Private Gold 70: Sex Rebels

His career long over, Italian director Antonio Adamo created some memorable works for both the Private and daring! labels once upon a time, but this ain't one of them. It spotlights the maestro at his worst, magnifying all the shortcomings of his signature style of porno filmmaking.

Subject is a post-apocalyptic tale set in 2013, 8 years in the future for the 2005 Private release. A quasi-Utopian society is actually a police state in which sex outside of marriage is severely punished, a typical porn theme as most Adult filmmakers like to harp on the Outlaw nature of their profession, and the inevitable harassment they suffer at the hands of those enforcing Obscenity laws.

Some second-unit shots establish the locale as the former USA, though the picture was shot in Budapest where all that Euro talent can be found. Promising sci-fi, all we get is generic humping with some pretty gals -Adamo's inevitable crutch in his hit or miss porn films.

But the crucial blunders AA makes here cause the video to be nearly unwatchable. Just to recount the major ones: (1) It's shot in Blurrovision, way beyond soft-focus and a sin in the presentation of sex.

(2) The director's preference for English-language dialog to impress the international market is a disaster, as the endless voice-over narration is delivered with such a thick accent to render most of it unintelligible, and the cast reciting English by rote is terrible. Even Zenza Raggi, as the leading rebel of the title fighting against the state, seems to be handling his English well until he starts ranting about the evils of Dictation -yes a made up word to describe what an evil dictator does to his people. Perhaps he had James Spader in "Secretary" in mind.

(3) AA's affectation for the women to stare directly into the camera during their sex scenes is here in spades, and disrupts those scenes.

(4) Story and action make no sense, even when there is a set-up or opportunity to do so.

(5) Miserable excuse for an ending has the bad guy named Fidelio phoning in some lame-duck exposition, apparently to set up the possibility of a dreaded sequel (never made) rather than tie plot threads together.

Nick Lang has the nominal hero does a terrible job of walking through the picture as an agent named X (he tries to make fun of his own name but fails) sent by top cop Fidelio to infiltrate the rebels. Raggi hams it up outrageously, though he has one effectively violent sex scene, raping the busty and alluring Michela Sabbatini in the early reels, serving to make the last hour or so of the feature an anticlimax.

Lovely Dutch actress Bobbi Eden is hot in the central role of Eve, but poor casting of a similar looking Eastern European blonde Stella Morante as Fidelio's wife merely confused me as to who was playing who.

A disaster so bad that it causes me to ponder whether Adamo's "good" films were in fact as good as I initially pegged them to be.