Michael Raven was an Adult Industry top dog 15 years or so back, but when he's bad he's very bad. Such is the case with "Always and Forever", yet another porn feature that takes Nicholas Sparks crap as its starting point and ends up making the mainstream schlockmeister look good by comparison.
Entirely told in flashback, this boring tale has Jessica as a top magazine writer standing at her window, recollecting about what might have been. Title is meant in an ironical sense, and by the time the threads of an inane plot (credited to Raven collaborator Jennifer Allison) are knitted together few viewers will still be awake.
Drake's narration in voice-over dominates the picture and adds to its drowsiness factor. She was in love with fellow journalist Barrett Blade, who as usual brings nothing to his role, showing up looking exactly like, you guessed it, "biker-styled" porn actor Barrett Blade.
He heads to Afghanistan (off-screen, this being a claustrophobic low-budgeter) and she has a recurrence of going crazy, falling into a deep depression. Her somewhat sympathetic dad Randy Spears (miscast as often is the case for a guy who radiates evil) sends her to shrink Scott Styles, who vaguely resembles mainstream's Jerry O'Connell here.
Much time passes and Drake gets hitched to her shrink. The evil character is not Spears but rather his wife Mikayla Mendez, who has something against (never specified) her stepdaughter Drake. She lies consistently about Blade's frantic attempts to get in touch with his g.f. after he returns Stateside, and drives a wedge between them, leading to her nuptials with Styles instead.
There are plenty of mechanical sex scenes among the cast members, including an extraneous one featuring a favorite of mine Nicole Ray, who has zero characterization to play with. Lost in the shuffle is Scarlett Fay as Jessica's BFF, an actress who based on her track record thus far desperately needs a new agent. Blade gets killed on another trip to Kabul (good riddance!) and poor Jessica ends up carrying a torch for the lost love, once she's figured out Mikayla's scheming ruined their potential lives together.
Raven delivers a grade Z version of what used to be termed in the '40s and '50s a "woman's picture", when Irene Dunne, Susan Hayward and Rosalind Russell were big box office in those gentler times. One of Adult's all-time greatest stars, Jessica Drake, obviously deserves better. She combines (for me at least) qualities of both Angie Dickinson and Julia Roberts and is capable of being ultra-sexy and dramatically convincing, a rare feat. Raven and crew did her no favors here.
0 out of 0 found this helpful