The 66th Day

The actors turned filmmakers team of Siouxsie Q and Michael Vegas try their hand at a feature film, after making hundreds of vignettes for Gamma Entertainment's various Bree Mills labels, with this glossy but unconvincing Wicked Pictures movie. Clearly aimed to please fans of BDSM lite porn, its misogynistic defense of the Submission school of brainwashing left me cold.

The movie reminds me less of the "50 Shades" novels (and crappy films) that made it possible, but leans back toward the "Pauline Reage" (Anne Desclos) novel "Story of O" that started it all, seven decades ago.

It's a fable, replete with a happy ending (if you buy into Siouxsie's rather ridiculous, topsy-turvy notion of what self-realization for a woman means) as star Vanna Bardot is put through the wringer as basically a sex slave for over 3-1/2 hours of running time only to emerge as a young lady with a very bright future and unlimited possibilities. The key is that two hissably evil men (Codey Steele and Lexington Steele -I guess their bearing the same stage surname is a happy coincidence) plus one deliciously sarcastic domme (Penny Barber -I'm a fan!) have painstakingly taught her over a period of 65 days how to face and overcome pain, greed and mistreatment to become a "complete" person. Sort of a toughening up process. She also has the vast largesse promised by Lex at her disposal.

The first half of the show is a perverted romance, with ice-cold Codey Steele quite a villain (think of those wonderful Gainsborough British melodramas with James Mason from the 1940s) as he picks her up at a flea market (with a key uncredited cameo role there by the movie's production assistant Daphne, who made an impression on me with her couple of bit parts in Transfixed episodes) and quickly makes Vanna a willing slave. The whole movie falls apart rather quickly, as it's very, very difficult to suspend disbelief at how easily Vanna gives up her freedom (cue the Beyonce music in your head) to the young creep.

Lexington, of course, is far creepier when Codey turns his slave over to him on the 19th Day for "further training". Both men are equally callous and oblivious to Vanna's need for love - one supposes that the Submissive Handbook says you have to beat that out of her. At any rate, once Lex is through manhandling and humiliating poor Vanna, he sends her on the 44th Day in a sleek Mercedes to Penny Barber's chateau (Story of O reference??) for final training, which porn fans will be glad to find out is a lesbian orgy with her and her female slaves Hazel Grace and Demi Hawks.

Considering the BDSM subject matter, the endless sex scenes are surprisingly vanilla, no doubt to appeal to Wicked fans (like myself -it was my favorite top-drawer porn label back in its heyday) who can find sleazier porn everywhere else with ease.

The pair of directors do a slick job, but make some rookie errors. At the very outset, one of a dozen or so title cards to mark the passage of time (with flashbacks and flash-forwards abounding) reads "The 21th Day"! That goof startled me, but two more bloopers awaited me: in future segments we have "The 35rd Day" (equal time mixing up oh-so-familiar suffixes) and finally a real doozy: "The 65td Day". The other disconcerting defect is in the photography/editing: Vegas and Sal Genoa (who used to work for Filly Films) man the A and B cameras, and in many scenes the shots edited together from their simultaneous work doesn't match: one camera has sharp focus and the other is soft focus -like those horse-blanket shots one associates with shooting aging Hollywood divas (in my memory, Lucille Ball's blurry closeups in the ill-fated movie of "Mame" were the most glaring, mismatched against the crisp focus elsewhere). This back and forth mismatch was not fixed in post-production, as Wicked, like most if not all porn labels, doesn't really care about the quality of the NonSex footage, assuming fans will skip it anyway.