Part of Bud Lee's "Mystery Sex Theater" series of features for Adam & Eve, "Once a Year" is a romantic drama (written by frequent collaborator George Kaplan) notable for its seriousness. It's one more example, among many, of the ability of Adult Cinema to tell an engrossing erotic story despite the conventional wisdom that only sex content matters.

Kylie Ireland loses her husband Ian Daniels to an incurable disease at the outset of the movie (after we see the couple make love). He pledged to return to her a year later, leading the story into ghost territory.

Her friends Shaena Steele and Renee LaRue encourage her to start datling several months later, and Kyle Stone emerges as the ideal match. Lee climaxes the film with a nicely edited sex scene of Ireland that may just be an erotic dream and is artfully ambiguous as to whether she is humping Daniels the ghost or Stone the fiance.

This feature was missing from IMDb, and I added it this week, 20 years after it was shot.