Casino, No Limit (2008) Online

With the title CASINO, NO LIMIT, one would expect some attention to the gambling details, perhaps even a suspenseful war of wills across the table. Instead we get high-quality Euro Sex, over 2-1/2 hours worth, but the video-makers decided to punt on the game of chance content.

That's a shame, because otherwise this is a glamorous, gal-filled porn video from Marc Dorcel, boasting "14 girls, 12 scenes". I guess the amount of thought and care to completing the entertainment package was just beyond the abilities of writer-director Herve Bodilis.

Flashbacks provide the back story as Dorcel regular Horst Baron portrays Horst (entire cast use the same names for their characters too), a war criminal seen torturing and then executing a hapless guy in opening scenes. Melissa Lauren (buxom French actress well-known from hundreds of U.S. made XXX videos) wants revenge, and schemes along with wheelchair bound Alex (as Alex, natch) to get some. Alex wants revenge against Nacho (Nacho Vidal, an excellent villain and no slouch in the humping department), the guy who put him in a chair three years back.

Yasmine is Alex's main squeeze and a key cog in the revenge plot -she's an amazing beauty who generally earns her top (or near the top) billing in a Dorcel exercise. Other key player is Tony (Tony Carerra), a gangster living very high on the hog in Ibiza, who is quite colorful, boasting plenty of tattoos and having a cute pug as mascot. He's certainly the least hissable of the villains.

One peculiarity of this video is that all the major female roles are played by brunettes (most of them outfitted with extremely fake looking wigs seeming to be auditioning for a Vampira role), while the attractive blondes, with the exception of Natali DiAngelo, are just on hand as eye candy and sex filler, with zero dialog. Given the huge cast list I found this pecking order fascinating and peculiar, though it is true that in mainstream cinema it's the brunettes (Roberts, Swank, Bullock, Portman, etc.) who bring home the bacon, with superstar longevity far exceeding that achieved by their blonde sisters (take Pfeiffer or even Lange for example, in hindsight view).

The one token "redhead" in the cast is Ana Martin, merely wearing a bright red wig that looks like it was sent over from Ricky's moments before the shoot. Her scene is near the finish, a very, very strange contest of Melissa arm wrestling Ana while various thugs molest them from behind as a distraction. Such irrelevant kinkiness is what puts Euro Trash porn on a pedestal, or into the gutter, depending upon one's point-of-view. Dorcel is on a safe sex kick (every video has a couple of PSA's included stressing condom use), so even in this life & death world, every villain and third-rate henchman remembers to put on a rubber before raping or just routinely penetrating the 14, count 'em, 14 women in the cast.

With Lauren and Yasmine leading the way, the sex scenes are strong and plentiful, which will obviously endear CASINO to the undiscriminating porn fan. One rather "violent sex" scene where nasty Nacho forces Lauren to gaggingly deep throat him is quite impressive, and works well in the narrative since we know she already hates his guts enough to want to kill him.

So why do I complain about the gambling? Early scenes show the cast playing roulette, blackjack and poker at a casino frequented by Horst and his evil-looking secretary Nina (Nina Roberts), but the plot builds up to an illegal "No Limits" game staged by Tony in which not only does each of the four contestants put up a million euros each for starters, but when cleaned out, you are permitted to literally bet your life.

The game they're playing appears to be a modified version of the currently trendy Texas Hold'em, but Bodilis' direction of the poker action is so sloppy you never know what's going on, and there's no suspense whatsoever before some guy announces, say "Two Jacks" (what's in his own concealed hand, not the total five card combination which counts) and is pronounced the loser. Why not show the cast sweating out each card, betting before and after the River, rather than truncating all the gambling scenes to the point of irrelevancy? This is Filmmaking 101 (or video-making I guess), but perhaps pornographers have reinvented the wheel to their own stupid "sex is all" agenda.