Fool Me Once, Shame on... Me

Bree Mills' porn series dubbed "Tricky Spa" within her website empire at Quebec's Gamma Entertainment is awful, promoting nastiness toward women as if it were entertainment. Add in shabby, mindless direction from Barrett Blade and you have "Fool Me Once" as the loathsome result.

Repetitious gimmick has all of the dozens of stand-alone episodes (made for web, compiled on DVDs) playing virtually identically. The masseur sets up a hidden camera, then interviews a new femme client, sneakily eliciting any sort of personal information that he can exploit to blackmail her into having forced sex with him after a desultory Oiler preamble. It ends with hand job, blow job or sometimes intercourse, always with a pained expression on the victim and a humiliating "go to Hell" finish from the rocks-off mean masseur -then screen (supposed CCTV video) goes to static and next vignette begins.

Very poorly improvised by the male talent (with the femmes responding as if they're attending an acting class type of skit), the lamest of lame gimmicks trotted out here include: (1) Derrick Pierce hiding customer Chloe Chaos' wallet, then forcing her to pay her $100 shoulder massage fee "in trade", namely a blow job and facial, before calmly handing her the wallet as if he "just found it"; (2) Steven St. Croix handling petite,pale Skylar Green a line on how folks behave in Europe, as she's traveling there soon, and sort of shaming her into a blow job/facial as if that were doing her a favor.

(3) Eric Masterson raping busty and exotic Gaia after insisting on a lap dance in a stupid scene in which the blackmail aspect is glossed over and illogical; (4) Ryan McLane extremely tiresome as he strains to use religion to get cute Dakota Sky to blow him, ending with his sardonic "God bless you" after the mandatory sloppy facial); and finally (5) St. Croix back with an asinine routine browbeating poor redhead Jessica Ryan into having sex to teach her a lesson. The humor of this finale is pathetic, as St. Croix claims: "I'm a misogynist, a professional massage giver" and rejects Jessica's attempt to correct his malaprop.

Apparently the sight of ladies being humiliated and physically abused, once the province of only renegade pornographers like Max Hardcore and Lizzy Borden, has now permeated mainstream porn like this series. If I were given to believing in conspiracy theories (like our dear Commander in Chief) I would attribute this to an industry-wide quest to snuff out story-line, dialog/acting style Adult Cinema in favor of the mindless all-sex format that dominates the market nowadays, as even a committed Old School fan of the narrative approach of the Golden Age ('70s/'80s) like myself is tempted to fast-forward or skip the awful dialog set-ups in garbage like this video.