Love's Passion (1998)

My interest in the acting career of Veronica Hart is everlasting, but my interest in her as an Adult Cinema director has waned. This "romance novel" material come to the screen in a porn format is so straightforward and uninteresting as to contradict its purpose.

Most porn, especially in its current gonzo mode, is documentary in nature -merely sex acts performed by amateurs or professional actors/models, duly photographed for posterity. Hart thrived when porn was still of theatrical interest and was able to give quality acting performances (with explicit sex as the centerpiece) that have stood the test of time.

Not so her various prestige assignments for VCA during the VHS era. "Love's Passion" concerns a romance novelist (weepy Juli Ashton, the Irene Dunne of porn) who escapes into her fictional world via her imagination. As viewers we see perhaps half the film as representations on screen of her fictional characters, with Ashton playing both novelist and period-dress heroine.

The period scenes have naturally stitled dialog and reflect attitudes of a bygone era, but Hart and her scripter "P. Kay" fail to make their speeches or actions anything but banal. in both stories, Juli's loss of her selfish husband, aspiring playwright Mickey G, is a yawner, especially when he suddenly turns over a new leaf in the final reels to facilitate a cornball happy ending.

This ends up being a mushy tale overloaded with sentimentality that does not mix well with the demands of explicit sex scenes, injected into the narrative like clockwork to please the VCA brass. Overall it seems sincere, but decidedly stillborn, even compared to numerous other movies (including Hart's own ) that use the novelist & his or her characters as a structural storytelling device.