My interminable losing streak watching Barrett Blade-directed porn videos came to a sudden halt with "Inferno", an interesting and surprisingly well-made trifle. It introduced me to the charms of British import leading lady Hannah Harper, and I'll be following up on some other career highlights of hers in future.
With fashionably extreme-dyed red hair, Harper plays a police desk jockey who gets her wish, an undercover assignment that takes her to working in a brothel. Blade is light on plot, but there is enough story tissue to tie the sex scenes together adequately, and interesting characters instead of his usual wall-to-wall approach.
Bondage and fetish content is clearly too lite for aficionados, but adds flavor to a familiar potboiler. The credits in IMDb seem a bit mangled, especially regarding what role was played by my fave real redhead Annie Body (I identified her as Amanda, but IMDb begs to differ).
Harper is beautiful, a decent actress, and no slouch in the shack. Overall sex content cannot be faulted, both in terms of execution and variety, so give Barrett a hand. He is such a prolific filmmaker of late that I'm glad at least one of the features he's made is watchable, as I'm destined to encounter a few dozen more almost involuntarily.
