Dreamwalk

Perhaps Anne Randall's half-baked screenplay is the main culprit, but the vastly overrated filmmaker Cecil Howard (=Howard Winters) lays an egg with "Dreamwalk", his penultimate Adult film project.

Sloppily constructed, it seems like a bunch of dramatic scenes, filled with XXX content of course, slapped together haphazardly. The story doesn't progress, and the characters remain uninteresting and opaque, all leading to a nihilistic conclusion. It's anti-entertainment -sound and fury signifying...nothing.

With a confusing opening voice-over narration by star Nina Hartley failing to make clear sense of what we're about to see, we get an utterly dysfunctional family: brother and sister-in-law Paul Thomas and Nina Hartley, with PT's children staying with them for the summer. Is it love/hate or merely hate/hate (plus lust) that drives this crazy bunch to confront, dominate and belittle each other? Who cares?

It's essentially a tale of faux incest and guilt: PT's son Tom Byron and stepdaughter Stacey Donovan have sex; Nina has custody of her niece Stacey after the death of her mom who was Nina's sister, and she's also f*cking PT. PT is strangely passive as Nina dominates him, a gimmick to set up the freeze-frame lousy ending.

Thrown into the mix is sultry Tasha Voux as Stacey's BFF (and lesbian lover); Rhonda Joe Petty as a prostitute who counts PT among her anonymous customers; and sort of for comic relief Ron Jeremy as a customer for unlikely prostitute Nina. Why she's a prostitute servicing johns right in PT's mansion is unexplained and an idiotic plot element that helps annihilate any semblance of credibility half-way through the torturous film.

Cast is encouraged to overact in the sex scenes rather than in the dramatic ones, especially Nina, who would undoubtedly feel ashamed if forced to watch herself pretending to be in the throes of extraordinary sexual passion on screen here. Howard insists on throwing in bits of kink to perhaps wake up a weary audience, all of it pointless, like Nina taking a shower that merely interrupts the story at one point, and even pausing to shave her pussy with a ton of shaving cream to prolong that "saved from the cutting-room floor" footage; or several idiotic confrontation scenes for the assembled family, where Byron or Stacey get to grandstand briefly. The movie even begins with a "sex-with-a-sleeper" scene, a gimmick that never comes off as believable (how'd he stay asleep?).

Nina also has an out-of-body experience late in the film, cuing an erotic nightmare (oddly starring Tasha Voux who is merely a peripheral character in the film proper) and looks like the work of some film school dropout given a $20 budget.