In the world of cinema, typical viewers of both sexes usually get exactly what they want. Many Directors would give their eye teeth to be able to make a truly independent film but the financial pressures associated with high production costs, together with overproduction (to the extent that a large proportion of new films exhaust their market potential long before these costs have even been fully recovered), create enormous pressures to spoon feed audiences with a product that is generally satisfying but can seldom be stimulating or challenging. This is particularly true of the late night films created primarily for the hotel industry. Audiences are largely business professionals, administrators or technologists, all relaxing after long and tiring days spent meeting their peers in the course of their normal working lives, together with a smaller proportion of married couples on infrequent holidays intended to recapture a little of the romance that can quickly fade under the tribulations of daily living. The films are usually not mainstream cinematography directed towards viewers who visit a cinema to share the experience of viewing a film with their contemporaries, but the hotel market remains a valid and socially important part of the cinema audience. Films with some erotic content appeal to most of this captive audience viewing in their hotel bedrooms, and can be produced quite inexpensively so (untypically) commercial success can often be achieved with products of relatively low production quality that only have an extremely transient market life. This has unfortunately seriously degraded the typical quality of the films selected by major hotel chains for showing, and worse has also led to an undesirable distinction developing between "legitimate" and "soft-core" production companies. Movies from the latter now frequently even forgo the luxury of a real story line with real characters, instead simply stringing together, with a gossamer thin tread of cohesive dialogue, a series of 5 or 6 minute cameo sexual couplings by characters that are never introduced and often do not even have any real dialogue to deliver - one early one featured a group of cheerleaders watching a football game whilst discussing the capabilities of the various players as studs, of course with appropriate flashbacks. Unfortunately Sinful Desires is one of the films in this category. A radio call in sex show host takes a series of callers who each tell their story about an experience which can be shown on screen in flashback. Plenty of variety in the bodies on show and little call for any meaningful dialogue! MRG Entertainment who created this film have also produced many others like it. Generally speaking they are slick, well performed and easy to watch. Many of them, including this one, also feature a crime thriller thread in the rather meagre connecting material; but there is seldom time for this to be developed in a meaningful manner and after watching a few such films they quickly become dreadfully boring. In this case the acting was even more limited than usual and I found that the sex scenes reminded me more of a modern ballet with ritualistic movements representing rather than depicting what was going on in the film. (done deliberately this could be an interesting theme for some future film or dance presentation).
When rating a film I always try to judge it as I would if its subject was something I was anxious to watch, but even so my rating for Sinful Desires would be no higher than 1 star. Nevertheless such films typically receive a mean viewer rating of 3 or even 4 stars from IMDb viewers, and this one is currently rated as high as 4.5 stars so my judgment is not typical here. Clearly they are of interest to their intended audience and I have no intention of criticising their availability; but, when alone in a hotel away from home, oh how I wish that at least one of the films on offer could provide a more varied erotic appeal. I think of Emmanuelle, far from the first erotic film but perhaps the one with modern production values that gave the entire genre respectability, of Amelie which I would love to watch again, of Away from Her - an unforgettable although very different erotic film, of Nine Songs, and Laura - Les Ombres d'Ete, as well as many others. Come on MRG Entertainment, think about the cinema as well as the hotel bedroom and try your hands at producing a few films like these to help close the rapidly widening and potentially disastrous gulf between soft-core film producers and the mainstream industry. You are capable of doing it. .
