cameo role, and phony names are applied to most of the cast. This very minor release should have stayed hidden in a landfill.

Ever since Ed Wood was elevated to cult status (a long time ago), incompetence has been rewarded by tagging many a slob as a "cult director". Ray Dennis Steckler is the poster child of this phenomenon, not helped by IMDb foolishly identifying the entire cast of his "Skin Deep" as playing themselves.

No, this is not a documentary, but merely reels of film slapped together as if packaging a compilation of stag movies. A female narrator talks condescendingly on the soundtrack pretending that we're watching porn stars in their leisure moments, when in fact they are mainly nonentities earning a few bucks as sex workers under Ray's non-direction. He took similar footage and packaged another fake feature titled "Las Vegas Erotica", with much of the same cast.

Jail-bait action is provided by no-talent Darla, with pigtails who rides a bike and is supposedly a French foreign exchange student. She also participates in a threesome with what the narrator identifies as brother and sister, to provide vicarious incest content.

Mixed in with the sexual hijinks is hedonistic footage of folks water skiing and cavorting in a man-made lake, typical escapist filler.

Guaranteed to evoke more yawns than lustful moans four decades after, "Just the Two of Us" falls squarely into Adult Cinema's romantic genre, aimed at couples audiences. A blah script is at fault.

Jerry Butler and Danielle are the married couple, with the zest gone out of their marriage, sexually speaking. In fact, their opening sex scene, with Danielle wearing hot lingerie (she wears more lingerie in this feature than even currently a staple of Dorcel movies) ends with Butler failing to ejaculate, part of the story line.

They resort to trying other partners but that doesn't work. Eventually they turn down an offer from swingers Amber Lynn and Tony Martino to join them in a sex party, and director Vinnie Rossi clumsily cross-cuts between group sex at the party, and a rejuvenated Jerry & Danielle back home making love together. Final screen card reads "The Beginning" rather than The End, about as corny as could be.

Adult Cinema legend John Leslie turned successfully to direction with this early title, creating a real movie, albeit with explicit sex scenes included (of course). His screenplay elegantly provides clues and plot twists worthy of any real motion picture. (Ironically, he later turned to directing more than a hundred strictly gonzo porn features, no longer committed to storytelling movies.)

The opening, pre-credits scene is masterful: Ona Zee using opera glasses to spy on her neighbors having sex, while she is masturbating. This actress really knows how to sell a scene, and her combination of sexiness by talking dirty while masturbating skillfully sets the story in motion.

An ingeniously twist-filled script stars Robert Bullock as the advice columnist Madame Rona for a men's magazine, styled a la Playboy or Penthouse, with Leslie himself co-starring in the Hugh Hefner/Bob Guccione role of publisher. Joey Silvera is the mag's staff photographer, while Shanna McCullough plays Bullock's cheating wife. The acting by all of them is right on the money, quite convincing throughout.

They way Leslie orchestrates the story, involving infidelity, a murder unraveling and conflicting motives by each of the principal players is faultless, and I especially enjoyed the way he subtly planted key clues which are resolved later on, with some twists foreshadowed while others are tantalizingly sprung on the viewer. It all makes sense and leads to a highly satisfying ending.

Balancing the great story values, Leslie does not scrimp on rewarding his audience with a quite beautiful new starlet, Dana Lynn, as Silvera's model for the magazine, as well as sexy performances from Ona, Shanna, Kathleen Gentry as Bullock's secretary, plus Alicia Monet and Megan Leigh as sexy models at Leslie's mansion.

Even among mediocre VHS porn features, this lousy sequel is worse than expected (or deserved by the loyal Rental audience of the time). Crew credits are all phony, a sure sign of crap.

Ray Victory returns in the title role, a dumb takeoff on the Will Smith TV show. He operates an escort service providing gigolos to service women, using his own sex appeal as the selling point, and advertises on TV.

Three gals, all of them rather plain, unexciting looking starlets (in an era when big name talent abounded) watch him and decide to get some escorts to service them. The incompetent script (two fictitious writers share credit) fails to properly set up the comedy premise, namely that ordinary guys show up at the girls' homes and f*ck them, invited in by the girls who think they're escorts they ordered. No explanation of what happened to the real escorts is given, and one of the three, Marc Wallice (ugh!) does identify himself as the real thing.

Cherry Hill decides to find out what happened and visits Victory, who is amused and decides to service her personally. Finale has "mechanic" Don Fernando, who had previously come to fix Kristy Leigh's exercise machine, finding Melinda Lee in his home waiting to be serviced by him, and he obliges. "Comedy" voice-over finish indicates that Fernando has now been hired by Victory as a real gigolo.

The anonymous pornographers who shot this turkey had zero respect for the audience (or themselves): David Sanders plays the cliche of a pizza delivery guy who shows up without a pizza (!), later claiming he left it in his car, perhaps a porn first where they didn't even provide a prop pizza box for the shoot. You would think even on such a crummy production that a used box from the crew's lunch break would have been available, but no.

Title was missing from IMDb for 36 years, so my public service (sort of?) was to add it today.

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".

One of Max Hardcore's first movies, this tepid spoof of televised beauty pageants is only of interest in proving he could make an ordinary, mediocre porn video without the extreme sexual content that soon were to make him famous and pretty much single handedly destroy Adult Cinema as a fledgling art form.

Kris Newz and Sierra host the title contest, with Marc Wallice, looking silly in an old-fashioned tuxedo as emcee, staged as a telecast without an audience (just an applause-track). Three contestants do pole dancing in bikini swimsuits, then are interviewed by Wallice and finally compete sexually with T. T. Boy, Wallice and Rick Masters servicing them anally as studs. Nicole London wins and the 6 sex performers celebrate with group-sex.

As satirist, Max bats a zero. The best thing this clunker has going for it is that Max does not appear on screen.

With Misty herself and her producer Chad Thomas frequently handling the camera, this "documentation" of the star's birthday party is an intentionally sloppy (for the sake of "realism") video, even including one sequence out-of-focus. It represents gonzo content at its worst.

With her staggering around, suddenly striking acrobatic poses and giddy sexual activity, Misty comes across as stoned. Lots of horsing around occurs, with plenty of lesbian sex and a couple of orgies.

Several big names participate strongly in the action, notably Julie Rage, and Misty shot several of these "random footage" exercises, something of an acquired taste.

Isis Nile and Jessie James star in "Reckless", a simple and direct premise for a porn movie that worked for me.

It opens with the pair having a strong lesbian scene. Then they launch into their story, two wives, each wondering if their husbands are faithful. Isis suggests a bet, getting a couple of women to lure the husbands into having sex with them, and seeing which hubby will succumb. It's what is colloquially called a gentleman's bet: they only wage a dollar. They use the classified ads to find the women -gotta love vintage porn and all the antiquated methods of a bygone era.

Predictably, both spouses fail the test: Isis's husband Abdul (an amusing in-joke given Isis Nile being of Middle Eastern ancestry, so John Decker plays Abdul wearing a turban!) succumbs to the wiles of busty Euro actress Valeria; while Jessie's husband Rick O'Shea is seduced by Eva Flowers, who takes polaroids of him as proof.

The bet's settled, but Isis is hungry for revenge: time to hire gigolos to service themselves and flaunt it in front of their husbands. Isis gets to hump Nick East, while Jessie dallies with Gerry Pike (and a cute twist: when O'Shea catches them he's actually turned on and likes to watch!), leading to a fun open-ending of the gals' conjuring up a new bet!

Part Two of this fantasy movie has very effective plot twists, a reward for someone willing to sit through both halves (that 1990s VHS habit of cutting many videos into two separate releases).

Two new characters are introduced to the story: Isis Nile and Tiffany Million, friends out to solve the mystery suggested by Part One. The will of Sam Shelton (Dick Nasty) was read at his mansion for assembled hiers and interested parties. The mystery of his final manuscript is also being investigated by Steve Drake, and the erotic dreams inspired by staying at the mansion make up the XXX content of the show.

There's a hot threesome in the bathroom for heir Rebecca Wild, with Tiffany and Jon Dough; and a mandatory porn scene of sex on a pool table, with Tiff again, this time paired with lawyer Tony Martino.

Movie concludes with Isis Nile (who gets top billing) having sex with what appears to be the ghost of Sam = Dick Nasty. I greatly enjoyed the final secret revealed, hinted at by Sam completing his manuscript for publication, titled "Life Is but a Dream".

Representative of a lengthy video series from Vince Vouyer, this is unapologetic gonzo porn, a parade of as many starlets having sex as time permits. Not my cup of tea, with the surprise that the mainly one-name credits hide a Jewel in the lead, namely the great Ava Vincent (who was originally known as Jewel Valmont). Another famous performer in the cast is Lexington Steele, paired with an actress creatively named Salacity.

I know Vince Vouyer from his vast quantity of acting roles, particularly for Vivid Video, yet all that experience as an actor in story movies apparently didn't rub off on his other career directing hundreds of strictly all-sex videos. He retired a full decade ago.

For the second episode of this Digital Playground series, a conversation between Isiah Maxwell and star Lilly Bell reveals the crux of the story: Isiah is an undercover agent posing as a croupier in order to get the goods on Mick Blue and John Strong's money laundering operation, centered on Strong' s casino.

He asks Lilly, working as a waitress, to get closer to Mick and get him to incriminate himself as part of taking down the bad guys. But surprisingly, Lilly's response is to seduce Isiah in a bathroom, providing the viewer with a half hour of gonzo interracial sex.

Two prostitutes, played by Sinatra Monroe and Vanessa Sky also figure prominently in this segment, with a cameo appearance by Dick Chibbles tossed in.

Adult Time's latest so-called Girlsway VOD does not draw on that label for content, but once again visits 2022 with a Holly Randall "Unfiltered" video podcast plus a segment from a VOD Girlfriends Films release that year.

Holly interviews veteran Adult actress Sinnamon Love about her acting career including a famous gang-bang, as well as her activities to promote equity for persons of color within the Adult industry.

The XXX scene is compiled from B. Skow's vignette feature "Lesbian Daughter In-Laws 2", featuring very poor acting by big mama Leya Falcon, getting to hump cute with pixie hairdo Jade Valentine.

One of my sci-fi/horror/fantasy reviews written 50 years ago: Directed by Peter Sasdy; Produced by Alexander Paal for Hammer Films; Released in America by 20th Century-Fox. Screenplay by Jeremy Paul; Photography by Ken Talbot; Edited by Henry Richardson; Music by Harry Robertson. Starring Ingrid Pitt, Nigel Green, Sandor Eles, Maurice Denham, Patience Collier, Peter Jeffrey, Lesley-Anne Down, Leon Lissek, Jessie Evans and Nike Arrighi.

Incredibly dumb and dull vampire-oriented film in which talented director Sasdy sent his brain out to lunch and came up with a stupidly sadistic anti-entertainment turkey.

IMDb has the credits all garbled for this throwaway VHS release, strictly random footage with Jon Martin as host at a San Francisco marina, introducing dull scenes that all look like refugees from the cutting room floor. He's named Robin Hardwick (erroneously identified as Eric Edwards in IMDb, which I have corrected).

Nina Hartley shows up a lot, as does Amber Lynn, two superstars whose filmographies can stand scrutiny without this non-starter included.

Of course the popular TV show starring Robin Leach is the hook for the wraparound footage, but it's a thoroughly pointless junker, ending in a party scene featuring cameos including Sharon Mitchell as a photographer.

This vignette's dream couple happens to consist of brother and stepsister. The title could belong to sis River Lynn's golden locks, but instead it refers to her stepbrother Parker Ambrose, who studious attitude and obedient attitude make him the apple of their parents' eyes.

It's his birthday, and the party downstairs is mainly made up of friends of the parents, so Parker flees to his bedroom. He's surprised to find River already there lying on his bed -she too can't stand the dull festivities.

After a certain amount of sibling rivalry and quarreling they settle down and River offers the birthday boy a present -she's going to teach him how to let go, and learn about sex. He's reluctant but her beauty and attitude win him over, for a highly erotic "first time" sex scene.

This Bruce Seven "spectacular" surprised me: I've seen dozens of his self-indulgent videos, mostly with him in the cast featuring his fetishes like flogging and fondling the girls in his cast and watching them dance around for him , but here is a VHS resembling a real porn movie. However, it soon becomes evident it's just a set of kinky vignettes loosely stuck together.

Raven Touchstone's screenplay is the glue to tie the footage together, in the form of inevitable star Bionca playing a twin who finds her sister's diary and rather vicariously relives sis' debauchery by reading it (and masturbating). Of course, in a Pavlovian way we experience that endless series of kinky sex by watching the video, one-step removed just as the twin heroine Bionca is.

Porn, including this example (which won an industry award as Best SPECIALTY Tape -even that phony category separating it from the mainstream) is consumed in gonzo fashion -only the sex counts. Seven packs in far more XXX this time, even though the BDSM and frequent near-fisting (i.e., 4-finger action instead of a full fist) is the point of it all.

P. S.: Jon Dough is quite busy in several scenes, just using a pseudonym (Jan Sanders) in the credits.

One of my sci-fi/horror/fantasy reviews written 50 years ago: Directed by Jacques Tourneur; Produced by Sam Arkoff and James Nicholson for American-International Pictures. Screenplay by Richard Matheson; Photographed by Floyd Crosby; Edited by Anthony Carras; Music by Les Baxter; Production Design by Daniel Haller. Starring: Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Joyce Jameson, Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, Beverly Hills, Joe E. Brown, Alan DeWitt, Linda Rogers and Buddy Mason.

Valuable one-of-a-kind spoof of horror films which rounds up several of the old veterans, who ham it up outrageously. Silly, but it saves a lot of time for non-genre folks who don't want to sit through innumerable campy originals to groove on cliches and macabre humor, as Price & Lorre play luckless morticians who kill rich folks to drum up business.

Juliet Anderson as Aunt Peg is indelibly engraved in Adult Cinema history, but her directing career never took flight. This fledgling effort is disappointing, in a rather aimless story about a gigolo service.

Perry Mann is poor casting in the title role of King, who runs Eden, the company motto being: "An Adam for every Eve". His female clientele also gets phone sex from him, with the movie beginning as Rhona Jo Petty masturbates while Perry sweet talks to her on the phone. All the while, his sexy secretary Mai Lin is giving our antihero a blow job.

Director Juliet likes to give her scenes a lovely look, emphasizing nature and flowers in the frame. Even a "roughie" segment of client Serena, looking fresh and virginal, attacked by Michael Morrison for outdoor forced sex, including whipping, is scored to classical music reminiscent of a vintage Ken Russell fantasy scene.

Morrison and fellow gigolo Jon Martin complain about being overworked and the King threatens to fire them. That sets in motion the movie's only real plot element, as they videotape surrepttiously sex in order to blackmail him into giving them thieir jobs back, with raises.

Movie culminates in a modest orgy, for the women's anual Scorpio party, arranged by Sharon Mitchell, who also has sex testing out three of King's gigolos. One highlight is a lesbian scene for Mai Lin with fleshy Holly McCall, staged in a hot tub.

Overall, Juliet's movie, including a teasing cameo for her stripping and getting into the hot tub with Mann as a potential investor in Eden, is rather uneventful, and the short sex scenes are quite dated by today's audience tastes.

I'm aware that Gonzo has conquered the world of porn, but I wasn't prepared for a stud named Shadow to set a new low in "reading" his lines of dialogue. Start to finish this "Transfixed" clunker is more of a parody of TS porn than the real thing.

Eva Maxim is a game enough trouper, but I was embarrassed for her. As far as producer Bree Mills and director Jim Powers are concerned, any old Gay Porn stud will do when it comes to the token boy/trans segments dished out to subscribers as sort of a bonus between the promised "trans lesbian" romantic segments on the Adult Time/Gamma website.

Ridiculous excuse for a story by Lapis Afterglow has Shadow kindly giving up his bed (he lives in a one-bedroom place -that's all we see with no establishing shot of even the building facade provided) to Eva, his girlfriend's sister, while her place is being fumigated. She insists that they share his bed, not to impose on him, but he's shocked and turns away when she suddenly gets naked.

He goes to bed clothed and acts quite shy, but sneaks a peek at her rear end. She easily seduces him and both promise not to tell sis.

Mechanical sex ends with a cum shot from Shadow and Eva's reminder not to tell. That's another XXX TS gonzo scene in the can, no pun intended.

Attention all casting directors: Shadow is available to shoot porn, if you can'f find anybody else at the last minute.

This "Transfixed" segment from Stella Smut amplifies a recent trend in this series: Transsexual porn trying to be slightly different but merely turning into gonzo filler, but minus the "mandatory" money shot. Well-hung TS star Leilani Li performs but the show climaxes with no proof of purchase ejaculation on camea nor a creampie, the currently fashionable porn cliche.

What we have is an off-camera blind date: Li at home waiting impatiently for late arriving date Casey Calvert who rudely is glued to her cell phone -doesn't even look at Li when she picks her up to take her to a restaurant. Cut to them returning home, now cheerful after having been fed and killing some more time before it's sex on the couch action.

Stella manages to shoot this, rather self-consciously, with mainly softcore camera angles -delivering fellatio, cunnilingus and vaginal sex of a mechanical nature while the actresses ooh and ahh with fake passion. It all adds up to another 1/2 hour of porn, trans lesbian division, strictly yawnsville.

One of my sci-fi/horror/fantasy reviews written 50 years ago: Directed by Don Sharp; Produced by Robert Lippert and Jack Parsons for 20th Century-Fox release. Screenplay by Harry Spalding; Photography by Basil Emmott; Edited by Robert Winter; Music by Burt Shefter. Starring: Brian Donlevy, Carole Gray, George Baker, Michael Graham, Jeremy Wilkins, Yvette Rees, Burt Kwouk, Charles Carson, Rachel Kempson, Mary Manson, Warren Stanhope and Arnold Bell.

Ultra-cheap third entry in "The Fly" series is poor in every respect, but has a couple of interesting wrinkles: it opens spectacularly in slow motion with a "Straw Dogs" window explosion, followed by luscious Carole escaping from an insane asylum for a romp through the woods clad only in white (pointy) bra and panties. Later she strolls about endlessly in a white nightgown. The film continues the series' teleportation theme but brilliantly leaves out the fly! Purity is destroyed by the inclusion of a descriptive scene recalling the last film with a still so as not to leave a naive viewer in the dark.