Change Your Image
patpowers1995
Reviews
Sinful Temptations (2001)
Strikingly Beautiful Cinematography and Actresses
I was just floored by the beauty of the cinematography in this film. It is gorgeous to look at. It's an order of magnitude above most Skinamax films, which IS saying something ... most Skinamax films do have competent professionals at work on them. This is soft-core eye candy of the very best quality. The actresses are beautiful and the sex scenes are plentiful and long. There is one scene where a well-tanned actress and actor make love in front of a coppery brown backdrop that looks like a classical nude painting brought to life. Incredible.
I rated this film a 9 out of 10. That is PURELY in terms of Skinamax quality. This film is NOT on a level with "Citizen Kane" or "The Maltese Falcon" but the standards for these films are so very different than Skinamax films that it's just not fair to judge them on the same playing field. Yes, "Sinful Temptations" has a plot, characterization and acting, all of it sub-par. If you are watching Skinamax films for these qualities, you are barking up the wrong tree.
As a Skinamax film, though, it's very nearly perfect. It's the sort of film students in Skinamax film courses should be required to watch, if there were such a thing. But we lucky dogs get to watch it just because it's fun, sexy and pretty to look at.
Rise of the Fellowship (2013)
I wanted to like this movie, but it was just too awful
The script for this movie set me on edge. It reinforced every superficial stereotype about gamers, its characters were extremely shallow, both the heroes and villains, and it used obvious, cheap gimmicks to push the audience's buttons. The bullies were cartoonish stereotypes, the good guys were cartoonish nerds. The notion that the very attractive girl nerd would associate with them was laughable. The acting was also poor, I didn't believe any of the characters at all and had to stop watching because I was cringing too much at it.
This movie was literally disgusting to watch, not because of what occurred to the characters but for the way the movie creators tried to manipulate the audience. It is a totally paint by numbers effort. Do not bother. Watch The Guild on Youtube instead.
If you honestly like this movie, I honestly feel sorry for you.
Joven y alocada (2012)
Strikingly Familiar To US Viewer, Though Set In Chile
Living in the American South's Bible Belt, I am deeply familiar with the kind of intense religious bombardment the protagonist experienced -- it's pretty much par for the course for any place or subculture where religious fundies have a grip.
I thought the movie did an EXCELLENT job of portraying this aspect of the film. I thought maybe mother was a WEE bit over the top hateful and intrusive, not that I don't believe mothers like her exist, but that I think the filmmaker missed a big chance of portraying the way kindness can also be used as a tool for psychological manipulation.
The part the filmmaker UTTERLY screwed up was helping us understand the reason for the protagonist's rebellion. Was it adolescent angst, a healthy sexuality growing and rebelling against the repression, or just a healthy human response to the general repressiveness of evangelical beliefs? We have no idea, because the idiot filmmaker just gave us lots of shots of the lead actress looking sullen instead of any meaningful dialog that would have helped us UNDERSTAND the reason for all the sullenness. Of course, there was a lot of dialog with other young people on her blog that MIGHT have been illuminating, but it wasn't. It was just the usual shallow talk of normal teens about sex.
I was hoping for more depth, more insight, than a teen might have about the issues raised in the movie. I didn't get that. A shame, because without it, the movie is a real nothingburger.
Bounty Killer (2013)
Flawed But Still Fun Progressivesploitation Film
Just caught the film Bounty Killer on Netflix last night. It's WONDERFUL. It's a violent exploitation flick set in the near future where corporate power has so far outstripped government power that the corporations have actually started warring with each other and turned much of America into a wasteland. This leads to an nascent government called the Council of 9 to arise. The Council of 9 starts issuing Death Warrants with considerable rewards on various corporate heads, and a class of bounty hunters arise to collect those rewards, becoming folk heroes in the process as they drive the mangled corpses of One Percenters to their ragtag villages to collect their rewards.
The basic appeal of this film is seeing One percenter corporate honchos and their minions getting shotgun-blasted, stabbed, and machine-gunned by regular guys. It delivers a fair amount of that. Of course, the corporate types fight back, there's your conflict, and it's all great fun if you don't think about it seriously for more than a nanosecond.
The film has two major flaws. One, the filmmaker is obvious deeply enamored of Mad Max and set much of his film in the California desert with various oddly-dressed sorts riding around at high speed on motorcycles, cars and Winnebagos and stabbing and shooting each other. There's also a bunch of degenerate, cannibalistic wasteland dwellers called "gypsies" who do violent things a lot because they're just violent people, who are in my opinion a complete waste, as they contribute nothing to the main theme of regular guys vs. evil corporate scumbags.
The other major flaw is that the Mad Max imitation just makes the film look cheap. So many bad Roger Corman flicks have been set in run down shacks in the California deserts cause it's cheap that any film that imitates Mad Max just looks like another Roger Corman cheapie.
If the film had focused more sharply on its central theme of corporate scumbags vs. heavily armed regular folks, it would have been much, much better, but the Mad Max imitation stuff just kinda kidnaps the movie and waters down its central theme.
Still, there are several extended scenes of regular guys in stylish desert leathers invading corporate cubicle farms and shooting and stabbing and beating up on One Percenters in three piece suits ... something so SATISFYING about seeing a Wall Street type get a shotgun to the face ... mmmmm. I know it's revenge porn, but it's the only kind of revenge we seem to be able to get nowadays. Enjoy!
Vicious Circles (1997)
Possibly the best of the erotic thrillers
I first saw this movie years ago, and have seen a lot of erotic thrillers since. I watched it again recently and my estimate of it went through the roof ... I simply had not seen enough erotic thrillers to properly evaluate it when I first watched it.
In form it is an adaptation of a common Internet bondage fantasy: a hot young woman (played by Carolyn Lowery) is forced by circumstances to become the sexual plaything of a wealthy older man (Ben Gazzara at his oily best here) joining a sex club called "The Circle" as one of their slave girls. Basically, it's a harem, but the inhabitants aren't there because they are slaves or wives, they are simply young women who like all that money they get for being in the harem, and don't mind wearing sex harnesses and having sex with older men.
In most Internet bondage fantasies, the progress of the story consists of the young woman learning how very, very much she likes being (or playing the part of) a sex slave. But Vicious Circles has a much twistier plot that involves freeing her brother from trumped-up drug charges. She learns to use her sexual prowess for her own and others' benefit, becoming a more powerful person in the process. It's a refreshingly different story.
The direction, pacing, cinematography, and most of all the writing of this movie are all topnotch. The acting is a little wooden in places, especially by the supporting character. Carolyn Lowery pumps so much heat and sizzle into her character that her growth as a temptress seems matter-of-course: I can think of many actresses for whom it would simply not be believable.
There are a couple of very silly scenes, most especially the mysterious wazooifier and the grasshoppers. Well it's not PERFECT -- that's why I gave it an 8 instead of a 10. But compared to most erotic thrillers, which are either all erotica (and generally more pornographic than erotic) or all thriller (and generally not all that thrilling) this film is a work of genius.