Caught Stealing

Paul Thomas elected to give his crew member a shot at directing in this very poor feature for Vivid Entertainment. Its dumb story line is matched by extremely mindless casting.

Even though I've been watching lately upwards of a hundred Vivid releases from around the turn of this century I found it extremely confusing having several of the leading ladies as not lookalikes but oh so similar looking busty blondes with harsh facial features. For the purposes of this review for the record I will assume who played what (no character credits are listed unfortunately) but I'm probably wrong.

Given that Jordan Haze is top-billed, I assume she was paying Julie, an office girl who both leading men, Steven St. Croix and Joel Lawrence, have a yen for. St. Croix is the boss (of both), married to Kate (Monika Star I'm guessing), who inherited the business from her dad. Profession seems to be involved in the wine business, but the lousy and uncredited script makes that and much else unclear.

Surprising element for such a junker is that the core premise for the story seems to be ripped off from Billy Wilder's all-time classic "The Apartment". Lawrence suffers throughout the show because his boss and brother St. Croix keeps borrowing his condo for sex, and even lending it to others for same, including Eric Masterson in a nothing role.

Recurring gag (makes you want to gag, that is), has neighbor Sharon Kane (!!) complaining regularly to Joel about the noise emanating from his condo apartment. Needless to say, I'd love to watch any of Sharon's innumerable classic films from the Golden Age of porn rather than see her hanging out NonSex in this loser.

Much ado about nothing until Joel finally grows a backbone, all demonstrating that substituting an untalented not-even-qualifying-as-hack in PT's director's chair is fatal. Briana Banks has a couple of extraneous sex scenes, and that's all that Vivid brass and the company's slavish fans apparently demanded back in the day.