Black Widow

The usually reliable Adult filmmaker Michael Raven does a poor job with this Stormy Daniels neo-noir, which features dim lighting (that ruins several sex scenes, meant to be explicit not shot in squint-o-vision) and presents scenes that seem out of sequence.

Like the real Stormy, her fictional character Payton hails from Louisiana, and we see snippets of her unfortunate childhood, with a creepy father (good old Dick Nasty) and uncredited mom, who has a foreign accent and should have been acknowledged for some decent dramatics.

She's determined not to have a vanilla life of a housewife, and embarks on bilking wealthy Randy Spears as her rather grim husband. Spears overacts and overdramatizes as usual, helping to kill the movie and definitely fatal to the story's intended fluctuation of sympathy for the viewer to alternately root for femme fatale Stormy or her victimized spouse. It all leads to a cynical and unsatisfying ending, though Raven regular Jennifer Allison's screenplay is not the culprit.

Supporting cast of Kayla Carrera as Stormy's duplicitous "friend" and Brit star Carmel Moore as a diverting hooker helps kill time, and inexplicably Raven reduces a Dick Nasty sex scene with starlet Kayden Faye to just a few seconds of quick cuts, then presenting the entire 8-minute XXX sequence in the DVD's Deleted Scene section.