Adore

My memories of Vivid Video, now nearly out of business with no new product on tap in recent times, is of glamorous babes in glamorous videos, not my cup of tea but top of the line. David Stanley directed scores of features for the label in its heyday, some of them fascinating, but "Adore" is a stinker that is strictly bargain-basement filler. If Vivid were a mainstream studio, it would resemble a Monogram or PRC release, rather than MGM or Paramount.

If Stanley's script were not deficient enough to sink the project, casting of Chris Cannon in the leading role would have sufficed. He's terrible, consistently unsympathetic and unpleasant, delivering both poor acting and generic humping. This is ostensibly a Savanna Samson vehicle pure and simple, she being the leading Vivid breadwinner in a period running roughly from 2003 to 2011, but it ends up just being a video with her name on it to sell it.

She's introduced in the opening scene humping in bed with Cannon. He wakes up next morning to find a "Dear John" type short note informing him she's split.

Cannon spends the rest of the blessedly short (79 minutes) feature feeling sorry for himself, complaining to what few friends he has or just moping around.

Enter cute but tiresome nymphette Ashley Blue, who doesn't look at all like a porn actress and had me convinced that I would be typing the usual NonSex Role after her character name when it came time to fix IMDb's credits. But no, she marries Cannon after some meet-cute action and Stanley flashes one of his elliptical inter-titles reading "Five Years Later, Stillwater, Minnesota".

Brief 2nd unit (or library) location footage takes us to that burg, where Cannon and Ashley are happily married. Unfortunately, Tony Tedeschi, heavily into his salt-of-the Earth accent and characterization moves in as their next door neighbor, and as luck would have it (or merely lazy, cornball Stanley scripting), his wife is none other than Savanna Samson.

The resolution of long-simmering enmities and a contradictory "everybody wants to get along" attitude kill off the remainder of the running time, leading to a terrible, soggy in the extreme "happy ending". Stanley was working on an assembly-line Vivid basis when he shot this one, and it is clear he was content to hand in anything remotely resembling a finished feature in order to cash his paycheck and scurry on to the next Vivid potboiler.

Upshot is that the prolific actress Ashley won an AVN award for her ho- hum performance, not really embarrassing to the industry as nearly all those awards are phony and incapable of close examination, sort of resembling Trump tweets or verbal pronouncements in that regard.