Busty Bound Beauties

This is my first, much belated, review for IMDb of a bondage/fetish video, my curiosity having been whetted by recent mainstream inclusion of fetish motifs. After viewing "Busty Bound Beauties" I was surprised to read in IMDb of its principals' subsequent death by double suicide, clearly coloring my judgment of their rather tedious achievement here.

The most interesting aspect for me of this seemingly routine pandering to a particular set of quirks of a specialized audience is a historical recognition it triggered. If you look at films made nearly 100 years ago featuring nudity or semi-nudity, it is often corresponding to the morays and censorship of the day affecting stage shows, like Ziegfeld Follies or Earl Carroll's Vanities. Similar to a Busby Berkeley movie later on, nudity was permissible and even considered vaguely artistic in the form of static "tableaux" - no movement was permitted. This phenomenon can also be seen in British cinema about stage revues, even the nostalgic Judi Dench movie "Mrs. Henderson Presents".

In the video world of fetish, revolving around beautiful women bound, gagged, Saran wrapped into cocoons, tortured, tickled or merely worshiped at their feet, a throwback to this early 20th Century approach is seen, as executed by the late pornographer Jack Banner here for the old Harmony Concepts video label. The result, and I have no doubt it is repeated more or less thousands of times in these videos listed in IMDb dubiously under the "Adventure" genre, is about as anti-cinematic as you can get.

Nothing happens here, just fade-outs (to mercifully deny us the extra tedium of watching rope masters carefully tying knots for minutes on end) from one tableau to the next of a full-bosomed beauty in sexy outfit, extreme high heels and otherwise styled out of a John Willie drawing struggling to break free. Essentially Banner and his colleagues at Harmony Concepts (and the currently successful label FM Concepts) are bringing erotic S&M still photography to life, but only barely, since movement is minimal. At best one gets the effect of Chris Marker's classic short film "La Jetee" which had the beautiful shots briefly go into motion.

90 minutes of this stuff is a bit much: roughly twice the length of a typical FM release and far too long for anyone to bear if one has not drunk the fetishist's Kool Aid. I will watch a few more of these exercises, in particular those featuring Darla Crane whose live-action subsequent work I greatly admire, but the ground-rules are obvious -doting on cleavage, big breasts teasingly partially covered (only one of the models here, the fatal suicide Natalie Demore, goes fully topless as the highlight for us mainstream viewers), adoring views of those fetish high heels, an occasional "panty shot" closeup of the genital area worthy of Pasolini's famous (male) crotch shots, ball-gagged mouth dripping drool, and that squirming motion that apparently turns on the closet sadists out there masturbating somewhere in the dark. Given the nomenclature "adventure" I thought some action would be forthcoming, but static is the noun most fundamentally descriptive of this video.

Superstar Anastasia Pierce, who like Crane is quite talented and well worth watching in a mainstream Lesbian opus from Sweetheart Video or Girlfriends Films, appears as a cheesecake photographer who Banner coaxes into woman-handling model Darby Daniels, only to get her comeuppance (action again left completely off-screen) at Banner's hands, as she gets a dose of her own medicine. Frankie Dashwood is my favorite model in this video, proof of the power of tease, since her huge breasts shown, but just covered enough to be ready for prime time TV, are a sight for sore eyes and perhaps worth (not quite) the price of admission. One thing is clear, no amount of exposure to these bondage epics will ever get me to react positively to the neatly tied rope restraints that apparently drive aficionados into paroxysms of delight. I've been seeing that junk since the Nikkatsu films of the '60s and am duly unimpressed.

Banner, RIP, comes off here as a nondescript pervert who delights in threatening his models, brandishes a riding crop he never applies to them, and basically displays a stage act that wouldn't even qualify him as a local late night Chiller Theater host on some rinky-dink TV station. I'm surprised this soft-R level material has any audience at all in an era when stronger stuff is so prevalent - perhaps it's the enduring power of tease.