Nothing to Hide (1981) is a classic era porn from director Anthony Spinnelli that won numerous AFAA awards, including Best Film, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Director. It differs from most adult films, even of the classic era in several ways. It has a sensitive plot, excellent acting, a tolerable score, and mainly inside cum shots. It stars John Leslie as Jack, a ladies man who thinks love is for suckers, and Richard Pacheco as Lenny -- shy, awkward, and a little mentally slow. John Leslie is a master of "talking dirty," and is probably best known for the series "Talk Dirty To Me." The plot is simple. Leslie goes from one woman to another, including Erica Boyer, who is the most recognizable women in the film, and four other women I was unable to identify. Hopefully, some of you will recognize a face or body part from among the unknowns and I can correct the images.

Meanwhile, Lenny meets Karen (Chelsea Manchester), who is a female version of him. The two struggle through their shyness to eventually fall in love, make love, and get married. This sensitive love story makes this a very good watch for couples. Manchester, who has also been credited as Tigr Mennett, Tigr, Chelsea McClane, Tigger McCormack, Tigr Minette, Tigra and Tieger, has appeared in at least 40 films. All of the women show everything -- this is a hard core film. For those who like modern porn, this is probably not your cup of tea, as there is character development, and the characters spend some time dressed and relating to each other, and there is little silicone in evidence, very little body art, and only ear piercing. For those who like a little story with their porn, and enjoy classic era material, this is a very good, although not as well known, one. C+.

Movies:

Two Weeks Notice (2002)

A romantic comedy with Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock is more or less a standardized commodity, like "salt". Indeed, the two of them working together are the top of the salt line, like Morton's. Hugh and Sandra are the best in the world at doing what they do, although I would be hard pressed to describe just what that is or why people ought to do it.

I think of movies like this in the same way I regard McDonald's, a lesson in the fact that "predictable" is not necessarily equal to "bad".  If you are familiar with the other eating options, McDonald's is probably pretty low on your list, but if you're on an unfamiliar highway, and you can't afford botulism, McDonald's is always a safe option with a clean toilet.

Try to look at movies the same way. Sometimes you want to see a really cool movie like The Usual Suspects, but you are going with a date, and she wants to see some utter bullshit like The Hours. Now, you've already resigned yourself to the fact that you will have to watch a complete and  unredeemed piece of crap, but you may be able to talk your date into a lighthearted piece of crap instead of a sobfest. Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock could be your key to avoiding some serious pain.

Plus I'm betting that you have a better chance at getting laid after this movie than after some diatribe about how men have marginalized women throughout history, causing them all to turn gay or suicidal or both.

Hugh is a shallow, stammering, self-centered, glib, zillionaire playboy. (Gosh, how did they ever think of Hugh for that role?). Sandra is an brilliant, activist lawyer with no interest in material wealth. She agrees to work for him in order to save a community center which is also a treasured architectural landmark. You know the rest.

By the way, Robert Klein is in this movie, and as far as I can see, he has finally managed to stop his leg.

No nudity.

• Sandra Bullock
• Alicia Witt

Living Out Loud (1998)

I guess Living Out Loud is supposed to be some women's empowerment film or something. Holly Hunter is a non-working wife, devastated because her rich doctor husband has dumped her for a younger woman, even though Holly gave up he own career to put hubby through med school.

Now you and I are supposed to feel sorry for her. After all, she is left with nothing except half of their fortune, a lavish apartment overlooking Central Park, a perfect body, a still-young face, and all the talent she had before the marriage. She now has both enough brains and enough money to go to medical school, and she's still beautiful enough that she can have any man she wants.

Oh, the poor dear.

For me, the highlight of this film was Queen Latifah, who plays a blues/jazz singer. I'm sure you know Queenie can sing, but I'll bet you just don't know how well. She sings Gershwin and Porter as well as anyone I've ever heard, and I like this kind of singing much more than I like that musical comedy style in Chicago, so I enjoyed when the Queen was makin' music, making the movie tolerable.

By the way, Danny DeVito is also quite a good singer.

• Holly Hunter (1, 2, 3)

100 Women (2002)

100 Women is remarkably similar to 100 Girls. It involves a quiet, eccentric, romantic guy in pursuit of his true love. There is a mystery overlay. He kisses her in the rain. It is magic. But he loses her phone number. At he first can't find her, and then when he does find her she is surprisingly indifferent to him. Meanwhile, another one of the 100 women in the apartment building forms a very close bond of friendship with him.

He is abetted by a sex-obsessed friend who seems creepy but is actually a decent guy underneath it all, and his reign of the 100 woman domain is challenged by a truly creepy guy who views the apartment as his personal territory. He ends up explaining his story in public to all 100 women.

If you have seen 100 Girls, you know that the same description pretty much sums up that movie as well. In fact, director Mike Davis manages to coax remarkably similar performances out of his leads. Either the new guy was consciously impersonating the previous guy, of Davis was just casting with a very specific type in mind.

In 100 Girls, the "gross" material was basically sexual: woman swapping blow-job stories, a guy with a penis-enlarging technique, and a woman obsessed with reading D.H. Lawrence aloud. In 100 Women, the "gross" material is concentrated more in disgusting bodily functions: nose hair growth, disgustingly yellow and curled toenails, booger-snorting contests, that kind of stuff.  I liked the sexy stuff much better.

The film has some laughs, and is a watchable youth-oriented comedy. Both films deliver a satisfying romantic denouement, but I really liked the previous movie better.

• Erinn Bartlett (1, 2)

More from the French Box collection:

• Lou Doillon joins Mathilda May in the bra-selling game (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
• Kate Moss
• Emmanuelle Seigner
• Esther Canadas (topless, but covering the goods)

Mailbox:

I have a question for the funhouse readers. There is a movie called Ivans xtc  (http://us.imdb.com/Title?0238321) being released on DVD soon. In an article: http://expressen.se/expressen/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=3D112&a=3D30325  the director says there is an explicit scene of Victoria going down on a guy in the deleted scenes. She denies it though.

Of course this may all be marketing BS but someone out there might know something more about it? There is some mention of it here as well that seems to verify it http://www.halfwaytohollywood.com/films.shtml

This letter really got me curious about this movie. It was created by the guy who wrote/directed Immortal Beloved, and the IMDb rating is excellent. It is supposed to be based on a Tolstoy story, but is more precisely the thinly-disguised story of the legendary CAA agent Jay Moloney. I don't know anything more about the film or the scene he mentions. The BJ scene (in inexplicit form) seems to be in the film, but an explicit xxx-rate version seems too good to be true.

 

Other crap:

• World Wrestling Entertainment has fired superstar Jeff Hardy, effective immediately
• Eleven British restaurants named to world's Top 50
• Prozac Nation, featuring Christina Ricci topless, has been postponed and delayed for years now. It was originally filmed in 2000. MSNBC says that the real reason is because it bites the big one, because of Ricci. (Bottom of column)
• James Berardinelli has already reviewed this film. He liked it and praised Ricci's work.
• Planet Sick-Boy, on the other had, reviewed it and called it "bafflingly awful"
• From now on Entertainment Weekly covers will only feature naked pictures of people who want to get back into the good graces of the American public. Next week: Jacques Chirac
• HUSTLER magazine honcho Larry Flynt is hunting for a videotape rumored to show First Daughter Barbara Bush in the nude. Classy guy, as always.
• first picture of Thomas Jane as The Punisher. Jane is a pretty cool actor, but this outfit look like it was purchased from the Halloween leftover bin at Wal-Mart

Here are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.

• The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
• If there is a white asterisk, it means that there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined there might be something else of interest.
• A blue asterisk indicates the review is written by Tuna (or Lawdog or Junior or C2000 or Realist or ICMS or Mick Locke, or somebody else besides me)
• If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

Life is a series of compromises.

Art imitates life.

Embrace the Darkness III is a series of compromises.

Erego, Embrace the Darkness III is art.

And that's the only place you're gonna read the title of the movie and "art" in the same sentence. Hell, in the same paragraph. So what are the compromises to this opus?

Well, take your average soap opera...the weak plot, the ham-fisted directing, the laughable attempts at acting... those are the compromised portions of ETD III. What you get in return is a series of women with considerable appeal, seriously nekkid, oft-times doing one another in ways that approach the graphic, if not the pornographic... in scenes shot beautifully. That's the kind of compromise I'll take most days of the week.

Plot is simple: an unusual vampire, a pure or perfect vampire (can't remember which term was used) is able to walk in sunlight and has the ability if loved by a mortal, and if she returns that love, to return to mortal form. Said vampire is played by Brooke Larele. She meets up with a creepy vampire who holds orgies to find victims to feed upon. Will she join with the creepy one? Will she give up her immortality and strange eating habits? Who cares?

Brooke has four sport-humpin' scenes, each lasting about 10 minutes. Three she does with boys; they are in collages 1-14. This is a triple B performance, with gynocam shots in 11 and 12. The scene she does with a girl (played by Sasha Rochelle) is capped in collages 15-24. IMHO, Brooke looks spectacular in this scene.

• Brooke Larele (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24)

Ava Lake plays the creepy vamps servant and sometime mistress. Ava has appeared as Ava Niche in The Mummy's Kiss, as Mia Zottoli in a half-dozen Skinemax things, as just plain Mia in a half-dozen more. She shows off her giganto-robo-hooters in collages 1 and 3-7. The bottom half of collage 1 and all of collage 2 show the bottom half of Ava-Mia covered in something resembling dental floss, it's so thin. As a result we get a near-gynocam, near-proctocam view. Or let's put it this way: there isn't much of Ava-Mia we haven't seen.

• Ava Lake (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

Sasha Rochelle, who has appeared in other movies (e.g. The Mummy's Kiss) as Sasha Peralto does the girl-girl thing with Brooke. We get kissing (collage 1), a good look at Sasha's furry bits (2, 4 and 5), undressing to reveal upper bod (collage 3) and a long implied lesbo lovin' scene (collages 6 & 7).

• Sasha Rochelle (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

Vanessa Lynch (aka Tiffany Shepis) plays a reporter with a kinky side. She is in two sport-humpin scenes and each of them shows off her recreational body very well. Vanessa is raven-haired with delightful, pale skin and a pair of natural wonders that border on the perfect. You see them in most collages, get a couple looks at her not-all-shabby bum in 8, 12 and 15 and at her naughty bits in 13 and 14.

• Vanessa Lynch (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16)

Pornstar Holly Hollywood (aka Stacy Leigh Mobley of Emmanuelle in Space fame) plays a party-goer-victim. In keeping with her day job, Holly's performance gets real close to earning this movie an X or two or three. My bet is she and her friend were really doin it. So you see the backside of Holly (collage 1) and lots of her frontside (2-5).

• Holly Hollywood (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Finally, a pair of women who may be Victoria Zena and Amy Facklam (they are credited, but as characters who were not named in this movie) play party-going blondes who have eyes and other things only for one another. I usually don't cap anonymous women, but the taller of the two is spectacular and I know how a lot of guys appreciate girls who do girls on screen.

• Blonde Babes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

Bottom line is this: do not get this movie if a rich plot and character development are your thing. If Citizen Kane is a twelve-course meal, this is a Twinky and a Big-Gulp. But if your interests are in attractive women, nekkid and active, you could not find a better way to pass your time.

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Scoops,
The main actresses in "Senso 45" are Anna Galiena and Loredana Cannata. The pictures in yesterday's Fun House aren't of them.

The main actresses in "Trasgredire" are Yuliya Mayarchuk and Francesca Nunzi. Pics 3,4,13,14 are definitely Yuliya (here is a pic for comparison). It seems this movie is also known by as Playboys. Yuliya has acted in another Tinto Brass Sogno as well.

Regards,

C2000

Subect: "Van Helsing"...

Scoop,
The cost of Van Helsing you reported yesterday ($267 million) is probably expressed in Australian dollars. That is only $165.2 million American Dollars. My guess is that those numbers are greatly inflated. Currently the IMDb lists the budget as $95 million.

Big Tom