The Master-Piece!

Extremism is definitely not a virtue, and after watching dozens of ad lib porn films recently, I was initially pleasantly surprised to view the meticulously scripted The Master-Piece! However, this hour-long misfire proves that the opposite extreme, overwriting, is also a pitfall.

Writer-producers Tom Alderman and David Presnell reached for the sky when concocting this acid-tongued insider view of Hollywood, but they landed in the mud below. It's a tedious, very poorly constructed tale that oddly disappoints more than the usual "nothing ventured" approach of less ambitious pornographers.

Taking a cue from Billy Wilder's classic Sunset Blvd., the film starts at the end with a couple caught en flagrante delicto by star Norma Sands (Lisa Grant) -not Norma Desmond, who shoots them. She then relates the story of what led up to that climax to her bedmate/current leading man Bob Dellasandro (Forman Shane).

The writing tries to achieve the biting, cynical dialog of a Sweet Smell of Success, but it lacks wit and is obvious in the extreme. The film's themes were very accurately developed a couple of decades later in another classic, Altman's The Player, but fall flat here. Not only due to budgetary restrictions, the people involved here do not suggest at all the Hollywood major studios' system being written about. It might have been advisable to crank out yet another spoof/insider's look at the skin flick industry instead.

After being victimized by blackmailing and two-timing Norma believably turns to violence. But this film ends sourly with a whimper -one of the poorest endings I've seen in a long time, which gives the viewer a familiar "is that all there is?" feeling.

Along the way Steve Vincent as the ruthless director Ramon Wellman (how's that for an overwritten pastiche H'wood name?) is dull & thoroughly unlikable, sinking both the character's potential for viewer identification and even hiss-able value. Leading lady Lisa Grant is styled reminiscent of Jill St. John (who was a big deal starlet at the time) and has a vaguely British accent which is merely distracting.

The skin scenes for the fans are completely unerotic, and whatever gutless wonders made this film, including the equally anonymous helmer Lee Van Horn, shot themselves in the foot by having the girls constantly full frontally nude, while the guys keep on ludicrously odd underpants (at one point matching each other!). It laughably destroys any credibility built up previously.