Tropical Pleasure

Euro porn takes a nose dive for Davy Jones's Locker in "Hot Sinners", the retitled version of this 2011 feature "Tropical Pleasure", which I stumbled upon while roaming through the entire catalog of Britain's otherwise laudable Harmony Films. It's as bad as it gets.

English-dubbing, even applied to expatriate American star Dillon Day (in apparently a career-ending performance) is terrible, employing so many euphemisms that even the simplest scene is made cryptic. If I were teaching a university course on semiotics or just plain porn, this would be a good test case to see if my students could discern sense out of nonsense.

There are several defined characters, plus an array of interchangeable lovely European actresses, who mingle in the Dominican Republic on the beach or at nearby shops, with the point of their activities totally eluding me. Scenes have Dillon or other bad guys getting mad, talking on the phone, and of course humping the women, but none of it makes the slightest bit of sense.

Worst scene and juxtaposition has Dillon bawling out a bald underling for some unexplained faux pas and in the next scene he and the flunky are suddenly having a three-way with Dillon's girl friend. How director Gianfranco Romagnoli gets from point A to B and C in this two-hour farrago is anyone's guess. His only punishment is to have his surname misspelled in one of the credit listings.

Why Harmony Films, once a bastion of high-quality Adult Entertainment employing great directors like Tanya Hyde and Gazzman, stooped to pick up this garbage, duly released by the studio's new front distributor Erigo, is beyond me. I was going to use a major studio analogy, but devolution has run ahead of me, as once-great Paramount Pictures is now devoting its vast marketing and distribution apparatus to the likes of "Jackass" and "Paranormal Activity" movies, though the occasional Oscar-worthy title like "The Big Short" also slips into their schedule.

Avoid at all costs.