Visions of a Woman

A high-concept lesbian video, VISIONS OF A WOMAN is based on girls reading an erotic novel and becoming stimulated by the purple prose. That's a serviceable notion for stringing together porn vignettes, but poor casting and performing kill it in the cradle.

DVD does not employ false advertising but nonetheless betrays some sort of mishap betwixt project commencement and final result. Nowhere in the packaging are they mentioned, but three superstar actresses are listed, equal time with the video's stars, in its end credits -none of the 3 appear in the actual video. I found this particularly disturbing because the actual 9 players booked for this shoot are either obscure or unknown (I had to add a couple to IMDb database). My guess is that as often happens with these assembly-line modern videos aimed at individual-scene-streaming online, the contents of VISIONS were assembled arbitrarily and the big trio (Sovereign Syre, Dana Vespoli and veteran Tori Welles) could be in a vault segment that will pop up elsewhere.

A certain degree of eroticism is generated by the girls voice-over of sexy tales that precedes the visual humping. Many of the players are fantasy figures, conjured up the human voice, and overall I liked that concept a great deal. But it is up to Sal Genoa, a journeyman cameraman, to make the concept fly and he failed.

Instead, after each buildup (the industry calls this "the tease") what follows is generic lesbian sex involving two or three young actresses at a time. Unfortunately, none of them are absolutely smashing looking and they don't generate much heat in the sack either. Hope Howell and Nilah Dove have no other credits to their name, not even getting a gig in the 2 years since this feature was shot.

Opening segment takes care of the biggest names here, as Carly Parker and Cali Carter make for a good match: even their names match.

Angelica Sky and Jasmine Gomez have the dumbest segment: sex with the "pool girl". The pool boy (usually overage by decades for his job) is a clichéd staple of vintage porn and stags, and this idiotic variation on that theme doesn't fly.

The idea of a beautiful girl being a character coming to life out of a book one's reading is interesting, but Genoa doesn't go anywhere with it. After a vignette's final orgasm, the fantasy girl just wanders out of the frame, as lame a device as, in a gay porn context, Wakefield Poole's famed appearances and disappearances of fantasy (male) sex objects in his movies like BOYS IN THE SAND and MOVING.

Even the cast seems uncomfortable with the overall concept, given that this video, like so many others, has no script credit (doubt if there was a real script). In a concluding threesome segment, the third girl won't speak when spoken to, so one of the others declares "Let's just go with it" and the typical lesbian sex moves begin. That kind of functional improvising when the guys behind the camera have not given the talent the proper marching orders is laudable.