In the BTS of this Wicked DVD release, auteur David Stanley is adamant about "entertainment" being everything in making movies, rejecting in-jokes (he uses Ron Jeremy references as a prominent example of this) and pretentiousness. Yet "Compulsion" is loaded with the usual Stanley in-jokes and is pretentious in the extreme.
It ultimately ends up milking rom-com cliches for a dumb happy ending, but on the way there this vehicle for Wicked contract star Carmen Hart is an elaborate, often tedious send-up of '60s and '70s trends like hippiedom and the group therapy oriented retreats of Esalen Institute and Sandstone. This is a topic David has handled before in other 2007 movies, including "Melt" and "Mouth".
So we have Barrett Blade, hiding behind a shoulder length wig, talking the old "Hey man" gibberish as head of a Mountain Lion Victim Support Group that Carmen joins after, yes, being attacked by a mountain lion that offs her boyfriend Jason Arrow (a journeyman porn actor). Our rom-com hero is Randy Spears, participating in a Sex Addiction support group run by director Stanley himself. The ups and downs of his romance with Carmen is presented in generally silly rather than erotically arousing or indeed funny fashion by David.
For example, harking back to his loose and wild days at Vivid Video before joining Wicked, Stanley depicts the mountain lion on the attack as a guy wearing a big cat costume. Many other in-jokes include Spears' first sex scene with lovely Brooke Banner (playing a sex-addicted nurse) ending in a money shot deposited on her feet, a fetish associated with both Stanley and Spears movies.
Blade is amusing in his hippie role but most of David's attempts at black humor here are awful. At one point he dares the viewer to hit the fast-forward button by having Spears, utterly in despair as he tries to recover from, what else, a mountain lion attack, listen to his answering machine for several minutes taking us back to a radio play format -pure filler.
