Wild Poppy

Paul Thomas hides behind his alter ego name Bo Edwards for "Wild Poppy", a disastrous Dasha vehicle that is one of the worst concoctions from a favorite screenwriter, Raven Touchstone. Both she and PT share the blame.

I tried hard, in vain, to make sense of its awkward and quite tiresome structure of "play it again", not in the "Groundhog Day" sense but more likely lifted from the great movies of Krzysztof Kieslowski (!!). What passes for a Raven T. plot has film school student Dasha on her trusty bicycle riding around to shoot a class project, but her actions repeated (and the film restarting) at least half a dozen times in some sort of fantasy mode. There's no reason given for this "worlds of if" or "alternate reality" approach -it's merely a crutch to pad out the running time as well as confuse the viewer.

Sometimes new things happen and other times history repeats itself. PT cheats by repeating some footage rather than shoot anew, and the final version of the story has a particularly arbitrary and cryptic element (sloppiness to the fourth power) of Dasha as Poppy riding up to her final destination not on her trusty, overused bike as before but suddenly in a VW Beetle that appears on screen out of nowhere.

In the BTS short subject Bonus on the DVD, Lauren Phoenix (then a new starlet on the scene) mentions how this is her first Vivid role, cast as an extra in a scene fooling around outdoors with Black actor Tre Synful, only to be given a larger role in the movie by PT. In the final print that results in a cryptic soft-core performance by Tre (with Lauren) lasting only a few seconds, with Phoenix later returning for a three-way with Dasha and male lead Eric Masterson.

Dasha's real-life hubby Dillon Day is also present in a dumb role consisting of not just sex but getting locked nude in a pantry (over & over again, per the repeat structure) by Eric due to being caught humping Eric's wife. Other talent caught in this clunker include a fairly no-name cast like Kelli Passion and Olivia Saint, though Joelean was a big deal back then who never made a lasting impression in my memory (and I've promptly forgotten her again a couple of weeks after suffering through "Wild Poppy").

Randy Spears once again contributes nothing, playing an idiotic role of Dasha's daddy (trans-Atlantic casting stretch) who wears an old British judge's wig while humping various starlets.