Jacky St. James is settling in nicely as the newest auteur for Canada's Sweet Sinner label, a specialist in Couples Romances. This feature doesn't conform exactly to the original mandate by Nica Noelle (which NN via recording still voices over on each DVD: "Real lovemaking, real orgasms") because the actors and actresses "open up" for the camera and go through artificial positions rather than the expected naturalism, but is still effective in a Jacky SJ sort of way.
It's far less slick visually than her dozens of movies for New Sensations/Digital Sin, as she's working with hack cameraman Hank Hoffman instead of her technical mentor Eddie Powell, but most fans will ignore that defect. Premise, set up in very typically cute voice-overs by star Logan Pierce, has him voyeuristically gazing at each set of new tenants in the home inherited from his late mother. He's set up 12 surveillance cameras, and tells each new renter couple about their existence. That plot device is typical of the JSJ approach of pulling all punches, draining the project of drama in favor of fairly routine sex scenes.
Hoffman and the director cheat of course on camera angles and placements, with some remote & static introductory set-ups for the eavesdropping but the lion's share of the footage being from cameras nearer the XXX action, and reverse shots to keep things moving. I've seen the purist approach in horrible gonzo videos (for cheapness sake), so this artistic license is preferable.
Another ill-advised drawback is adopting the Marc Dorcel approach to cinema, in which JSJ has suppressed the dialog of several set-up scenes, drowning out the actors in favor of Logan's oppressive narration. This destroys the dramatics and makes the feature too close to "wall-to-wall sex" for comfort.
The vignettes, uniting Lily Labeau with a wooden Chad White, zoftig Italian beauty Valentina Nappi doing standing-up sex in a hallway with Van Wylde and exotic Lyra Law/Louvel humping Michel Vegas, are dullsville, but lead to the big finale of Logan coming out of his self- imposed shell to have romantic sex with cover girl Melissa Moore.
Moore, who still trades on her lookalike entree into the Adult biz on the coattails of superstar Riley Reid (starring in several "twins" sex videos with Reid), has her best screen role to date as the odd woman out in a menage a trois with freewheeling Lyra and Vegas. Wearing very little makeup (unusual in a medium where industrial strength false eyelashes and Eva Green-level raccoon eyeliner are the norm) Moore creates a real character and acts quite well when not getting down to the sensual sex that is the DVD's raison d'etre. Pierce is a good actor too, though his overall performance here is facile and surface. So watching MM was my chief enjoyment from "The Voyeur".
