Designed to capitalize on the success of Michael Raven's Adult sci-fi/horror feature "The Visitors", this riff on Burning Man had more potential than is evident in its realization, emerging as a rather sloppy attempt to transcend the genres.
Raven is quite boastful in an interview included on the unnecessary 2nd DVD of a typical WIcked Pictures "prestige" package, meant to cost the fans more money rather than enlighten or entertain them beyond the main feature. Ten years after I was a bit sad to hear his enthusiasm about the future of features in Adult Cinema (he was quite wrong on this point) and even his own future career, which instead ended up in early retirement just a year or two after the show was released.
Kaylani Lei is a bright spot as the heroine, haunted by nightmares (of an erotic nature) as she and her man Barrett Blade head out into the California desert to attend a Black Rock Festival. It's clearly a rip-off of the bonfires at Summer Solstice nonsense initiated a couple of decades earlier as Burning Man.
Along for the ride in their snazzy VW Minibus are pals Voodoo, cue Annabelle Lee and hot Tori Black, last-named a newcomer here but still going strong in a Lesbian genre comeback of late. Road Movie format along Route 66 is punctuated by Lei's nightmares, which foreshadow the movie's climactic battle against sort-of-vampires, led by stunning Demon Queen played (with SPFX makeup) by that Digital Playground superstar Sophia Santi.
While Lei is endearing, Blade as always is the same irritating persona, an actor who never created a characterization (in hundreds of tries) different from this slacker/biker type full of wisecracks. Lei's fellow WIcked contract girl Mikayla is wasted as just another vampire (and stripper at a local strip joint), while Stormy Daniels impresses as a formidable vampire-hunter working in tandem with baldie Derrick Pierce.
On the way to their destination the fim works okay, except for the distorted visuals and soft-focus that harken back to similar fantasy features Raven made a decade earlier at Sin City, such as "Watchers". But he fatally ruins the film in the final reel with a confrontation between the good guys (including Stormy & Derrick) with the vampires that is so poorly staged and chintzy in all horror departments (FX and gore) as to be a genuine anti-climax. Despite Michael's effusive self-praise for daring to mix XXX with horror, he ultimately wimps out in the usual fear of censorship, with violence and gore left off-screen.
Besides the title, there's self-serving plugola in having a prominent neon sign at the strip club being the WIcked Pictures logo.
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