Christine's Secret

Candida Royalle has found a niche in the porn market for people who want something more than the soft core erotica but who find hardcore porn to be a bit more than they actually want to see. In her Femme productions, Ms Royalle does not use the "money shots" and she tries to employ actresses without augmented breasts. In fact, I cannot recall any breaches of the above rules in any Femme film that I have seen.

There is not much of a plot to this film. Christine (Carol Cross) goes to stay at what appears to be a small honeymoon hotel run by a couple of friends. Apart from the proprietors, the only other people at the hotel are a honeymoon couple and single female guest (Taija Rae). There is also a naked guy who has ensconced himself in an outbuilding without anybody noticing - weird. A film of this sort is all about sex and the cast certainly get their share. Taija Rae and boyfriend Joey Silvera have a great scene in the barn; the honeymoon couple obviously and we find out what that naked guy is there for.

There are a couple of things about this film that irked. The music was too loud and downright boring. The music in the last scene in particular was just the same few bars repeated over and over. For me, the sounds of love making are all part of erotica but the film makers seem to think that boring music is so much better. The lighting could have been better. The light through the windows caused annoying shadows of the window frames and masked flesh tones and contours.

On the technical side, I would question the run time quoted on the title page. Femme's own literature quotes a run time of 72 minutes for the full version and the censored UK VHS release runs for only 60 minutes despite the box cover saying 65 minutes. I like Candida Royalle's approach to erotic films so 6 stars.

Collaborating with "R. Lauren Niemi", this short 1984 feature from Candida Royalle has her trademarks in terms of style and content, but lacks the depth of her later story-line films. For me it fit within the abstracted eroticism of such famous porn pioneers as David Hamilton and "Andrew Blake". Unlike Candida's militant "safe sex" later work, the sex scenes are performed bareback, without condoms.

Carol Cross is a winning heroine, so fresh and lovely to captivate any audience. Setting is a rural residence with a neon sign reading "Love's Inn", and the sunny, bucolic mood is reminiscent of Euro Porn, especially Swedish films including those by fellow East Coast Adult Filmmaker Joe Sarno.

The music score by BamBam Productions is the chief drawback, as its guitar and keyboards drone on in vamping mode that is boring and at time overwhelms the pantomime sex action on screen. Eschewing narrative, Candida and co-director Niemi have Cross arriving at the inn to be greeted by wonderful proprietor Chelsea Blake (the only player allowed to do any acting, with dialog and an exuberant personality), followed by five sex scenes involving couples but with no story progression or much of anything happening. It runs 63 minutes on Adam & Eve DVD, including slow end credits, and the IMDb listing of 89 min. original running time is likely false.

Just like modern pornographer Nica Noelle, Candida pioneered in naturalism, with the sex scenes utterly natural, no opening up for the camera, no cum shots, no extraneous changing of sex positions all of which remain virtually mandatory in hack-directed porn to this day.

The only "development" in characters is that after the "love at first sight" (or perhaps on an annual basis, since opening scene establishes that Cross stays at the inn once a year) where Cross and handyman Jake West see each other through windows and each masturbate, a lovely scene of Cross on a swing outside turns into fantasy of her nude swinging through the air to be met mid-swing by Jake as an apparition. Later they have a satisfying sex scene to finish the film.

Given this hour-long template, there was nothing stopping Royalle and Niemi from shooting dialog scenes and even some action scenes to flesh out the characters and narrative in order to make a more conventional and riveting film, in line with the Golden Age story films which were still the norm in 1984 when this one was shot. But instead we end up with an all-sex feature, tasteful for sure but uninvolving.

This is one of Candida Royalle's opuses from her much-publicized Femme production company. She started directing and producing her own adult films after a few years of performing in them. She claims she was highly dissatisfied with the products the adult industry turned out, especially the films' bias toward the male viewer at the expense of females. So to rectify this she set up shop and started producing her own movies, garnering much publicity in the adult and "straight" media along the way.

'Christine's Secret' is one of the results, and it's typical in a lot of ways. Some of the raunchy excesses found in many porn films are gone, but there's still enough of the old hardcore formula left to identify it with that genre. The result is that a lot of folks coming from both sides don't particularly enjoy the Femme productions. There are those who say it's too soft and those who claim they can't tell the difference between Femme and a regular hardcore picture. Plus, a lot of viewers are disappointed that Royalle's films aren't any better than they are. Budgets always seem to be low, scripts aren't that original, the acting is not that great, and in general the promise of feminine/feminist porn isn't delivered.

I'm notoriously easy to please when it comes to adult films and I give 'Christine's Secret' passing marks because of the sexual performances of the cast, a mix of Femme regulars and other old pros. But I find the production lacking and the story nothing special. Candida Royalle has gotten a lot of publicity for Femme over the years but the quality as well as quantity of her output doesn't justify it, in my opinion.

Though some may find this movie too soft to be a real porn classic, I enjoyed viewing it a lot. Especially the scene in the barn featuring Taija Rae and Joey Silvera is hot and steamy. An all-time classic : rent it if you can still find it !