I must resist overpraise for "Hard Choices", watching it for the first time in an era when its simple achievements have become a lost art. The redoubtable team of Ron Sullivan (aka Henri Pachard) and producer Paul Thomas have taken an excellent Raven Touchstone screenplay, cast it well like an off-Broadway play, and come up with erotic entertainment for adults.
The content includes XXX porn, but the general approach here is that of "let's make a real movie". Not a big-budget, lots of locations movie, but a chamber work that happens to deal with explicit sex and attitudes toward sex. The nearest thing to this genre in recent years is what often passes for soft-core pornography on late-night pay-cable, but this video is infinitely better.
Raven's story revolves around an aging college prof played by Nick Random, who is an unlikely porn leading man, more reminiscent of the great comic Arte Johnson of "Laugh-In" TV fame than a handsome stud in the John Leslie or yes, Paul Thomas himself vein. He's planning to marry young student Shanna McCullough -delightful here in an undemanding but showcase sexy role (most of her work at this time was lame sex filler). He's invited all his favorite former students to attend, and the old guy's misogynistic attitude is unfiltered in a perceptive screenplay that '80s style emphasizes 'talking dirty" both before and during the sex scenes, yet another lost art.
The ensemble cast is terrific in their roles, and today's awkward improvisation is absent - a key factor as in the 21st Century the scriptwriter has largely been abandoned except for a Cliff Notes style transcriber for those atrocious ripoff shows called euphemistically "parodies". Leading the pack is Krista Lane, overplaying humorously as a sex bomb turned TV evangelist with hokey Southern accent, whose tag "Hallelujah!" is exhorted at the end of nearly every sentence and carefully timed while having sex. She has a hot lesbian scene with similarly built (both famous for perfect nipple cones) Jessica Wylde, relenting to let her husband join in later for a threesome. As the hubby, Wayne Stevens is a balding character actor who is so unlikely a porn performer that I was actually surprised when he joined in for explicit sex: I was certain he was just cast for dialog scenes only.
Also making a strong impression is Nina Hartley, already playing (a sneak preview of 30 years later) an older woman at age 28, another of the prof's conquests. Many sex scenes are abbreviated (perhaps a minute long) and shown in flashbacks of cast's younger selves, and in total the feature breaks many porn rules in not kowtowing toward the "sex is everything" Prime Directive. It is more like a real film with sex included -what the Adult Entertainment industry should have evolved into instead of the generic mess we have today.
Tom Byron is a bit young (looking) to be Hartley's husband about to get a divorce, but he acquits himself well with some rather erudite dialog and a solid humping session servicing the prof's bride-to-be Shanna. Hartley comforts the prof the old-fashioned way, and other performers hit the sack: amusingly ethnic Tony Montana pretending to be a success but just a bus boy hooking up with similarly false-front Blondi who's just a diner waitress. The most minor player is oddly enough Mike Horner, perhaps the most accomplished actor in the bunch, merely cameoing as a TV star who Nina can't wait to hump.
Right up to an unusual freeze-frame ending, which left me wondering just a bit, "Hard Choices" is rare amongst '80s shot-on-video features for its unpretentious yet engrossing achievement. No showy "award-winning" crap here, and a serious attention to craft. Like most Caballero DVD reissues, it is advertised on the box liner as "Shot on 35mm", which it was not.
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