The Love Couch

THE LOVE COUCH is a porn programmer with a dumb premise, lousy cast, and poorly executed sex scenes. Strictly a bummer from proud parent Carter Stevens.

Perhaps the greatest porn director to date Anthony Spinelli mined exactly the same ground with DIARY OF A BED, and an excellent German sex comedy THE SINFUL BED handled the subject too, both made in the early years of porn features. The major difference between those films and lazybones Carter's effort is that the earlier works used an interesting (and oft-employed) mode of depicting different periods of history for each vignette, progressing toward the present day. Stevens just has an untalented set of performers have sex on the couch as it changes hands in contemporary NYC.

Femme talent is unattractive, a persistent issue with the director, and always glaring because the fans were accustomed to seeing a quality local talent pool satisfyingly go through their gyrations (Samantha Fox, Marlene Willoughby, Merle Michaels, Andrea True, Vanessa Del Rio, etc.). First up, in a major role, is Harmony as Dr. Benway, a shrink who uses the couch in her office for patients, but in an unusual manner sits next to the subject of psychoanalysis on the couch (never saw that before -it's not credible). She's matronly and extremely unappealing as a porn performer, and like most of the female cast, a one-shot. Her client is Stevens regular Leo Lovemore, who like so many of these protagonists suffers from limp- dick disease.

Premise that the couch is alive, voiced by a woman, and getting off vicariously by having the power to get people sitting on it horny and immediately impelled to make love is preposterous and puts the entire overlong feature into the stag movie category. R. Bolla overacts as usual in the role of a sleazy porn producer, a bit too close (hey Carter, what do you do for a living?) for comfort as he uses the title object as a clichéd "casting couch". Stevens appears in a mercifully brief but pointless cameo as an uppity moving man who delivers the couch to Bolla's office.

Eric Edwards delivers an uncharacteristically poor performance as yet another limp-dicked guy -rather unusual casting for this prolific porn star. He even calls his wife by the wrong name at one point, is corrected, and the flub is left in the final print.

He suggests they try swinging, and when he talks wifey into it and she gets off with the new partner (an unappealing guy), Eric is embarrassingly limp-dicked with the girl. Result: he gets mad at his wife and swears at her. Stevens' misogynistic script goes way overboard in this sequence in its implicit "the guy can do no wrong" mistreatment of the wife's role.

It adds up to a boring, repetitious and far from erotic time-waster.

Adult films back in the day, often had plots to them which made the sex in them seem more spontaneous and real. Adult films today are basically one sex scene after another and it's rare when there is a story. Usually there is a theme, but no story. The ones made today, you do not have to sit through horrible acting and there is a plethora of adult films where you can see what you want. While in the 70's sometimes you had to wait too long for sex scenes to occur and sometimes you can even forget it is a porno! So basically, both eras have their pluses and minuses and this film has the pluses, but carries with it the minuses as well.

The story has a couch that talks about her owners and all the sex they have that she sort of causes. Yes, the couch is a female and at times has the best voice of the film. There is not much to it than that as this one starts fast and seems like a decent adult film as there are a few sex scenes. This one starts with a therapist, goes to a swinger couple, then inexplicably briefly to an adult movie maker and then even briefer hippies.

The film is good up to the swingers, after that there really is not much left. The two girls during the adult filmmaker scene were attractive, but the scene was not steamy due to the guy performing the sex. Then the hippie scene is undone by the fact there is an unattractive girl and she is primarily the focus. Then a brief pointless scene and it's over. Just seemed it kind of faltered at the end and instead of a super grand finale, instead it just kind of peters out. The best scene is this one guy who seduces a virgin, though I do not believe a virgin can be as accommodating as she was without a bit more screaming.

So, not a great adult film by any stretch of the imagination, but I liked it better than some. It did focus on the sex for the most part, but as I said it just needed more at the end of it. I always think the last scene should be memorable, but in this one it was clearly the one girl who was a virgin. The lesbian scene after was good too, just cut a bit short. So, a bit hot the girls are really attractive during the swingers section and okay the rest of the way.