Decadent Divas

Tanya Hyde is the greatest stylist of fetish features in Adult Cinema, no longer in the spotlight a decade after her career peak. Harmony's 2011 release "Decadent Divas" suffers from her going to the well so often and delivering the same content, stuck in a gonzo rut.

This stems from her decision from the beginning of her directorial career to ignore old-time niceties like character, narrative and story. Instead, Hyde presents arresting imagery of BDSM action and extreme fetish activities that impress one at first or second glance but inevitably become tiresome through endless repetition.

The five lengthy segments of this 3-hour opus are well-crafted and performed by an able Brit Porn cast, but offer nothing new: we've seen the same old latex outfits, animal-head masks, extreme penetrations, d.p.'s and domination routines dozens of time before.

I had only seen the wonderful British star Rebecca More in acting assignments before, but here Hyde has her doing very strong gonzo sex while styled unattractively with pulled-back hair and rubber body suit. Her usually distinctive look and personality are wiped out in dehumanizing fashion, furthering a major theme of Tanya's work but disappointing for a Rebecca fan. She and a lesbian buddy Megan Coxxx service a cocooned (in rubber, of course) Clarke Kent, billed here as "Seb Cam" in a vignette pointlessly titled "Room at the Top".

The animal heads are thrown in for "The Pussy Bar" in which Ian Tate is the cocks-man, and the minor fetish of cigarette smoking is tossed into the mix.

Other segments put beauties like Syren Sexton and from Eastern Europe, Carla Cox through the ringer, while a super-stud like Danny D is only recognizable beneath the hood/mask disguise by virtue of his always recognizable long shaft. Omar Williams is on hand to provide the requisite IR content in a scene unsubtly (to put it mildly) titled "Dark Meat".