Illusions of Ecstasy

Similar to their collaboration "Pleasure Hunt", this Ginger Lynn vehicle by director Lawrence Cole mixes sappy romantic moments with a dumb story line, making one wonder about the sincerity involved.

Jamie Gillis stars, and overacts, as Merlin the Magician, a crummy showman working at a nightclub with lovely Ginger as his assistant. He is fixated on what he terms "hypnomagic", a routine where he hypnotizes an audience volunteer on stage and transports them into a fantasy world reflecting the subject's erotic desires.

Story premise is immediately undermined (if not rendered unworkable) because it is structured to provide the usual XXX vignettes for the home viewer to watch but doesn't explain or even present how the nightclub audience perceives them. The volunteer is enveloped in smoke and lives out (unconscious) what amounts to an erotic dream. But what does the club audience experience: somebody lying there covered in smoke? Or is th audience supposedly hypnotized to live the same erotic dream as voyeurs?

Among the volunteers we have Mike Horner as an astrophysicist named George Hamilton, who gets a cheesy threesome (including Ginger) in which he is space alien Kazar from the planet Dong; Sheri St. Claire as a socialite transported to ancient Rome for anal sex with Jon Martin and lesbian sex with Ginger; and Lili Marlene sent to the African jungle for sex with native Jonathan Younger.

This leads to Merlin's downfall: an orgy when he uses hypomagic on the entire audience, who drink a witch's brew from a big smoky cauldron. The local cops are not amused.

Hokey ending transports Merlin & Ginger back to medieval times, as if he fantasizes being the actual Merlin of history and myth.

Lyrical scenes of Ginger wandering around in nature are interspersed throughout the movie, and idiotic musical accompaniment ruins most of the vignettes, including jazz/funk for ancient Rome and sappy ballads sung over the action. The dramatics of Jamie being drained by the power of his experimental hypnomagic as well as the underlying "magic is real" are never credible.