Invisible Lover

Made for VCA, "Inivisible Lover" is a disappointing porn feature from the prolific team of director Bud Lee and George Kaplan, short on creativity and clumsy in execution. It's one of the more disappointing videos I've watched in my current review of Lee's lengthy Adult career.

Though the cast keeps speaking of "my imaginary friend", Kaplan's script is more in keeping with the tiresome Guardian Angel theme that permeates mainstream entertainment and pops up in Adult from time to time, too. Bridgette Kerkove is cast as such a being, giving our hero Steve Hatcher advice and help at key moments in the story. As Steve's bewildered girl fiancée Vivian Valentine points out when she finally figures out his supernatural problem, he's way too old to be still visualizing and conversing with "an imaginary friend".

Perhaps it is the infantile nature of this story conceit that quickly turned me off, but director Lee doesn't do much with the concept. There are attempts at humor based on the old saw that the other characters can't see the fantasy friend (only the protagonist and we, the audience can see him or her) but they are lame.

Kaplan's one almost intriguing device is to posit early one that EVERYONE has an imaginary friend looking after them, certainly untrue in our presumably real universe, but stretching the viewer's willingness to suspend disbelief in watching the "Invisible Lover" saga. So it comes to pass that Valentine's male "imaginary friend" in the form of Chris Cannon, who also plays a counselor/therapist our leads visit for help. Gimmick permits the two imaginary characters played by Chris and Bridgette to have a finale love scene, stretching the fantasy premise to the breaking point. A Hollywood (or big international) production like "The Golden Compass" would have investigated the parallel world of the "imaginary friends" but VCA and Lee working with minimal resources do not oblige.

Joel Lawrence is extremely smug as Steve's mean boss, who fires him merely to open a position for his nephew at the firm (nephew is the butt of humor and played unimpressively by obscuro performer Tylor Wood, who should have stuck to gonzo). Gina Ryder brightens things up for one scene as a nympho. Just to confuse us fans, a Black actress named Chocolate is cast as Lawrence's sexy secretary - in the DVD menu giving bios she is identified instead as Mocha, her twin sister according to IMDb, leaving hanging which sis actually showed up for work on this project, as budgeting would have precluded pointlessly tag teaming them in the same role.

DVD packaging presents Kerkove in all her post-surgical glory with those huge breasts, but the actual feature was shot in early 2000 before she opted for implants, so the actress appears with natural, normal-sized knockers. I wasn't disappointed, but merely felt bad at the VCA effort to mislead.