Insomnia

Cameraman turned director Hank Hoffman greatly impressed me with truly "sleeper" of an Adult Cinema release (from Wicked Pictures), which boasts an excellent screenplay and amazing star turn by the talented Mona Wales.

She plays a woman who lost everything a year ago, her job, husband, etc., and is now a drifter, travelling from one seedy motel to another in search of casual sex to help conquer the emptiness of her existence. Gimmick that she suffers from something akin to narcolepsy, but termed here as insomnia, is very well used by writer-director Hoffman to give the feature a quality usually linked with mainstream filmmakers like David Lynch or Chris Nolan in his "Memento" mode.

Wales frequently breaks through cinema's fourth wall, talking directly to the viewer while her own sex scenes are in progress, and her handling of lengthy monologues are vivid proof of her acting talent, beyond the required sex performance. Ryan Driller and Chanel Preston as a pair of grifters give solid support in a twisty story that captured my interest and had me guessing, all the time building tremendous empathy for Wales' central character.

I have one specific thing in common with the protagonist in this movie: I, too, have difficulty sleeping. And that's really where the similarities end. I haven't lost everything nor am on the run. I also don't have sex with random strangers. All of which Mona Wales character does to catch those elusive zzz's. On her journey she meets a couple people who happen to be involved in meth dealing, and some complications arise from that. She also dips in and out of consciousness throughout the movie, occasionally giving this a hallucinatory quality. To top it off, in a sort of neo-noir fashion, Mona Wales frequently narrates and/or talks directly to the camera. In fact, for me Mona Wales was the nice discovery to all of this. She had some actual acting talent as well as having natural body I found attractive, and bringing a realistic (for porn, at least) eroticism to her sex scenes. My other favorite scene would have to be the girl-girl between Chanel Preston and Jenna Sativa. So with the intriguing story and satisfying sexual content, this turned out to be one of the better features I've seen, Wicked or otherwise.