Jacky St. James coaxes top-notch performances from a cast of familiar porn stars in "The Obession", one of the best Sweet Sinner DVD releases in recent years.
IMDb classifies this as a "TV Mini-series" but it's not. Instead, as the screen credit reads "a film by Jacky St. James" it is a feature made for DVD (also streamed on line in artificial chapter segments).
The genre here is that of Barbet Schroeder's classic "Single White Female", with Abella Danger starring as Michele Yates, new roommate to uptight Mandy Prescott (Chanel Preston). It soon becomes abundantly clear that something is wrong with Michele, but director St. James keeps the suspense quotient up as we travel through five explicit (and lengthy) sex scenes en route to the story's climax.
Mandy's boyfriend Michael Vegas is a principal character in the saga, eventually caught up between the two women as the erotic content escalates. Mandy's little sister Lucy (cutie Adria Rae) comes to stay with her boyfriend Jay Smooth providing the viewer a sexual diversion as they make love in the kitchen, but the pot really comes to a boil with a flashback presented by Michele's former roommate Alana Howard (played by the alluring MILF Reena Sky) that limns the havoc she caused years ago in Alana's life.
Jacky brings the story to a very satisfying open-ended conclusion in which Michele gets the last word, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if a sequel were forthcoming. Abella's sinister, well-modulated performance here is a revelation, a major improvement over her previous unexceptional acting (she is mainly an all-sex star) in such featured roles as title character in the poor thriller "Sleeping with Danger".
St. James is to be commended for so skilfully blending the demands of XXX explicit content with solid storytelling - for example, her camera's fixation on voyeuse Michele's exquisite backside in early reels to set us up for her anal-sex finale.