Passages 1

Paul Thomas is often cited as the GOAT among porn directors, but simply delivering an entertaining miniature movie is hardly cause for the ridiculous hyperbole of the previously ONLY review submitted to this website some 16 years ago and 15 years after the video's release. Calm down and get real!

Its virtues include the simplicity with which Ariel Hart's script attacks the staple and overdone theme of young love, in this case gushy young co-eds discussing and experimenting with sex at college. Also, we have mature, clearly adult female actresses performing the teen roles, as opposed to the borderline kiddie porn approach of both 1970s jail-bait porn and current Gonzo "teen" porn in which the performers are legally old enough but consistently cast to appear underage (think Piper Perri or Angel Smalls).

Designed as a low-budget series of four barely-feature length (70 mins.) videos with the same overall cast, "Passages" deals with rites of passage stories, simple and unpretentious.

This first one has Christy Canyon and a less successful starlet of the era Jennifer Stewart chatting on their bunk beds about boys and sex, even practicing sex on each other, not as lesbians but in the tried & true porn trope of "learning to kiss, etc." to be ready for escalating intimacy once boys invite them out.

Both actresses are quite convincing, and the male talent (big names Peter North, later scandalized Marc Wallice and Blake Palmer) are okay. Ariel Hart's dialogue is fine, including requisite "talking dirty" content, and the sex is tastefully of the Couples format rather than extreme XXX.

Net result is nostalgic and almost quaint, tasteful rather than in your face. But this is hardly challenging eroticism or as creative as PT's many serious projects. It's light entertainment, conventional but well-executed and utterly lightweight. Therein lies its charm.