The team of Wendy & Jim Crawford, animation distributors who impressed me with their paste-up Romance film "Book of Love" destroyed that good will with the disastrous "Brave Hearts". This is incompetence not normally shown in the crank 'em out world of porn.
The format of both features is deceptively simple: shoot some wraparound footage in Chatsworth with name porno performers, and slap it together with perhaps 90 minutes of Eastern European-shot porn featuring local talent, be it Czech or from Hungary. Precedent reminded me of those terrible '60s imports by Jerry Warren, probably inspired by the tremendous success of folding Raymond Burr into "Gojira" and coming up with the hit "Godzilla".
Faye Reagan fronts the show, not styled very appealingly as our romance novelist heroine, overcoming her writer's block by mooning at barrista/coffehouse owner Rocco Reed. Nearly all the film consists of her narrating (intros only) the chapters of the stroke-book-for-women she's clicking away on her laptop: roll the videotape from Prague please!
Somehow that formula worked in "Book of Love" -the Euro footage was arousing and the cover story fronted by Kiara Diane watchable and at times empathetic. But the Crawfords, who like to bill this junk as made "by a couple for couples" seem to be insulting the viewers this time around. Video's title harks back to the Scottish hit by Mel Gibson, so Faye's romance novel is set in ancient Scotland, where men wore kilts and nothing underneath.
However, these men, going off to war and few returning alive (soggy sentimentality at its treacliest) and their womenfolk, speak sub-Berlitz phonetic English, not with a brogue but with a thick Czech accent. Before you say "it's porno, so who cares?", that is precisely the problem here - a "who cares" attitude sinks the entire project. The Crawfords should have enlisted the vast pool of Brit porn talent for their Euro shoot, but that would have made too much sense.
Along for the ride is the inevitable sidekick, Anita Blue as Dee (a non-sex role), giving BFF Faye a hard time and pushing her into romance with Rocco. Anita deserves a razzie for worst non-sex performance in a sex film!
Of course, fans can turn on when Rocco eventually humps Faye, but both performers have been better (and better served by filmmakers) dozens of times before. In fact, I still wonder why the remarkably beautiful Reagan never crossed over to the mainstream.
But with "Brave Hearts" on her resume, she has a big strike against her.
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