Best Friends, Better Lovers

Holly Randall takes screen credit for writing, producing and directing this awful Wicked Pictures feature, on which she should have remained anonymous.

It is a relentlessly cornball romance, insulting any audience's intelligence, even that consisting of porn enthusiasts.

Eliza Ibarra and Codey Steele play friends since childhood who move to L.A., where Codey hopes to succeed as an actor. Presumably as a mainstream actor, not porn.

Their next door neighbor is Joanna Angel, who consistently seems to have strayed into the movie from some neighboring set, so out of place. She stereotypically represents (crudely) the decadent world of Hollywood, with her familiar overall tattoos and goth styling, but is way too old for the role on top of that.

Premise of "we're just friends", repeated ad infinitum by Codey and Eliza, is a lame set-up given the inevitability of romance and of course sex between them for a finale. Angel has her eye set on lovely Eliza and gets her in Sapphic embrace in a truly unbelievable plot twist. Just for good measure, she also has success with fellow tattooing activist Small Hands, thrown into the movie for no good reason. A staging of a BDSM party thrown by Angel, that grosses out guests Ibarra and Steele, is ridiculously chintzy.

As far as the leads go, they are hardly a substitute for the superstar contract players who put Wicked Pictures on the map nearly three decades ago, of whom only Jessica Drake remains. NonSex actress Stella Marx overdoes it as the hokey "yenta" stereotype of a landlady, a role that should have been amusing.