The Exhibitionist

James Avalon's THE EXHIBITIONIST doesn't break new ground, but provides a well-made porn feature with an interesting cast.

It's an early starring role for Adriana Chechik, well-chosen for the title assignment. She moves from Frisco to the L.A. area, next door to happily married couple Kimberly Kane and James Deen, and immediately Deen's wandering eye spots and fixates on her.

A helpful flashback adds the sexual variety these videos need, as recurring tight eye closeups of Deen have him recalling a peeping incident before, wherein he watched Riley Reid and Seth Gamble get it on, standing outside their window.

Mirroring this episode, he next sees Adriana humping her boyfriend Tyler Nixon in a well-shot sequence, first maintaining a discreet camera distance representing him peeping across through her window, and later adopting the video viewer's point-of-view, closer up inside the bedroom.

Though storyline stresses Deen's under great pressure from his congressman boss to fine-tune a political speech, he does make time to hump wifey Kane in awkwardly tight quarters in their laundry room - a sequence where Avalon (perhaps due to logistics of the setting) violates the center line editing rule and repeatedly cuts with actors flipping back and forth left to right across the frame. This scene reminded me of a classic Ava Addams laundry room hump directed by Avalon in a later Sweet Sinner opus, MY DAUGHTER'S BOYFRIEND 11.

Finale predictably has Deen finally hooking up with Chechik, she being the instigator as befits the video's title. Behind the Scenes short subject on the DVD displays the clapper-board revealing this was originally titled THE NEIGHBORS: THE EXHIBITIONIST, which would have made it Vol. 4 in The Neighbors series, but the marketing department ultimately thought the better of it. It doesn't really conform to the format of the earlier Neighbors movies, which emphasized reciprocity - two couples mixing and matching, while here Chechik is unmarried and Kane not straying (could have had a lesbian tryst with her).

Late in the film I had a problem with editing and continuity, as Avalon attempts to reinforce Chechik's seductiveness and Deen's growing obsession by using a wide-angle shot of Chechik removing some clothes and masturbating (fantasy style) while sitting listening to some anecdote from neighbor Kane, inter-cut with Deen's eerie eyes closeup (he's not there anymore having left), ending with her primly composing herself and turning to Kane. Both the timing and the hokey content of this brief segment made no sense in context of the ongoing reality of the story.

Deen is obviously well-cast as a crypto-pervert: he doesn't turn out to be so bad after all (the Riley episode and its consequences are never resolved). Kane is perfect as a loyal, relatively plain (for modern porn) housewife, while Chechik with long pitch-black hairdo is incredibly sexy and a hot performer.

Adriana shot MY DAUGHTER'S BOYFRIEND 9 for Avalon just a week before this feature, and Deen had starred in the previous entry in this series THE NEIGHBORS 3.