Public Service

The chief mystery in this Wicked Pictures mystery film is why quirky writer-director David Stanley decided to rein in his tendencies toward weird stories in favor of such a mundane "suspense with a twist" exercise. It's strictly for die-hard Jessica Drake fans.

The leading Wicked diva plays a police detective married to lay-about Barrett Blade (I wouldn't wish that fate on anybody) who in a totally unbelievable starting point for a tale gets assigned to investigate a missing persons/probable murder case in which Blade is the chief, virtually only suspect. Even Jeff Sessions might recuse himself from such.

Picture opens with a lesbian twosome (featuring Dana DeArmond and Kelly Skyline) taking place on a set that looks like a hospital clinic, with Blade jerking off watching them. We find out after he deposits his spunk on their feet that this is one of many private rooms in a brothel, and he invites them on a date with him at a nearby motel after work. We get a fade-out of the girls arriving at the motel and Blade closing the door.

Wifey Drake is introduced interrogating Blade, the girls having gone missing and all sorts of circumstantial evidence pointing to him as the guy who offed them. Stanley develops fake suspense in this scene, because we don't find out that interrogator and suspect are man and wife until the next scene, the two of them back home as if nothing had happened.

Drake is angry (understandably) at Blade for having cheated on her, but he relies on a Clintonian cop-out, namely that he only jerked off, never had intercourse with the missing ladies, while continuing to protest his innocence as to doing away with them. He's mad at her for taking the case, though as a viewer I'm mad at Stanley for trying to get me to suspend disbelief that this could possibly be here case.

But the director plows ahead as if everything were hunky-dory, he having the privilege to be working in porn rather than the more logical-minded mainstream of cinema, where some pesky producer or studio boss would reject such a story hook.

Stanley's next plot twist is cornball, but also handled without any believability. Drake goes undercover to work at the whorehouse, run by Eric Masterson -quite good at such sleazy roles (I had just seen him in an identical assignment back a few years during Stanley's Vivid Video phase, in "One Good Minute". Besides the previously seen doctor's room, there is a police interrogation room - the sort of "in your face" cutesy coincidence that Stanley is prone to throw into his films.

Her undercover work makes for plenty more sex scenes, but sloppiness ruins what is left of a viewer's investment in this story. For example, Chris Cannon has a group sex scene featuring not just newbie whore Drake but old hands Darryl Hanah and Lindsey Meadows. But he has full intercourse with the other two ladies, even though it's frequently emphasized by Masterson (who monitors the action on CCTV) that the girls are not allowed to f*ck the customers, only setting up jerk-off sessions for the guys. If you want to go further, take it to the motel -the self- same one from the beginning of the film, sayeth Masterson.

Later Jessica humps a customer, hardly befitting her status as undercover cop (breaking all sorts of ironclad rules), and disobeying her police chief boss listlessly played by guest star Fred Lincoln, grey pony-tail and all. For his pointless walk-through, Lincoln received a best-actor nomination for the year from AVN, that phony baloney @#*!$ organization.

I won't spoil the final twist and surprise ending, but let's just say it won't be honored with a Mystery Writers' Edgar award, even in some parallel universe where this story holds water and where the Edgars are handed out by AVN.

Wicked's favorite d.p. Francois Clousot shoots this in a lousy soft- focus manner, making it far inferior to Stanley's innumerable Vivid releases. And while he customarily brought those Vivid features in at under 75 minutes each, this bloated effort runs nearly two hours.