Art of Love

Michael Raven's pretentious "Art of Love" is a failed attempt at Couples Romance, a strong suit for decades at Wicked Pictures but bungled here. The overrated auteur hogs many a screen credit, but delivers little to the viewer.

A femme narrator intones poetically about the gods and goddesses, immortality, love and desire, as we gaze at lulling settings of nature or some under-dressed studio sets evoking Olympus but consisting merely of pools and statuary. There is no dialogue in this pantomime effort, about as sleep-inducing as the current spate of European imports from daring! Media's Pure label which has former Eaetern bloc talent pawing each other and groaning for two hour stretches. Only difference is that this Wicked release has local Chatsworth models instead.

Opening scene has Christian and Niko as live-action Greek gods for a group-sex scene with 3 lovely babes, the odd woman masturbating while the gods where Trojans, that fallen foe of ancient times living on in the condoms that Safe Sex-obsessed labels like Wicked insist upon. Use of rubbers helps destroy the intended atmosphere.

Several lesbian scenes are shot in shallow focus, often achieved by vaseline-smeared lenses or other forms of artificial masking, so that the edges of the frame in medium shot or long shot are blurry on purpose. They are a bore, hardly up to the level modern audiences expect in Lesbian Cinema, even though the great Karlie Montana is featured licking and fingering.

Keri Sable gets star billing as a Wicked contract girl, but gets lost in the shuffle apart from an anal-sex outing with long-haired Evan Stone.

My DVD suffered from a mastering defect which quite likely is a constant factor for this release: in both watching the full feature and using the individual scene menu, the #6 Vignette lasts only 30 seconds long, with Lee Stone's money shot on featured actress Alektra Blue, early in her career before she opted for boobs-enlargement surgery. That leaves the total running time including credits at a meager 72 minutes, while the timer (how much time is left) on the DVD promises an 86 total. My best guess is that some techie at Wicked mistakenly substituted the "Cumshot Recap" 30 second edit of the final Alektra scene for the proper full- scene in putting together the release version, but overall low quality of this project prevents me from wasting any further time or money to get another DVD and see if it has the full scene included. Coincidentally, I had to add Lee Stone's name to IMDb's otherwise complete cast list -hmmm...