Cheating Sex

Cash Markman's unimaginative, overwritten script sinks "Cheating Sex", a trite survey of the old "Double Indemnity" style crime movie. Add a one- note, annoying performance by hissable star Randy Spears and you have one of the crummier Penthouse productions stemming from the big production burst nearly a decade ago.

Much of the turgid story line is voiced over by Spear's narration, a device Cash likes to use in his lousy neo-noirs. To create Penthouse's required five XXX vignettes, he has Spears recount to us how others have failed in schemes to fake their deaths and cash in big. So Charles Dera, Steven St. Croix and Rocco Reed all mess up, before Randy supposedly commits the perfect crime, instantly foiled in what Markman would call irony but I call idiotic and lazy writing.

Kylee Reese is attractive as Spears' better half, while Angelina Ashe plays the buxom blonde who assists him in trying to defraud the money men with a fake kidnapping subplot (none of which is actually depicted on screen, as Cash relies on his voice-over crutch instead of action scenes). The other lovelies are adequate in the sack, and guest star Roxanne Hall appears briefly in a NonSex Role as an uppity wife.

The twist in each vignette is invariably uninteresting, as Markman, IMDb identified as a screen writing teacher in his non-porn career, is woefully negligent in the creativity department. Two of the flashback scenes have guys caught by photographers having extramarital sex, which foils their criminal plots. Any random TV episode of "Perry Mason" sets up the crime and how it was done/covered up infinitely better than any of Markman's dumb gambits here.