Anticipation

I've been railing against the movies of Carlos Tobalina/Troy Benny lately after watching some of his worst back to back, but ANTICIPATION (wrong title choice indeed) is even dumber than usual. It should prove to be a test for IMDb-ers who purport to enjoy his stuff.

It's basically a 4-character movie, not a good idea for porn where variety is the spice, but never fear fans - an orgy dragging in some name talent for brief f&s/cum shots is thrown in at the end.

Joey Silvera and Jesse Adams unconvincingly play brothers who fall for each other's wives. In almost anyone else's movie, say by Gerard Damiano, Anthony Spinelli or Paul Thomas, this would be the meat of drama and perhaps a twist or two. Not so here, as Carlos (evidently working backwards from his Big Idea) has the 2 Js ending up on a bed wearing party masks humping each other's spouse side by side, as an orgy goes on in the other room. Mindless, inane, stupid? - take your pick.

Weak build-up shows us Jesse on his honeymoon with his lovely but foul- mouthed bride Sheila Parks. The willowy blonde you never heard of is one of those actresses discovered by Tobalina who never made it -never worked for anyone else "in this town" (not black-balled, merely untalented).

Joey is married to Wendy, a half Latin/half Japanese girl played by Karo Akamoto. She looks okay (nice breasts) but can't act a lick, and is so obscure that she wasn't even listed in IMDb - I had to just add her to the cast list.

Joey's otherwise kindly dad hates Wendy -he apparently is a racist, though the lame script (much of it playing as if improvised) credited to "Lawrence Lance" doesn't make this or anything else clear. Instead it is chalked up to her being a "massage parlor girl".

Wendy is unfaithful with a curly haired blond guy, and Joey ends up in jail when he catches the two together in a bar, pulls out a gun in front of everybody, and the guy is shot to death.

Soon after Carlos proudly replays the scene and shows us from a different angle that another guy at the bar did the actual shooting; after an autopsy showing the bullet didn't match his gun, Joey is exonerated and let out of jail. This sequence is beyond sloppy: we see a big sign on location announcing San Quentin, but the jail Joey's briefly in looks like a set from a Don Glut amateur backyard film.

Movie at this point enters the realm of camp, not high camp nor low camp, just generic camp. The foursome of leads meet, apparently for the first time, at the home of J&J's parents, a set that is one of Tobalina's very phony looking studio interiors. They then go out for a day on the beach, highlighted by the gals' attractive pastel bikinis.

Each of the four is treated to a voice-over of innermost thoughts -they've all fallen in love instantly with the opposite party. The great stone face Wendy (Akamoto) is so inexpressive in close-up I thought Carlos was pulling my leg. The director's short attention span (an issue that killed entirely his crypto-incest movie SENSUAL FIRE) has him giving us a XXX sex scene each for both swapped-couples at this point: Jesse humping Akamoto, and Silvera trading in Wendy for Sheila. A cheesy ballad "Stay with Me" plays, it's title incongruous, and never fear, it will be reprised at film's end.

This letting the cat out of the porno bag, so to speak, kills off any potential suspense for the viewer on whether or how the mismatched leads will hook up, but of course Tobalina had no intention of providing drama or suspense. His Prime Directive is to deliver sex scenes and cum shots, as many as possible. I stupidly demand more, a whole lot more.

This is all happening while Jesse & Sheila are still on their honeymoon, the script reminds us with little impact. After a bit of verbal beating around the bush, everybody goes to a costume party thrown by Serena: Serena playing someone named Serena, not necessarily herself. If this makes no sense to you, you haven't seen much porn, where such a name game is de rigeur.

At the party Serena tells Joey that Jesse is humping his wife Wendy - Joey's reaction: "Good news, now I can f*ck his wife". The rest of this sorry excuse for a film devolves into another of Tobalina's lengthy orgies - I concede his place in Guinness' Book of World Records in the category "Staged the most pointless orgies in film history". An innovation here, which will undoubtedly delight his brain-dead sycophants, is flashing Wide World of Sports style the legend INSTANT REPLAY on screen over and over as he repeats six, count 'em, six money shots over the next reel or two, cleverly padding his running time, and anticipating the oft-used DVD special feature that wouldn't be invented for another 20 years. Carlos Tobalina, the Tom Edison of porn.

Film's coda has the clan's grey-haired mom declaring they're a happy family, and the foursome having group sex on a bed together, so all's right with the world.

About the only good thing in this stinker is Jay Rando's funk/rock musical score, which adds to most scenes, and most scenes are in dire need of something to pep them up.

Anticipation (1982)

** (out of 4)

Jerry (Jesse Adams) and Steve (Joey Silvera) are brothers who are about to find themselves in a very bad situation as both find themselves lusting for the other's wife.

As I slowly make my way through the films of director Carlos Tobalina it's becoming clear that he often skips any sort of story and just gives us enough to get an orgy started. If he isn't doing that then he is attempting to deliver some sort of real story and it just doesn't work so it's becoming clear that no matter what he tried the end result wasn't going to be very good except in rare cases.

The problem with ANTICIPATION is that it really does try to tell a deep and personal story but it just fails for a number of reasons including the fact that the director just wasn't able to build up or play out any real drama. Not for a second do we believe these guys are brothers and it's even sillier during the fantasy sequences, which seem to be another thing the director liked doing.

The film was mildly entertaining for what it was and especially for Sheila Parks and Serena but even they couldn't save the picture. I did find a few scenes extremely funny but the highlight of the picture has to be the flashback to what happened when one of the brothers was sent to jail for murder. His reaction after the gunshots were hilarious and the following scene showing "what really happened" was hilarious as well.