cricharddavies

Let's get this out of the way -- this is, flat-out, a pornographic rip-off of BASIC INSTINCT 2, with Jane Darling in the role that Sharon Stone made notorious. Now, porn filmmakers have been ripping off mainstream film for probably as long as they've been doing anything, so there's nothing new about that. But Antonio Adamo, who used to be a fairly imaginative director and storyteller, doesn't seem willing or able to do anything but do rip-offs these days. His latest project, not yet added to the IMDb, is an equally blatant rip-off of HBO's ROME.

Making matters even worse is that this is filmed with the actors speaking "English", but with other soundtracks and foreign language subtitles available. Basically, the studio seems to be operating under the assumption that nobody in English-speaking countries gives a damn about understanding the plot of the movie, and that all they care about is the sex scenes. Who knows, maybe they're right about most viewers. But I'm not most viewers.

The sex scenes are pretty appealing, and Jane Darling certainly looks better than Sharon Stone. She also has some fairly good acting chops, although she hams it up, too. I just wish that I had some idea of what she was saying when she tries to talk in English ...

... and possibly one of the best *ever* made.

This video is a gigantic poke in the eye to anyone who believes that extremely sexually explicit action and an interesting, compelling plot can't ever exist in the same production. Some of the scenes were almost too explicit for my liking, but they never made me want to stop watching. And while the basic storyline is one that's been done to death by cyberpunk writers and gamers, it remains intriguingly presented here. As the accompanying BTS footage makes clear, the production team worked their fingers to the bone to make this near future video look and feel plausible.

There's only a couple of problems. While Eva Angelina's acting is top-notch, her delivery of her lines isn't quite as clear as it needs to be. (Contrast, for example, the clarity of Hillary Scott's character.) And it's really not clear how and Derrick Pierce's character reaches the conclusion that he reaches in the film's penultimate scene. And the decision to film one of the sequences in black and white is really unfortunate, as it fails to present Kylie Ireland's lovely red hair in all its glory.

Perhaps the most fascinating and novel element of the storyline, in my opinion, is the fact that none of the three leading characters have sex with each other. That's an ironic statement. In a mainstream film, if characters had chemistry with each other, as these ones do, and there wasn't some hint of that chemistry achieving fruition, that would be a case of putting a gun on the mantle in the first act without having it fired by the end of the play. But in a pornographic film, it's *expected* that everyone will do everyone else, and so keeping the characters from doing so, in a way that preserves them, is an intriguing choice.