The usual Marc Dorcel TV "making of" short subject is quite enlightening regarding this porn feature, directed by Paul Thomas as a first-time assignment for the French pornographer. PT's enthusiasm and discussion of his methods and motives contrast with the finished product, evidence of post-production tinkering that has plagued Dorcel releases in recent years.
PT later directed an abstract (not gonzo, but basically wall-to-wall sex) feature for Dorcel titled "8 Masseuses" which I enjoyed, while this very old-fashioned feature is an artistic failure.
First off among the film's shortcomings, as the "making of" reveals, Paul shot the thing in English, with Continental talent like Tarra White handling their dialog extremely well. Dorcel, as usual, issues it with many audio tracks to choose from, but his assembly-line approach means the original soundtrack was thrown away entirely. Both the French and English tracks are dubbed, with many cast members not even called back to dub themselves. This neutralizes the effect of the dialog/story scenes.
Further, the editing and structuring of the film are quite poor. Many of the sex scenes last seconds rather than reels, having no impact whatsoever from an erotic standpoint. Late in the film, the dramatic tension as the story's suspense is resolved gets undermined by sequencing scenes in such a way as to minimize rather than maximize their impact.
Title premise is not incest (and you have to watch the "making of" to discover from Julia Ann's own lips that she's playing a stepmother, not the birth mother of the title) but rather inter-generational rivalry. Julia Ann and her kid Jade Laroche (okay, they bear no physical resemblance) end up falling in love with the same cad, played by oh so lucky Justin Magnum. JM never impressed me in his prolific decade-plus career, and here his acting is wooden. But he gets to hump not only the Hollywood legend Julia Ann but also perhaps the most beautiful, perfect young actress ever discovered by Dorcel, but who oddly never became a superstar: Jade Laroche.
This represented literally Jade's ticket to Hollywood for the shoot, but nobody seems to have noticed and cast her in any Chatsworth productions. It's the industry's loss.
This delectable ma & kid duo are surrounded by top talent, though most of PT's scenes are arbitrary and injected into the film haphazardly, contradicting his sincere spiel about how he likes to make a real film, not just sex scenes, like the old-school, good old days. The failure of the finished film spells, for me at least, the winding down of his career -as all his latter-day features are quite poor compared to his effortless classics cranked out a decade or two before.
Plot gimmicks all fail as either unconvincing or merely clumsy. Main shtick is that Justin's character Mark is addicted to phone sex, a transparent and lazy scriptwriter's ploy to create a vignette structure out of thin air. So the opening sex scene has Tarra White as a phone sex girl pleasuring Justin (who's seen on his toilet, phone in hand, presumably taking a dump) with sexy palaver, the real deal of which has to be heard in excerpt on "making of" because it's been ruined by the dubbing over, in any language.
When she's through yapping, Tarra humps her boyfriend Denis Marti, who the sloppy DVD keeps calling Denis Martin. I admired the international casting, but this sequence confused me because these three characters are all in L.A. (and in fact Continental bombshell White was flown to L.A. for the shoot, even though she doesn't interact with the leading players), but watching it one naturally assumes that Marti & White are part of the Paris-set scenes. P.T. includes some colorful second unit Paris footage of Jade Laroche wandering around, back where she was born to visit her dad, but the whole issue of what was shot where is an extraneous element that better scripting and filming could have avoided.
Other big-namers shoe-horned into the show include an unrelated to plot 3-way sex scene by Dana DeArmond, Danny Mountain (dubbed minus his British accent) and Jerry, supposedly on the phone with Julia Ann. After some social commentary (she loses her job at the time of the 2009 Recession, after callous Black boss Lee Bang humps her and summarily fires her -thank you very much), Julian Ann coincidentally gets work as a phone sex girl, the same service apparently that Tarra works for. This contrivance hooks her up with addict Justin, who just happens to be her daughter Jade's fiancé, whom Julia Ann has yet to meet. Imagine the complications! Well, you don't need to imagine them, PT presents them in the worst way -making for several anti-climaxes in the clumsily constructed and downright awful final reels.
Kristina Rose (PT comically warns her to hold back on her gonzo proclivities, when directing her in the "making of") plays a lookalike lesbian lover for Jade back in Paris. She's gone to visit her dad, who in the person of the detestable Rod Fontana (a very yucky filmmaker in his own right) peeks at the two girls making love in his Parisian apartment. Rod jerks off his rod watching his daughter, and I would have used this unresolved scene to come up with a suitable conclusion to the whole film: namely the family that lays together stays together once JA & Jade find out they're both humping Justin.
But no, we have corny theatrics that simply don't play when the reveals finally (and unconvincingly late in the day) are plopped down in front of us. Example of finale dialog: "That's my mother!" "You f*cked my mother!". Soap opera ending of poor old Julia Ann, all alone with only her telephone (and its sex service gig) to comfort her, is beneath even soap opera levels, and I can't believe PT played it straight. The porno gods observed the result and declared Gonzo the winner forever; exit PT stage left.
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