The Life of Riley

With Stormy Daniels currently winding up her 15 minutes of mainstream fame thanks to an evidently "fake" Wall Street Journal story linking her to the prez, watching this forgotten (among hundreds) Stormy-starrer from Wicked Pictures was most disappointing. It's awful.

Randy Spears is not known as a director, and this demonstrates why. What shapes up as a potential thriller and perhaps character study emerges as a bland, boring non-event, little more than five sex scenes strung together with mucho Stormy reading voice-over narration to us, suitable for endless anthologizing by Wicked in its never-ending string of 4-hour and even 16-hour compilation DVDs.

She portrays Riley, a mainstream Hollywood actress who suddenly had a hit and is now suffering from the anxiety of fame. Try as they might, Spears the helmer and Stormy the actress cannot whip up an ounce of sympathy for her character, as she comes off as just another self-obsessed prima donna, whining endlessly in the time-honored Garbo mode of "I just vanna be alone".

Threatening letters looking like ransom notes (cut & paste typed up words pasted on a piece of stationery) cause Stormy and her manager Brad Armstrong (in a truly nothing role) to hire a security expert in the form of Nick Manning. Nick's dull walk-through is a prime negative contributing to the film's failure, above and beyond Spears' incompetence as storyteller.

Since all that Wicked cared about at this point in its history was getting product to the marketplace featuring its roster of contract stars, Kirsten Price and Kaylani Lei are shoe-horned into the narrative, each getting two sex scenes. Stormy also has two, boiling the sum down to five by having Kirsten hump Stormy in a flashback demonstrating how the college chums were former lovers, until Stormy put Kirsten on the payroll after hitting the big time. Lei's status in the entourage is never adequately spelled out (Stormy insists on firing her at one point but that plot ploy is abandoned or ignored by sloppy Spears). As to sloppiness, Manning's character is named Mike, but the final print leaves in a scene where Stormy calls him Frank by mistake.

Final reel is beneath contempt, as Spears builds to the inevitable scene where Stormy seduces playing-hard-to-get Manning, but uses a dissolve that removes the sex (not even any nudity at this point) and just has the duo comment on having made love, hardly the stuff that dreamy porn is made of. Final plot twist and ending is anti-thrilling.

Danny Mountain gets no billing in the opening credits or even in the trailer portraying Price's boyfriend, but Bill Bailey gets decent billing for a quickie, nothing sex scene with Kaylani that is thrown in randomly.

"Makeup by Melissa" is the credit, and a very poor job is done, with too much makeup, so that Stormy looks perfectly coiffed and eye-shadowed even in casual scenes, while Price of course wears high heels to bed, perhaps due to Spears' well-known foot-fetish. Even Stormy's real-life husband Brendon Miller, unappealing as usual, is given enough eye makeup to be Eva Green's beau instead. Or maybe his casting as a rock star explains his 24/7 Rocky Raccoon visage.