Teacher's Pet

Talented director Stormy Daniels violates a famous Hitchcock principle of thriller construction, substituting surprise for suspense in "Teacher's Pet". Rather lame Wicked Pictures release received a knee- jerk "Best Feature" award nomination from AVN, from which one might wrongly conclude it was a weak year, when obviously corruption is the source of such an unwarranted accolade.

Wicked contract player present and accounted for is Alektra Blue, but only in an inconsequential supporting role that help keep the potboiler blot boiling. Title lead is instead assigned to a more age-appropriate for college coed Gracie Glam, who breezes smugly through the film in one of her lesser performances.

She's identified as a bitch and No-goodnik from the git-go, and Stormy's script errs mightily in not having any mystery in it, settling for the dullest of dull formats, a case history. Marcus London, reduced to catering status on this project, cameos uncredited in the opening scene as local coroner, examining a dead body from a dumpster and reciting CSI style exposition to another cameo-er, Jim Enright as the homicide cop, who is merely Digital Imaging Technician on the shoot, a far cry from his A-list directing assignments for Wicked (e.g. "Haunted Nights" two decades earlier.

The corpse, later pictured in a Student ID photo that is key to unraveling the "murder mystery" (NOT) resembles Brooklyn Lee, but is not her, and other intriguing small roles for extras likewise sadly fail to earn any screen credits (e.g., a beautiful redhead coed).

Glam shows up as a college transfer student, and fellow classmates take an instant dislike to her, sensing her evil nature without much provocation. That spoils the whole point of a thriller, where we're supposed to be fooled about the main character's or potential villain's true nature, or at least the other players are left in the dark.

So various killings by Glam occur, staged as surprises rather than suspenseful pay-offs. The plot twists involving these offings are entertaining in the later reels, including both a fake ending and a shock ending, but many a re-write and re-thinking by Stormy would have greatly improved the end result.

Cast is okay going through the motions, including Glam's roommate Ash Hollywood (before she got her ugly shoulder blade barbed-wire tattoos, India Summer as the hapless wife of teacher Tony De Sergio, and both Glam and Alektra. I kept waiting for a Stormy cameo (never happened), perhaps the only suspenseful aspect of the production.