The Masseuse 6 (2014) Online

I liked THE MASSEUSE 6 for several reasons, not least of which is its new-found emphasis on sex tease instead of today's usual wham-bam approach to XXX. Heading for double digits the series is milking its premise, but so far so good.

Sweet Sinner is a label dedicated to a more naturalistic presentation of explicit sex acts, and MASSEUSE supports this goal but diverges from the company's laudable story line efforts of recent years. It more closely resembles the loop carrier of old - sex vignettes (a la stag films) strung together on the measliest of hangers.

Anikka Albrite top-lines as the manager of Zen massage parlor, where to judge from this video the male clients may well expect a happy ending to their hour treatments. Beyond the requisite four sex scenes nothing of interest happens. Albrite is introduced flustered by constant customer service phone calls, when newbie receptionist, lovely redhead Penny Pax, arrives in the nick of time to (wo)man the phones.

Clients arrive, go to the massage room, and get serviced, and that's all she wrote in a script credited to Melissa Monet. Unlike other Sweet Sinner features, there is no sexual interaction between participants in the 4 separate segments, making each of them a stand-alone porn short - same format as tens of thousands of other modern porn programs. Video's editor "Norma Lee Wett" earns punning points.

One key novelty here is a set design and HDV visual palette that gives #6 a distinctive look. The lengthy sex scenes all take place in a massage room that is decorated white on white, and a somewhat color drained photographic process yields pale pinkish skin tones against white backdrop with only the cast's hairdos offering tonal variation. This is impressive and almost other-worldly, causing me to remember my favorite (and most striking) experience of white-on-white in the cinema way back in 1971 with George Lucas's underrated THX 1138.

Each sex scene begins slowly with a real massage, but inevitably the guy's towel gets removed and a hand-job turns into a blow-job and then full-scale humping. The delay and viewer anticipation regarding this repetitive structure is what makes MASSEUSE work, and I appreciated the effort.

Of the five girls in the cast I enjoyed Penny's turn the most: in spectacles she transforms from college student trying a new job to pay her loans to a requisite sex pro with admirable gradualism. Some of the other performers, notably "superstar" Albrite who tag-teams on Mr. Pete with Penny in the final segment, go through a maximum number of positions and handle sex like pros, somewhat defeating the Sweet Sinner prime directive of "real sex" (i.e., more naturalistic sex).

I hope the MASSEUSE series is not a harbinger of SS dropping the storyline experiment altogether, but it is an interesting variation on the house style.