Centerfold

Bud Lee directed this okay vehicle for his wife Hyapatia, its main drawback being Ariel Hart's script which is quite dated 30 years later.

Hyapatia plays a successful adult photographer working for magazines, a sort of Suze Randall. We see in flashback her start in college days as a photography student, auditioning for Steve Drake & T. T. Boy as a model and readily subjecting herself to casting couch sex, anxious to get ahead.

Currently she has reversed roles, now a tough cookie, running her porn photography sets in bossy fashion and treating her models the way men treated her on the way up. Hart's screenplay keeps hammering away at the theme that she's adopted bad masculine habits and would be better off to have retained her soft, feminine nature and be kind and loving instead.

Randy Spears as her best (platonic) friend and Porsche Lynn as her hair stylist on set keep chiding Hyapatia, and ultimately are proven right with the usual happy Hollywood ending.

Bur undercutting this condescending approach is the fact that Hyapatia's character was tough and career-driven in the first place, plus the blatantly biased approach that treats Lee as photographer Kristina's lesbianism as inferior to being a "normal" heterosexual. Obviously the picture was playing to a male audience, but it is structured as a Romantic Couples film for VCA Platinum and should have risen above that b.s. Variation on male chauvinism.

Lee is sexy as always, and capable in the dramatic moments. Lynn is excellent in basically a character role (plus a masturbation scene), Francesca Le hardly recognizable as a model who's flat-chested early in FL's career. Quite appealing is a redhead Sheila Stone who as a new model creates the movie's central crisis for Lee when Hyapataia falls for her; Stone has a beauty reminding me of current starlet Nickey Huntsman.

Title song "Centerfold" is extremely poor, even sung off-key.

Although the women in this film are fantastic to look at, the highlight for me is Hyapatia Lee, one of the greatest porn stars of all, with her best work, in my opinion being The Masseuse (1990). In this film, she play Kristina Rand, a photographer who is not at all sure where she wants to be. There is some good sex action with the scene comprising Miss Lee and Randy Spears, reminiscent of her scene in The Masseuse in which she had also got together with Randy Spears.

It goes without saying that there are a great deal of intimate close-ups, particularly of Porsche Lynn although the boy/girl scenes are really steamy, as is the girl/girl scene that Miss Lee does with Sandra Stone; and the threesome with Steve Drake and T. T. Boy, in which she really shows off her talents. Anyway, consider this another good performance from Hyapatia Lee.