Nantucket Housewives

Even the greats have their off-days: Bergman with his David Carradine movie, or say Kubrick meets the superstars in "Eyes Wide Shut". My new-found admiration, if not hero worship, for the oft-maligned director Bud Lee, hits a snag with "Nantucket Housewives", a very soggy Romantic Couples movie coming late in his career and lacking the ingenuity, nay the commitment of his earlier work.

I like to alternate watching porn with mainstream (or sometimes high- brow/esoteric) movies, and subconsciously I tend to pick surprisingly complementary content. In this case, I accidentally got Ron Howard's "In the Heart of the Sea" in the mail from Netflix (no streaming for me, buster) and watched it the same day as this Bud Lee opus - attentive folks will note that Ron's story of the writing of Moby Dick is thoroughly embedded in the ethos of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.

It's actually a Marilyn Chambers independent production that Bud has directed, and the sex icon does a Rod Serling/John Newland turn, walking in and out scenes to introduce the characters and action, as if she were some invisible presence from the Great Beyond. That gimmick adds little to the dull soap opera that unfolds, centered around lovely Kirsten Price (before her Wicked Pictures career commenced), a romance novelist who moves from Manhattan to Nantucket when doctor hubby Barrett Blade is hired at a new medical practice there. Barrett as hubby Justin is nicknamed "The Rock & Roll Shrink" to explain how this guy, who always looks like some biker in his movies, is passed off by Lee as a professional.

The non-adventures of Kirsten and her circle of femme friends in the new neighborhood is relentlessly boring, and would remain so even if Marilyn relinquished her hosting chores, stripped down and joined in on the humping. No such luck - we're stock with busty Brooke Haven -whose character name "Linda Harrison" unfortunately brings back memories of the far sexier Hollywood starlet of the '60s (SEE: "Planet of the Apes"), Kelly Kline as Barrett's colleague in his new practice, Sativa Rose, and of course a fictional character from one of Price's romance novels, Jenaveve Jolie. Romantic/Couples porn often features a romance novelist - a ploy that has become very tired for me after numerous iterations.

Lee's frequent collaborator, screenwriter George Kaplan, does a poor job here, even having the head shrinkers Blade and Kelly discuss "Lonely Widows Disease", apparently afflicting the affluent denizens of Nantucket. Even Joe Sarno in his '60s soft-core mode would have trouble getting this weak film to float.

By the end of the fifth sex vignette, when Kirsten boldly declares she's tired of writing "bodice-busters" and plans to write novels drawn from reality, I was sick of the whole thing too. She was poised to begin f*cking her handy man Evan Stone when Lee decided to call a halt, and not a moment too soon.

Making this worse is the very chintzy decision to apparently shoot the film in Chatsworth; all the Nantucket visuals are just second unit footage (without the actors) credited to one "Major Deegan". Poor Bud didn't even get a free trip to the East Coast out of the deal.