Tabitha Stevens and cable-soft-porn expert Gary Orona teamed up for the dismal ego-tripping "Sanatorium" project and this venture into horror porn is almost as bad. What might have been passable as another amateurish horror stinker mixes poorly with artificially injected XXX scenes.
The auteurs apparently like mystical themes, and both videos are set out in the desert. "Sanatorium" drew on Native American lore including vision-quest malarkey, while this feature riffs on popular vampire legends- it is clear to me that had this team been more successful they would already have a zombie ripoff porno on the market.
Stevens is apparently more than proud of her rather artificial looking face & body, and not only shows them off but even injects herself as sort of extra eye candy into scenes she doesn't belong in. Racking my brain for a precedent I remembered the vanity soft-core productions several decades back of strippers like Nai Bonet in "Nocturna", silly excuses to show off this or that voluptuous body.
Cheyne Collins, long after his heyday as XXX leading man around the turn of this century, plays a biologist studying local bat colonies, with petite girlfriend Ally Kay in tow. She is appealing in a jail-bait slot in the film, given plenty of sex action but seemingly out of place in what's happening. Had this been an R-rated or soft X (director Orona's forte with series like "Hotel Erotica" ) she would have been an okay short shorts/hiking boots heroine.
Tabitha as a lead vampire plus a "Mr. Stevens" (made up like a long-haired albino vampire, and evidently the stars better half) overact miserably with pompous line readings that would do a ham like Kevin Spacey proud. As before, Orona provides impressive desert location photography plus a small town of Midland where a museum features prominently in the action, but there is a major disconnect between the "story/adventure" scenes/plot line and the periodic porn insertions. Ally getting bitten and turned after sex with a mysterious guide (Jay Lassiter) is thrown in clumsily and the feature plays as a mish-mash without logic or forward momentum. How it received numerous industry "award" nominations is mere testament to the foolishness of that whole process.
All I got out of it besides revulsion at Tabitha's ridiculous grand-standing are two hot lesbian scenes -I guess salvageable in some crappy 5-hour compilation gonzo video: one pairing Ally with a cute vampire Ashlyn Rae, and the other trumpeted misleadingly on the box cover of the DVD as beauties Jenna Presley and Sophia Santi enjoy Sapphic bliss, with strap-on dildo and mucho fingering/cunnilingus, in a set-piece tossed in as a Cheyne nightmare, though as viewer it was more of a dream. If Orona just wanted to grind out sexy porn scenes, maybe he would have succeeded but his mix here is embarrassingly inept.
I'm not surprised to see that Orona's career has stalled (IMDb lists only occasional gonzo or parody junk since 2011) and that Tabitha is stuck in dreaded porn "parody" crap.
