Triple Summits (2001) Online

Alexis Taylor gives an outstanding comedy performance in "Triple Summits", a bondage video that at first seems merely a clever send-up of Lynch's classic "Twin Peaks" but develops into a bulls-eye satirical deconstruction of an entire genre. Pornographer Oak O'Cork, who is often just making fetish filler for the fans, is smoking on all burners with this must-see video.

In fact, it's the first of dozens of fetish videos I've been sampling out of curiosity recently that is actually worth watching. Here is a subterranean genre, little-known outside of its dedicated if misguided fan base, that has generated thousands of crummy releases. O'Kork is well aware of this fact, and skewers the whole damn cottage industry here, far better than an SNL sketch on the subject could have done.

That's because O'Kork includes the requisite boring (but not to the initiated) cliché footage that makes up such a show. The hog-tied big- breasted women, hopefully topless towards the end of the video, squirming and whimpering as they struggle to break free; the tight close-ups of pretty feet or wrinkled soles or stiletto heeled shoes for the aficionado to gaze at longingly; the handcuffed girls with manacles at their ankles hopping around comically on their 6-inch fetish high heels; those bodices yearning to break free of fabric restraints (or carefully tied rope knots) like some heroine in a period romance. It's all there, plus the comedy.

With the precision of those Pinter plays with their pregnant pauses, Taylor belts out her dialog with such authority that it's a crying shame that she hasn't moved over to mainstream cinema by now. Her "shot" back in the year this video was made (2001) was a brief but memorable bare- breasted role as a prostitute in the Nastassja Kinski starrer "Confession of a Sex Addict", but nothing of substance has followed. As promised in her hilarious summation at the end of "Triple Summits", old Oak was wont to create a sequel or series, in the form of "The Closet of Fear", an overlong video starring Taylor that I didn't enjoy, but will have to watch again after seeing this earlier classic.

In addition to mocking the genre that feeds him, O'Kork also manages to tangentially make fun of the Shaggy Dog Story genre, a rich mine of nonsense that has made the Coen Brothers household names. Pointless details, circular stories, intentionally misapplied emphasis and much- ado-about nothing, the mother's milk to almost any Ethan & Joel screenplay, is skewered on its petard while Taylor as Detective Jefferson searches in vain for the missing girl "Fauna Tallner", elegantly played with scarves tying her up and gagging her by topless beauty Sadie Belle. The banter between fetish icon Amber Michaels and Taylor is priceless.