Oriental Jade

A pretty dire Franken-film, the most tragic thing about ORIENTAL JADE is it could've been a contender. All the pieces are there - they're just jumbled together into total nonsense.

Things start off strong, with a mysterious and sexy credits sequence giving way to an American GI making love with a beautiful local (Kristara Barrington) while at war in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the mood is shattered as the footage is revealed to be a rough cut of the in-production porn flick ORIENTAL JADE, being watched on a flatbed by its sleazy producer (Ron Jeremy).

Would that they'd stayed with that film. The morass we have instead throws us into the struggle of hardcore director G.W. Hunter (Harry Reems, adopting the nom de porn of the actual director of this film, Bill Milling) to finish his latest epic, which is running over budget and off script. Intent on regaining control of the production, his producer is scheming to bring about Hunter's downfall, while the director, along with the office secretary, tries to find a way to right the ship and turn the film back into the high-minded artistic statement he'd imagined.

Supposedly an inside view of the ins-and-outs (yuk yuk) of the porno biz, JADE is all the more frustrating for how much potential it squanders. Casting Reems as Milling's screen counterpart (his true identity not yet public knowledge) presents a number of fascinating opportunities for meta-critique; however, the film has absolutely nothing to say about the process or difficulties of shooting a sex film. Instead, it shifts listlessly from character to character, arbitrarily fornicating to no particular end or purpose. Often, Milling will intercut two scenes to the point where we can barely remember what's going on, and if any pairing manages to generate steam, its cross-cut counterpart is bound to throw off the rhythm. Like its predecessor, HEART THROBS, the film boasts fantastic location photography, but most of it is easily recognizable from that earlier production, suggesting this may well have been the same type of farrago it purports to chronicle. More's the pity, as the film truly gestures toward making something out of this mess, before falling flat on its face.