The Faces of Alice

Filmmaker Bree Mills cites her "Sharing the Bed" feature in discussing this new series in her BTS short subject "rant", and I agree: these are her two best films out of over 100 features & compilations released through Gamma Entertainment.

Its failing is the usual for the team of Stills & Mills: exaggerated scenes that apparently are pablum (or manna) to their devoted web-fans. But Sara Luvv in the title roles, balanced by strong support from Serena Blair and Cadence Lux, save the picture.

It has the same theme as "Sharing the Bed", about identity and self- worth, as Luvv portrays Alice, a still-closeted lesbian who loses her fabulous girlfriend Dinah (Bree Daniels with dyed red hair and butch styling) because she's afraid to come out. But the format falls within Mills' growing fantasy lore about Wiccan witches, as Alice in a foolhardy act casts a Wiccan spell to summon the goddess Aphrodite (a gloriously zoftig Adriana Sephora, closest the long cast list comes to an older MILF actress), and gets into deep trouble.

Moving into "3 Faces of Eve" lite, Aphrodite achieves an almost Faustian bargain by getting Alice to make a "goddess pact", getting her wish to become an "ultimate lesbian" in return for servicing Sephora. Catch is that Alice becomes possessed by two spirits, effectively giving her three warring personalities, fighting for control. This gives rise to the humor of the piece, though Bree's official characterizing "Alice" as a comedy is a stretch. I found it serious and that was what was good about it, the silly lapses expected and possible to ignore.

Stealing her scenes, but not the show which firmly belongs to Luvv in a smooth tour de force performance, is my favorite member of the Bree & Alan acting troupe, Serena Blair. She's cast as Ellen, a throwback to hippie and old ('70s) New Age clichés, as the head of the college campus's "Womyn's support group", which provides a safe space for girls and folks identifying as girls, holding weekly meetings of the lesbian pagan Power Circle, to which Alice is invited.

Four-hour show (IMDb lists it as 2 hours long by mistake) released via a 2-DVD package has an early climax with a terrific squirting deluxe scene starring Alice's roommate Christie, wonderfully personified by Cadence Lux in what I would term a star- making assignment. Alice, possessed by a butch stereotype named Al, has a double-dong purple dildo which warms Lux up and leads to multiple squirting orgasms that seem real. However, Mills cannot resist milking the gimmick (and fans will be delighted), as a second half of a very long vignette has Al returning in the guise of Alicia, the affected diva personality of the triad, and another round of Sapphic sex with Christie results in a true fountain of a Golden Shower, passed off as more squirting and lapped up like mother's milk by both actresses. I guess they earn stunt pay for this sort of thing.

Of course, the filmmakers need to top this set-piece, so the feature climaxes in a nearly hour-long all-girl orgy that starts as 6 on 1 with the beautiful members of the Power Circle adoring Al and his purple dildo, later joined by Christie, Ellen and to top it off, Dinah for a ten, count 'em, ten-fold daisy chain in which AJ Applegate shows off her Golden Shower skills, shot by Alan from behind for a change of pace. The orgy is oddly reminiscent of a 6-girl humpfest (styled in the manner of a Satanic cult ritual) centering around Eva Angelina in the otherwise forgettable porn parody of a decade back: "The Da Vinci Load".

Happy ending of Dinah and Alice reunited, with the 2 pesky spirits banished by fulfillment of a counter spell, leads to Blair as Ellen getting the final word: "We're all surrounded by magic".

For the uninitiated, all that liquid gold on the faces of the beautiful cast, plus the occasional silliness that is the Stills & Mills trademark detract from the feature's success, but overall it plays well, seems scripted for a change (fewer verbal improv longueurs) and indicates forward movement of the profitable pornographers on the artistic scale.