Corset Reveries (1995) Online

Dullness is the watchword of fetish & bondage videos, as if the would-be filmmakers had taken the notion of "immobility" to heart. The dictionary declares succinctly, Immobile = incapable of moving or being moved. I am incapable of being moved by junk like "Corset Reveries".

After watching a couple dozen (out of tens of thousands, many listed in IMDb with stupid titles -look up FM Concepts to chuckle at the inanity of their monikers) fetish videos recently I finally think I stumbled on the answer as to why this niche industry exists. Those new iPhone commercials hawk the feature whereby a still photo momentarily "comes to life", namely one sees several frames shot just before & after the key photo, causing pixilation when projected. This is what a bondage/fetish video does: captures a still photo (the visual stimulation of many decades ago when magazines ruled the porno world) set in motion just a bit through the magic of VHS or DVD (or now streaming I guess).

So director Kristine Imboch can be forgiven the absence of motion for an hour here - perhaps that's the elegant way of portraying poor model Cathariine Beaumont being in constant bondage and restraint for the duration. Since this is a one-woman show for Beaumont (saves on talent costs), there is no drama of being captured or being tied up -all that implicitly happened off-screen. Instead we get eight tedious vignettes of her trussed up in various costumes wriggling and struggling to get free, but, alas, unsuccessful.

So the fans get to see Catharine in a variety of lovely corsets and lingerie, often topless. Her hour-glass figure is her drawing card, no doubt achieved through tireless corset training (which in our real world has become trendy once again two decades after this was shot). Anyone waiting for "something to happen" will emerge as frustrated as if sitting through one of Warhol's ground-breaking '60s movies all about the camera gazing -like "Sleep" or "Empire".

The original title of this exercise back in the VHS era was simply "KI-11", referring to Imboch's output, and sounding more like an art museum installation than a moving picture. In sum, that's how I would characterize the lion's share of these fetish videos: soft porn in search of a museum to be installed in perpetual loop in the lobby.