With the lovely Samantha Ryan in the lead, I was looking forward to AWAKENING to LOVE but the star of many a lesbian or bondage/fetish opus is ill-served here. One of New Sensations' old Romance series (which get cut down for cable play), you'd think it was going to be GIGI or WEST SIDE STORY based on its AVN's 9 best this & that nominations, but once again, the industry mavens' accolades are about as credible as the phony foreign press's Golden Globes for mainstream films. (As a journalist I covered the GG's in the '80s and they're about as real as pro wrestling.)
Picture gets off to a very shaky start, as Ryan, a brunette rather than blonde here, is all lovey-dovey with fiancé Dale Dabone, starting with a lengthy hardcore sex scene. He gives her an engagement ring and proposes, and then she leaves to drive to work. Seconds later there's the loud sound of a crash (I guess she barely got out of the driveway) and Dale runs outside to merely stare Spielberg-like into the distance. Yes, fans, this video is so cheap that there's no visual at all of the crash or its aftermath.
Rest of the picture revolves around Sam in the hospital. At first she's unconscious and there is a tedious (but necessary) section where Dale sits puppy-dog-like at her bedside waiting for a miracle. Nurse Dawn, played by Kimberly Kane in a non-sex role for a change, stupidly tells him in a poorly- written speech (credited to anonymous screenwriter "Crystal Dear") that such wimpy behavior is no help, so he stops coming and ultimately returns only to leave a sappy note and (Crystal, dear, what's up with this??) take back his engagement ring from her limp finger. Yuck.
To break up this extremely boring material, hack director Eddie Powell (who usually cranks out at least one gonzo feature per week) inserts a sex scene between Sam's friend Misty Stone and a barely recognizable (with short-short hair) Tony De Sergio.
Sam suddenly wakes up 8 months later, and has chatty Danny Mountain as a hospital roommate. For a change of pace, Allie Haze is another hospital patient who has sex with TJ Cummings in a storage room, notable for her effortless deep throat technique. Chalk up another sex filler that plays better on the unexpurgated DVD than the heavily edited cable edition where it serves no narrative purpose.
Mountain tells Ryan his sob story about his wife having left him, and in a montage we watch the two walking wounded bond. When they're ready for release he invites her to live with him and she says -wait for it- Yes.
Flash a "One Year Later" title, and the duo are in bed humping away, Danny's big dick giving Samantha something she can definitely hang on to. It's a satisfying sex scene to culminate a trite, crummy movie. The germ of the script is a cornball line, repeated for supposed irony by both leading men: "I'll never leave you".
