La mansión del placer

Overly ambitious James Avalon project falters from his perhaps intentionally absurd sci-fi premise involving parallel universes and what amounts to a hokey psychological implanting of fake memories device. I was rooting for the film most of the way but it falls apart under its own weight.

And it is a film, shot using Super 16mm, the process once popular for blowing up to 35mm release prints. However, in the video era this gets processed onto a video for DVD release instead.

Penny Flame is our winsome heroine, trapped in some sci-fi mumbo jumbo situation that Rod Serling would have rejected in his "Twilight Zone" era, or at least required a dozen or so re-writes to get it into shape. Working in his "Red Light District" career phase, apparently Avalon had carte blanche to do what he wanted, a big mistake.

Oddest aspect of the project was hiring Vince Vouyer to direct the sex scenes, leaving Avalon to contemplate making sense of his own nonsensical dialogue footage. The BTS short subject humorously shows Vouyer being his own man, proudly declaring he never read the script at all. Perhaps a wise move? In any event co- director Vouyer scores much higher marks with the finished product than writer- director Avalon.

Not helping matters is casting industry tag-a-long and apparently pal of the director William Margold. I have criticized his work dozens of times in IMDb, based on dozens of bad performances, not any enmity. As a quack scientist/psychologist he recites his lines, constituting most of the sci-fi explanatory content, in his usual irritating, smarmy fashion, and in one segment Avalon has loud soundtrack music (for no reason) nearly drowning out Margold's b.s. He gets a dual role as part of the film's positing of doppelgangers and mix-ups between parallel worlds, but Avalon never exploits the "meet your double" prospects and Margold merely confuses matters -a disaster. Perhaps Margold's too old to perform, but when one plot line leads him to be deflowering Penny, the character begs off and Billy Glide is the big, hard dick substitute. I, for one, was thankful.

Rest of the cast is all about sex, artfully staged by Vouyer with attractive sets and photography. Main subplot concerns nefarious Randy Spears who is either the unnamed city's mayor & Penny's jealous husband, or merely a figment of her imagination from some dream. Predictable twist ending involving him falls flat.

Femme talent is very impressive -Flame a beauty; Hillary Scott as an anal specialist alongside obscure but pretty Alicia Alighatti as two student interns (read: jail-bait) for Spears; and a totally extraneous but eye-catching trio of cheerleaders as further jail-bait, including Sunny Lane -soon to become a superstar.

"DarkSide" tarnishes Avalon's career-long argument for the superiority of storyline film to gonzo video in Adult Entertainment. His narrative feature material is lousy, yet gonzo expert Vouyer hands in high-quality all-sex content. Methinks James has shot himself in the foot in the court of public opinion, which has opted in the decade since this was shot for gonzo, gonzo, all the time gonzo.