Given its tendency to move from (sexual) set piece to set piece, it's surprising more porn doesn't adopt the variety or skit format, which seems tailor-made to what frequently devolves into a scene-based medium. Though there are a variety of examples of XXX directors trying their hand at the genre, Leonard Kirtman's HOT FLASHES perhaps provides a prime example of why it's not more ubiquitous: it's hard to keep up the pace of comedy when you keep having to stop for sex.
Supposedly chronicling a newscast on the adult cable network W-SEX (where have I seen that before?), the film fails to move at the pace of actual television. Hosts Rebecca Wallflower (Nicole Blanc) and Rosie Raindrop (Dorothy Onan) serve as newscasters introducing various interview and report segments, while Justine Juicyfruit (Karen Summer) sits alongside - for some reason for the entire newscast - as the weather girl.
Most of the reports are vapid and uncreative, occasionally achieving some mild chuckles at best (Francois Papillon, jogging past Blanc at one point when she's seeking an interview, replies, "Sorry, I deun't speek Eenglish" in his trademark Gallic purr). Beyond that, the rest of the comedy falls flat. There's an interlude with Summer becoming so horny she ends up messing up the sound by boffing the boom guy (as if they use booms on the news!) that just leads to a lot of running around and flailing by the rest of the cast as they try to look like concerned while not actually *doing* anything to impede the action. An interlude where Blanc gets a dildo stuck in her vagina and Onan has to perform cunnilingus to calm her down is surely the film's nadir, an unfunny and incomprehensible set-up that's insulting to everyone's intelligence.
Beyond that, Kirtman, a veteran sex producer who by this point was more than a decade into his career, is surprisingly bad at shooting sex. The encounter between Summer and the boom guy, for example, alternates between long shots that obfuscate most of the action and boring inserts where it's difficult to get a good view of what's going on. A lot of the scenes are like this - indifferently shot and over before they've begun, making this a weird case of a film where all the skits are too long but somehow the sex is too short.
Ever the penny-pincher, Kirtman also pads the (already brisk) runtime with outtakes from several of his other movies (I counted HEAD WAITRESS and UP IN THE AIR, and there may be more). Ironically, due to the scattershot nature of cobbling this footage together, these are the only segments that actually approach the feel of a real sketch film, and while they're still not good porn (there's no rhythm since they're pieced together from scraps of other movies), they at least get the pacing right. The rest is largely lifeless, except the final report from the "Sex Olympics" (apparently held in a Los Angeles living room), which is as insultingly stupid as the rest of the skits but at least features the amusing and cleverly deployed gag of spreading its cumshots across the various "events." Still, the film is largely all wet, a poor example of a sex variety show that does little more than illustrate why the genre is so hard to pull off in the first place.
