Caribbean Heat

I have greatly enjoyed porno travelogues, dating back to glorious '70s soft-core classics like "Emmanuelle" and especially "Vanessa", and on into hardcore epics like many of the exotic location shoots from the Adam & Eve label, such as "Emerald Rain". This followup to Candida Royalle's "Urban Heat" is n.s.g.

Candida and her frequent producer Michele Capozzi backed a lady director Manuela Sabrosa to shoot in South America with what appears to be amateur or at best semi-pro talent. Explicit content is minimal: enough to put the video into the XXX cast but not enough to satisfy the punters.

The five vignettes are mainly touristy, with seduction and vacation flings the main subject matter. Within the melting pot of cultures and ethnicities that is Brasil, the emphasis is still on what visually comes across as interracial sex, since to the naked eye (pun sort of intended) the strong contrasts in skin color are apparent in the casting of couples, regardless of their specific genealogy.

Of course, La Candida's work as director is an acquired taste, in that she usually takes a softer approach than other pornographers, especially contrasting with the uninhibited nature of her acting roles prior to becoming an auteur. Writer-director Sabrosa is way too laid-back in her creation of sex vignettes, which emerge as uneventful and snooze-inducing.

She gives us sex on the beach; a tourist making out with a stud she picks up; a pointless encounter between a sexy interior decorator and the guy guarding the house she's inspecting (could have been an occasion for class conflict); a dismal BDSM depiction that is lighter than light, as "the master" dominates his "maid" with a little riding crop thrown in - truly dull; and a finale of two couples making out on a remote beach titled "Adam and Eve Meet Adam and Eve", utterly pointless except in its obvious and annoying plug for the video's distributor.

Nowadays most failed attempts at eroticism err on the side of gonzo or often pomposity/pretentiousness/artiness. This one provides neither extreme, and is so lacking in ambition that it flops even at a soft-core level.