Love, Lust & Longing

I appreciate that after more than two decades since its debut, Wicked Pictures continues to release new Couples Romance videos, alongside its roster of increasingly All-Sex content. But Scott Allen who directed this weak movie is not ready for prime time.

He has many Wicked credits as crew member for Brad Armstrong under his belt, but advancing to the director's chair with losers like "White Witch" and this one is surely the Peter Principle at work. No, not Al Goldstein's old Peter Meter for judging videos on the basis of hard-on stimulation effect, but rather advancing to a job one is unqualified to handle.

The weak premise of Allen's script has a setting of a small inn or hotel, where folks meet and occasionally hook up. Sure, that makes the usual porn vignette structure easy to develop, but Allen fails to sustain much interest in his characters or their uneventful encounters.

Trying to tie it together is a mildly comical turn by Dutch Loper as the portly innkeeper, whose wisecracks aren't funny, and whose presence is transparently merely a gimmick. Lead roles are taken by Wicked's longest-running contract star Jessica Drake, as a prostitute who lives at the inn, and Kurt Lockwood, perennially glum as a husband who's been banished by wifey from his home, staying temporarily at the inn.

It takes nearly two hours for Drake and Kurt to inevitably hook up, and we watch other couples hump until this rather boring ending. Allie Haze is a mute girl who somehow gets a crush on the pasty-faced, unappealing soldier played by Jake Jace, surely one of Chatsworth's least talented new studs. In a preposterous subplot, contract star Asa Akira is slumming it in the role of a waitress at Nick Manning's food truck (try believing that one!), and they hump away standing up in the close confines of his truck's "kitchen". Other cast members stop by for meals, a pretty lame way of integrating them into the story.

Completely extraneous is a pair of newlyweds played by Marica Hase and Chad White, tossed into the show apparently to exploit that obscure bridal gown porn fetish, as Marica humps away clad only in her bridal veil. Completing the cast is Tyler Nixon, still typecast as an adolescent in need of sexual initiation with Drake of course paid to do the trick (pun intended).

This is paper-thin, overly mild Adult entertainment, barely serving even as a time-killer.