David Stanley's fingerprints are all over "Promises of the Heart", a sickly Couples Romance feature from Wicked Pictures that is way below standard. If you've sat through dozens of DS movies like I have, this one is warmed-over sludge: unintentional self-plagiarism.
His obsession with near-death experiences sets up the structure: many flashbacks assembled in clumsy fashion as we witness hero Chris Cannon with bloody/disfigured face in an ambulance recalling his unlucky life. Accompanying him is a plain-Jane EMS worker played by Kelly Kline, who will get all dolled up by the final reel to have sex with him -quite obvious since she's billed as one of the XXX femmes in the show.
But the lead actress is Jenna Haze, a super-duper star when this was made and still fondly remembered as one of Adult Cinema's all-time great innocents (who put out). She plays Cannon's best friend since childhood and Stanley's dirty version of a rom-com would seem to be about that corny issue of wanting to be a lover rather than taken for granted as a friend.
Several extraneous sex scenes are thrown in, a practice Stanley even seems to defend in his BTS interviews on the DVD, but it is hard to take him seriously on any level when the final product is as stupid and univolving as this. By film's end I was rooting for Chris to kick the bucket rather than have a happy ending.
Stanley made a very odd and forgotten Vivid video "Happy Ending" with an emphasis on casting sexy Oriental actresses and continues the practice here, even casting Mika Tan rather effectively as a Russian dominatrix. In the porn tradition, Mika's vignette can stand up as an excerpt, browbeating and treating Chris to some BDSM lite punishment, but the rest of the movie is headed for landfill.
Worst gimmick, which Stanley carefully plans in the BTS, and was idiotically repeated in several other of his movies like the recent "Silhouette" he scripted for director B. Skow, is the car accident that puts Cannon in the ambulance. It's meant as a shock effect but emerges as a groaner every time.
Stanley did a fine job with the Romance genre in his best-known film "The Last Rose", but his insincerity and poor writing/directing sink this one.
