WHITE FIRE should be considered a noble failure: a serious attempt to mount a quality porn film done in by a weak script and miscasting. Filmmaker Roger Colmont deserves an E for effort.
Ultimately very repetitious story concerns Vanessa Johnson (listlessly played by Lisa Marks), a buxom NYC fashion editor for a magazine. Classy opening has her annotating the credits on fashion sketches for a "White Fire" layout.
Bulk of the action takes place at her lavish cabin retreat in the country, where she's snowed in for several days. She has endless flashbacks and fantasies about sex, mostly involving her boy friend Tim (Herschel Savage in his first starring role, though not yet using his HS moniker).
She seems to be going crazy but the finale switches everything around in a surprise, unsatisfying, too-extreme twist, almost as bad as the dreaded "it was only a dream" gambit.
Along the way Colmont has some imaginatively staged sex scenes, notably a crazy aerial porn sequence in which Marks & Savage are on a horizontal ladder near the ceiling doing acrobatic stunts while humping. With a fantasy format, he indulges in orgies and lets several lovely supporting actresses upstage the heroine, notably Georgette Sanders as Vanessa's secretary (and lesbian mate Cynthia) and the always striking if artificial looking Jill Munroe. On the male side, David Morris steals a couple of scenes by way of his expert cocksmanship.
Too much repeated footage as filler and an ill-advised softcore gang-rape scene hurt the film, as well as overuse of a pretentious classical music score. This was evidently intended to score big in the "porno chic" sweepstakes then popular from the likes of Radley Metzger, but the film ends up being a long shaggy dog exercise.
Among the more creative (if like the aerial sex stunt, stupid) effects are a group sex scene with the cast wrapped in fabric; a lesbian threesome staged on an abstract black floor framed by theatrical cutouts representing a forest; a strange insert closeup exaggerating a huge cock -they liked it so much it's repeated twice; and a nutty effect of sparklers supposedly blazing from either Lisa's or Jill's vagina, but obviously faked.
Lisa Marks in the lead role gives a poor performance and is not beautiful enough to make up for it. In fact, her slightly overweight appearance is unwisely emphasized in some of the shots; her other film appearances were in supporting roles plus the lead in JACKPOT (which I'll be watching soon).
By the time a Matt Munro-genre vocalist sings the thematic ballad "The Day to Say Goodbye" over the disappointing finale, this romantic opus has frittered away its welcome.
