Harry Sparks is a horror movie turned porn director who does not even qualify as a hack, so deficient is he in any skills in his chosen field. This tired-blood, half-hearted attempt to join the lucrative porn-parody bandwagon, fantasy division, is embarrassing. Try watching Paul Thomas's 2-part video on the theme instead.
I'll merely recount the more egregious mistakes made here -not worth 1,000 characters to drive a stake through its heart. Even simple scenes seem to be green-screened, yet the sex scenes are generally all-nude with no period costuming or anything to suggest atmosphere, an essential feature in a fantasy fable missing here. Sparks, who takes charge of SPFX, does a poor job in that department, as poor as his writing, direction and casting.
Dani Daniels is miscast as Belle of the fairy tale, more convincing in the pretentious black & white wraparound footage as a modern girl reading the story, so presumably imagining herself as its heroine. Sparks' first major gimmick is to cast her actually in four roles: she also portrays Belle's sisters Felicia and Millicent, accounting for the static master shot in which they give exposition with their merchant daddy Albert, non-sex role with mustache for porn regular James Bartholet.
Besides poor lighting in some scenes and soft-focus, both trademark Sparks deficiencies, the absence of close-ups during sex scenes is a terrible drawback for XXX fans, as in one scene where Evan Stone's money shot is rendered invisible by a static camera many feet away from the players, perhaps out of fear of getting sprayed.
August Ames as the villain of the piece, Scarlet who watches via her crystal ball, is completely wasted, and superstar Riley Reid gets a truly nothing role as a lesbian enamored of yet another superstar Lea Lexis, who doubles as both wardrobe and makeup lady, reprising her "Voracious" contribution for Buttman a couple of years earlier.
Xander Corvus gets a crummy wolfman makeup job as the Beast, and speaks with a lower register voice, instead of crafting a characterization. The finale of the fantasy within the film, as well as the ending concerning modern-day Dani are both bungled.
By not concentrating at all on the simplest requirements of these genres (fantasy atmosphere; arousing sexual explicitness), Sparks with his abbreviated sex scenes continues to toil in a self-appointed realm that has no place in this world: porn pretending to mainstream and equalling neither. As usual, this is marketed as a 2-DVD set to give it the illusion of "premium product", but the feature runs only an hour and a half and Disk 2 merely supplies another hour and a half excerpted from 2 other lousy "porn parodies" plus Corvus humping Chanel Preston in a gym.
