Collaborating with "R. Lauren Niemi", this short 1984 feature from Candida Royalle has her trademarks in terms of style and content, but lacks the depth of her later story-line films. For me it fit within the abstracted eroticism of such famous porn pioneers as David Hamilton and "Andrew Blake". Unlike Candida's militant "safe sex" later work, the sex scenes are performed bareback, without condoms.
Carol Cross is a winning heroine, so fresh and lovely to captivate any audience. Setting is a rural residence with a neon sign reading "Love's Inn", and the sunny, bucolic mood is reminiscent of Euro Porn, especially Swedish films including those by fellow East Coast Adult Filmmaker Joe Sarno.
The music score by BamBam Productions is the chief drawback, as its guitar and keyboards drone on in vamping mode that is boring and at time overwhelms the pantomime sex action on screen. Eschewing narrative, Candida and co-director Niemi have Cross arriving at the inn to be greeted by wonderful proprietor Chelsea Blake (the only player allowed to do any acting, with dialog and an exuberant personality), followed by five sex scenes involving couples but with no story progression or much of anything happening. It runs 63 minutes on Adam & Eve DVD, including slow end credits, and the IMDb listing of 89 min. original running time is likely false.
Just like modern pornographer Nica Noelle, Candida pioneered in naturalism, with the sex scenes utterly natural, no opening up for the camera, no cum shots, no extraneous changing of sex positions all of which remain virtually mandatory in hack-directed porn to this day.
The only "development" in characters is that after the "love at first sight" (or perhaps on an annual basis, since opening scene establishes that Cross stays at the inn once a year) where Cross and handyman Jake West see each other through windows and each masturbate, a lovely scene of Cross on a swing outside turns into fantasy of her nude swinging through the air to be met mid-swing by Jake as an apparition. Later they have a satisfying sex scene to finish the film.
Given this hour-long template, there was nothing stopping Royalle and Niemi from shooting dialog scenes and even some action scenes to flesh out the characters and narrative in order to make a more conventional and riveting film, in line with the Golden Age story films which were still the norm in 1984 when this one was shot. But instead we end up with an all-sex feature, tasteful for sure but uninvolving.
