Private Movies 5: Pleasure Island (2002) Online

Oh this movie is soo bad that I just had to find my forgotten password to be able to comment. It's aggravating! First off, the male protagonist Mick Blue doesn't stop talking and every 3 sentences he opens his eyelids wide to look like a an innocent Bambi with his big blue eyes on his baby face. It's hard to explain but the faces he makes are an instant turn-off and it's really quite ridiculous. If I never ever see this actor again, it'd still be too early.

Then, the camera seems to be out of focus most of the time and/or the director thinks blurring is the next best thing since sliced bread. It's painful! Like watching a seventies playboy movie or something, with greased lenses. And the camera does more idiotic stuff. Many scenes with movement just become motion blurs, like the camera uses a way too long exposure time or only records at 9 FPS. It makes the scenes nearly unwatchable. If this is the way the director thinks he's being 'artistic' he better go back to film school, or move to make art-house movies, but please: NOT porn!!

Then as if all this isn't bad enough yet, one of the biggest mistakes in porn ever get repeated here like nothing was learned since the seventies; many scenes are interlaced. So you get 7 seconds of girl #1 and the action moves over to the other side of the room with another girl. This is killing; whether your fave is girl 1 or girl 2, nobody wants his favorite porn scene be interrupted 4 times per minute by a lesser girl, (or even worse, non-sex scene). Wow. Did nobody care to tell these people that?? If I want to zap away from my porn every 7 seconds, I'll do that myself, thank you very much! It completely spoils the scenes with the hottie Angela Black (Julia Crow) for me, but I'd imagine that the fan base of Julia Taylor also doesn't really like that the camera pans away all the time to Angela Black, either. No matter how you look at it, it turn out bad. WHY are they repeating these old known venerable pitfalls of porn, in 2002 ??

Then there is the painful plot, the dialogue, the dubbing. This film is truly one that should never have been made, and certainly not in 2002. Not worthy of Private standards.

As with many of Antonio Adamo's Private oeuvre, this video suffers from a major problem in its translation to English. It was dubbed into the language, and whoever wrote the dub script clearly didn't know the English language as well as one would hope. While some of the dialogue is pretty clear -- ("What are you doing?" asks Mick Blue's character of "Nirvana", played by Julia Taylor as she begins to passionately embrace another man". "What I want to do with you," she replies.) -- much of the rest is just plain incomprehensible.

But hey, it's a sexvid, who cares about the dialogue, right? Wrong. This film has a surprisingly deep amount of dialogue, much related to its plot. Mick Blue plays a sex therapist -- who apparently used to get quite hands on with his clients -- who came home to find his wife (Sandra Russo) having rampant affairs with everybody, even the gardener. He gets depressed by this, so depressed that he doesn't have even the slightest interest in sex anymore.

Okay, that's an exaggeration. But he keeps telling this story to everyone, repeating all the graphic details, and my God, it's boring. And furthermore, he's interested enough in sex (and more importantly showing other people how to have good sex) to demonstrate to a fellow performing oral sex on Rita Faltoyano how to do it so she'll really enjoy it. But then he meets Julia Taylor -- or Nirvana, as her character is apparently dubbed -- who leads him back to arousal. What, exactly, we're supposed to make of her identification with the Buddhist ideal of detachment from all worldly concerns is a subject for a more erudite observer than I.

Four scorching scenes with Julia Taylor, plus a scene with sex-star Rita Faltoyano before she had surgery to make her more conventionally attractive, make this one a keeper, as far as I'm concerned.