Fleshtone

1994

This project turned out to be worthwhile. Last week we were talking about Lise Cutter's only real nudity, which occurred in this film. If you recall, we had some decent collages, but inadequate film clips.

Now we have some good ones. I ordered a DVD from the UK, and it turned out to be quite a nice transfer of the film in a 4:3 aspect ratio, which I suppose was the original size, assuming that it was made to go directly to video.

The film itself had some potential, and there were some things I really liked about it, even a few elements that surprised and impressed me. The entire film was lensed in Jo-Berg, South Africa, where the director found several unusual and atmospheric locations, including some creepy back alleys and a vast trainyard. The nighttime scenes were illuminated by some colored lighting effects which were gimmicky, but crisp and highly effective.

Unfortunately, the director really couldn't decide whether he wanted to make a soft-core sex film or a thriller. Despite the popularity of the erotic thriller genre in the 80s and 90s, it's just damned difficult to deliver both erotica and thrills simultaneously. The plot was interesting enough to hold my attention, but if you watch the Lise Cutter sex scene you can imagine that the film really isn't paced very well, given that the entire film runs only about 85 minutes, excluding the credit sequences, and that sex scene alone, counting some non-nude parts not shown in my clip, is about 10 minutes long! That represents 10 full minutes when absolutely nothing happens to advance the plot. That's perfectly fine, even desirable, for a softcore sex film, but is death to the pacing of a thriller. By the time that scene was over, I had forgotten what was going on outside the bedroom. (And, frankly, inserting a sex scene there was inappropriate to the plot as well as the pacing, because those characters, given the urgent predicament they were in, would not have been having sex of any kind, let alone a prolonged bout of lust. They should have been thinking about a place to lay low, rather than a place to lay pipe.)

The film has other pacing problems besides the length of the sex scenes. Some of the more dramatic plot twists were handled clumsily, so that scenes which should have been tense or shocking ended up being matter-of-fact. And the ending of the film was virtually non-existent. It doesn't seem like the director reached the end of the script so much as just quit when he ran out of film. There was no satisfying explanation for almost everything along the way that had been interesting or puzzling, and the ultimate safety of the main character remained in doubt. Bah, humbug.

For the sake of our discussion today, let us ignore the thriller part of the equation, and view it as a straight-to-vid softcore. We can then say that the film's greatest strength is that it got beautiful, G-rated sitcom actress Lise Cutter, love object of both Balki and Cousin Larry, to do a fairly explicit 10-minute sex scene in a softcore porn film. Can't beat that with a stick!

Also naked in the film:

Melanie Walker, whose entire career consisted of a few straight-to-video film made within a few months of this one.

Debi Giezing, whose entire career consisted of this movie.

and Daniella (seen with Debi Giezing), who has the most interesting career of all. She made several movies, but this seems to have been the only one, or one of the few, in which her anus was not violated on camera. Here's a selected portion of her filmography:

Anal Maidens 3 (1996) (V)
Assy 2 (1996) (V)
Young and Anal 1 (1995) (V)
Buttman Goes to Rio 3 Oh! (1992) (V)
Fleshtone (1994)
Up Your Ass 7 (1997) (V)

(By the way, The Young and the Anal was, by far, my favorite daytime soap opera.)

Daniella, the porn actress, was the only one of the four with any significant career after this film, assuming you consider getting drilled in the butt to be a career. Even Lise Cutter was soon out of show business. Her only credit after this one was a single episode of "The Cosby Mysteries." I don't know what happened to her but with a 10-minute sex scene, followed by a scene in which she is killed in her sleep, at least she went out in style. You might say she ended with both a bang AND a whimper.

TV Round-Up

The Girls Guide to Depravity, s1e11, featured nudity from:

Sally Golan

Rebecca Blumhagen

Hannah Rose Fierman (with Rebecca Blumhagen)

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Femme Fatales has not even started season 2 yet, but this preview of s2e2 is already floating around

Diana Gettinger and Moniqua Plante

Diana Gettinger alone

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Laci Broussard in Treme, s2e7

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Cristina Reali in Clash, s1e2