Terri's Lesson in Torment!

Seemingly kicked out as part of Terry Sullivan's Athena Films bondage concern, TERRI'S LESSON IN TORMENT! is a woeful little S&M picture targeting the fetish market. It would have played a few specialty houses in the day before slinking off to video, where it appeared under its proper title from Bizarre as well as a presumably bootlegged version (all credits have been removed) as RAVAGED from Video de Sade.

The nonexistent plot finds Sonny (Sammy Oscar) consulting with his dominant cousin Sarona (playing herself) after discovering that wife Terri is cheating on him when she starts calling out other guys' names during sex. (As an aside, Terri is played by homely brunette Julie Graham, and should not be confused with the far more attractive blonde Juliet Graham, who so memorably essayed the Queen of Hearts in Budd Townsend's ALICE IN WONDERLAND. To make matters even more confusing, this one-shot looks like Terri Hall - to the extent I actually thought it was her for a few minutes, given the title!)

As punishment for Terri's transgressions, Sonny binds her wrists, ties on some tit-weights and gives her a good-old-fashioned spanking over the knee in a scene that drags on for an eternity. Shot without any camera movement from a none-too-illuminating angle, this section plays like a Warhol film from hell. I defy anyone to listen to Terri's endless whining of "Sonny... Sonny..." like a 1930s grandmother and achieve an erection for a week, much less during the course of the scene. Forget unerotic - this film is ANTI-erotic, and could find good use among sex offenders as a replacement for chemical castration.

Things don't fare much better moving forward. Apparently having decided the world's most unappealing spanking was insufficient punishment, Sonny has conscripted Sarona to help him dish out further torment in the basement. They tie Terri to a St. Andrew's cross and lightly flog her, then switch her to a horizontal board, where they spread her legs and Sarona works her over with a vibrator. Things conclude with Terri being made to suck her husband's flaccid penis while Sarona eggs her on. Finally, we return to Terri and Sonny having vanilla intercourse again - and now it's Sarona's name Terri blurts out mid-coitus!

While theoretically kinky, TERRI is a total dud. The film - and the rest of its Athena ilk -at least engages with the bondage ethos in a much more intimate way than most vanilla XXX that dabbles in "the rough stuff" - i.e., it features real bondage gear and people that, seemingly, at least kind of know how to use it. Nevertheless, the "torture" is utterly listless, and Graham's half-hearted attempts at playing the brat are more irritating than arousing. Even the potential incestual frisson of the two cousins meting out the torture together goes completely ignored - the plot is merely a pretext for the bondage, which, when delivered this ineffectually, collapses the film like a deflated balloon. Athena was clearly capable of delivering the good stuff - there's a scorcher of a scene that serves as the backbone of CALENDAR GIRL (or BIKER SLAVERGIRLS, as it was released from Video de Sade with extended whipping). The key is to cast attractive participants who know what they're doing. TERRI'S LESSON IN TORMENT! does neither.