The Perfect Secretary 3: The New Recruit

Nick Orleans created this series of porn videos, derived from the indie classic SECRETARY starring Spader & Gyllenhaal, so I was taken aback to see him undermine and virtually destroy (like some demented Ayn Rand protagonist) his own creation with this lame 3rd act. Ernest Greene directed and Nina Hartley produced part 2 with aplomb, so giving the reins back to Orleans was a big boo-boo.

Perky Riley Reid makes a sexy if vertically-challenged heroine, though her story gets lost almost immediately. Prologue is a nightmare she's having involving two sexy lesbians (Bailey Blue and Holly Taylor, shot with a Buttman camera that gives more than a hint of what's to come) plus a laughing Chanel Preston, all while dear Riley is masturbating (in erotic tight closeup of her swollen labia courtesy d.p. James Avalon under the covers with her -per the BTS short subject) in bed.

She's a journalist (or author) set to interview a reclusive genius played by Michael Vegas, and the 3-hour feature is barely underway when auteur Orleans drops the narrative ball completely. Riley is staring at Vegas' website on her computer screen and is whisked off magically to his BaukRiver Institute's headquarters, which jarringly turns out to be the elegant (but inappropriate to the subject) mansion (with its distinctive spiral staircase and double portal-ed front doors) used in so many Chatsworth video shoots, which I have christened the IMMORAL PROPOSAL house in honor of Nica Noelle's film shot there.

Orleans's series concepts of secretaries and training them are nowhere to be found in the ensuing 3 hours, just several fetish-garbed women with headsets occasionally responding to customer service phone calls when they aren't too busy humping or posing. In place of the original themes, Orleans has proudly dared to introduce his favorite types of fetish gear: tights, pantyhose, nylons and even those TV-hawked body-shaper slim-ware, displayed on beautiful women with Avalon's camera worshiping them regardless of the storyline, dialog or anything else. To say he got distracted is a euphemistic understatement.

So during crucial set-up scenes, the camera wanders ever-so-Buttman-like to gaze at one to four women's posteriors, shining through layers of nylon and pantyhose - a visual delight but turning the entire farrago into an imitation Andrew Blake show. I don't know if a mainstream audience is ready for strictly-fetish material, which can be obtained in unlimited quantities and variations from specialized porn distributors. It overwhelms SECRETARY 3 in a most embarrassing way.

Also extremely embarrassing (immortalized uncannily in a blooper reel) is the incompetent line reading by Chad Diamond (who briefly gets a blow job later on), who any serious filmmaker would have replaced. He plays Vegas's butler and as luck would have it has more lines to recite than the leads.

There is the requisite amount of bondage and domination material as befits a BDSM movie, but much of it is ludicrous, as when Riley is wandering around with her shoulders held out in a genre-requisite metal yoke contraption, which she manages to get caught on a metal gate and can't escape from (even when Vegas sees her in this predicament, he doesn't help). This and other nonsense is all designed and approved by BDSM consultants including one Echo D., but it's unimpressive, and certainly unimaginative compared to the fanciful nonsense Orleans presented in the first PERFECT SECRETARY.

Matching our leading lady in shortness is delectable Katie St. Ives, sort of a tour guide of depravity, leading to a hot lesbian scene for them. Chanel Preston is brought extraneously into the main body of the film wearing angel wings so as to provide a touted (but who cares?) "first interracial scene" for her with special guest star Prince Yahshua. This isn't filmmaking or even XXX video making, it's just checking off the boxes of what the auteur and his audience presumably expect for their 18 cents investment.

Co-producer Jane Hamilton makes a cameo at a climactic sort-of wedding ceremony that would propel PF3 to midnight movie status if porn qualified for same: Vegas weds Riley with their own vows: she pledges to be his sub while he promises to be her lord & master, and the preacher (or whatever) announces "You may kiss the sub", after more pointedly muttering "Good luck with that" under his breath. An orgy erupts and "THE END" is mercifully superimposed on screen right after Mike's money shot on her belly.