The Voyeur: Volume 2

Jacky St. James ups the ante in this excellent sequel to her Logan Pierce-starrer for Sweet Sinner. She moves away from the obvious treatment of the Peeping Tom subject matter to delve more deeply into the motivations of the character.

Relying on considerable voice-over narration, we get at what makes Logan's surveillance freak tick: he is obsessed with observing strangers' stories, not to interfere or connect with them but caught up soap-opera style in their lives. He is still carrying a torch for the star of the first volume, Melissa Moore, a tenant who left. We see her in a brief bit of archive footage as flashback, and her character remains an important catalyst for the rest of Part 2.

Kenna James is a tenant having trouble paying her rent, and Logan convinces her to plant cameras off-site so that he can keep track of Melissa's current activities now that she is absent from his orbit. St. James wisely expands the show's universe beyond the dozen or so CCTV cameras Logan uses to monitor his building's inhabitants, promising more varied adventures in subsequent editions of the series.

We learn of Mellissa's quest to become pregnant with her husband played by Jay Smooth, and the first sex scene depicts Smooth seeking sexual solace elsewhere, humping his alluring young secretary Whitney Wright in his office.

A key subplot has Michael Vegas as Moore's doctor, contriving with his assistant Eliza Jane to surreptitiously substitute his own sperm in order to fulfill Moore's pregnancy wishes. No surprise that the sperm sample is obtained by humping Eliza.

Tenants Ramon Nomar and Mona Wales are into role-playing, making for the most interesting segment of their BDSM antics, underlining Wales's status as porn's most reliable kink performer (and convincing actress) currently.

Show climaxes with an excellent role-reversal, as Kenna becomes the voyeur and Logan the subject of her observations. Open ending is beautifully directed by St. James, worthy of a mainstream project. Not so ready for prime time is her writing error in the voice-over content, where putting words into Logan's mouth misuses the word penultimate as if it meant the same as ultimate (I guess the way flammable and inflammable are synonyms).