The Mad Librarian and Other Tales

I am growing weary of my current, probably ill-advised, survey of bondage and fetish videos, most of which aren't worth the powder to blow them up real good, as John Candy used to say on SCTV. This set of five short stories varies in quality but even at its best doesn't pass muster.

Main problem with Jon Woods' approach to the genre is related to budget. Each skit takes place in an apartment with zero production values, no indication of film or video technique, and execrable acting by the cast. Hardly a train wreck -that would be interesting, it falls into the vast pit of nothingness that is perhaps the zen secret to bondage video.

Title segment is poorly cast, with the Librarian all wrong- she's too young, not interesting to look at, and it takes more than a short skirt (this is porn after all) to be alluring. She torments a poor girl unconvincingly for some trumped-up infraction of the library's policies regarding overdue books, and the turnabout where the girl who's been hog-tied gets to do the same to the librarian is borrrring. There's no library set at all, and nothing of interest occurs. This is G-rated porn.

"Mistress Kelsie's Chambers" attempts to up the ante by having a woman with big breasts and deep décolletage, perhaps the one constant I have found in fetish videos. There are some campy moments, but this is a tiresome display of the usual ball-gag and tying somebody up routine, with a huge X-rack thrown in.

A self-reflexive vignette about a bondage model is unenlightening, and an attempt at humor in "Pillow Talk" about a roommate who can't sleep due to the can't shut up antics of her bedmate is stupid.

Final 25-minute segment is probably the keeper here, in that finally a starving for affection audience is treated to big-bust toplessness. The problem is that the genre's insistence on endless longueurs of women wriggling around trying to free themselves from their bonds is terminally dull unless watching that is one's idea of the ultimate turn-on. This is not an A-list cast, and the results are ephemeral.