Lesbian Fashionistas

Nick Orleans was riding high about 15 or 20 years back, directing consistently interesting and stylish porn features for Adam & Eve and other labels. He's back with Adam & Eve, but his recent "comeback" videos are mindless exercises in fetish -truly awful.

Such is the case of the obscure "Lesbian Fashionistas" which recently has been packaged as a bowdlerized short feature titled "Erotic Fashion Show" for insomniacs to watch on Showtime on Demand. I gave it my usual A/B comparison and found it severely lacking in everything except pretentiousness.

Penny Pax is miscast once again as our empathetic but empty-headed heroine, a minor-league fashion stylist, seen fooling around with her knock-out blonde roommate Anikka Albrite, latter riding high in porn and marketed as if she were the star of the video (she's not).

Pax inveigles her way into the jet-set world of fashion icon Victoria Hunter, well- played by another statuesque blonde, Ash Hollywood. And there Orleans' non- story ends, stretched to an interminable 112 minutes in its XXX incarnation, and reduced simply by removing the explicit insertion lesbian footage to 70 minutes for cable-addicted wimps.

The pretentiousness comes with various Brechtian devices, notably lovely but punk-styled Sasha Knox as sort of a Greek Chorus in one, talking to Pax and the audience from time to time while shining a flashlight toward the camera. I found these interruptions annoying, as they probably were meant to be, and was quite confused by Nick's poor technique of having pixie cut Sasha as a blonde in these shots but bearing distinctive pink-dyed (blonde underneath) hair in the regular scenes.

There are men in the cast, notably Chad Alva cast as a still photographer, but they have nothing to do. Chad pops up in several shots, has no dialog, and does nothing but snap some photos - yet he receives a screen credit (whereas in porn actors with huge roles but no sex scene are normally omitted entirely from both front and back credit crawls).

Orleans and his partner in crime "Velvet Vixen" (who gets acting, writing and a.d. credits) forgot to develop a plot, any conflict, any drama, anything but sex here. I've seen Andrew Blake films with more narrative drive (just kidding - he was the king of no-content, all-flash cinema). No "All About Eve" rivalry erupts between Pax and Ash; no spats or even perturbed scenes occur between Pax and roomie Anikka, nothing happens.

Instead, we are treated to dreamlike wandering around, emphasized by swirling hand-held camera, in Victoria's world, where a work ethic (notoriously strong in the world of fashion and modeling) has been replaced with a '60s into '70s hedonism. The pretty girls are pawing or even XXX humping each other at all times and everywhere, creating an environment where "sexual harassment" in the office is rendered a meaningless concept. Pax acquiesces to this immediately so there is missing entirely the thrill (see any of thousands of Lesbian Cinema features from Girlfriends, Sweetheart Video, Filly Films or any other specialist labels) of resistance/seduction/capitulation that is the cornerstone of lesbian porn. Nick has no feel for the genre, and the empty result is this stinker.

Like his other recent flops, "Perfect Secretary 3" and "Game On", Nick has jettisoned drama in favor of fetishism. These fashionistas are semi-clad in pantyhose and other inviting lingerie with Nick's cameras lingering on their bodies, particularly the posteriors, in Jules Jordan/Johnny Buttman Stag gonzo fashion. That emphasis is decidedly pleasing to the auteur, but merely cryptic to a mainstream porn audience. If you want fetish, there's a whole world of fetish porn out there, but to integrate it into a mainstream feature requires the talent and ingenuity of one of the masters of Adult Cinema, say Alex De Renzy or Radley Metzger to drop a couple of big names. With his career dwindling down to junk like this, Orleans will likely be lumped with Andrews, Cramer and Steele as just one of the Nic(k)s.