Handy Girls

The new round of Penthouse video features is hardly "new and improved" but actually quite a come-down from the comparatively entertaining works issued five to 10 years back in the label's heyday. This one is wall-to-wall sex with top current stars spinning their wheels for a paycheck.

Hook is that all the female characters do physical labor to make a living, but even that meager excuse for "plot" is largely abandoned. Yes, these actresses make money physically by humping, perhaps the only takeaway from a true time-waster.

Some of the team before and in front of the camera recalls salad days back at Wicked Pictures, where Alektra Blue was a top contract player, director Francois Clousot a busy cameraman and production manager Mark Nicholson supervising many productions. For Penthouse they all go through the motions.

Alektra is with a big Caterpillar piece of equipment and seduces Mick Blue for outdoor sex. Attempt to improvise even some meager dialog is embarrassingly unsuccessful -we know and they know that sex is all that matters.

Other nearly as stupid vignettes include Dahlia Sky as a plumber opposite divorced Toni Ribas in which the double entendres concerning his "clogged pipes" are groan-worthy. Aaliyah Love, beautiful as always, is a highly unlikely pool girl working for busy Erik Everhard, just as unlikely cast as a guy intent on planning his big software IPO, and having to be coaxed by Love to make love to her.

Jessie Volt plays an auto mechanic with a thick accent (she's a French import to Chatsworth), who gives Ryan McLane -his car having broken down- some deep throat action. Xander Corvus stars in a very half-hearted depiction of a porn shoot, actually one of the least convincing I've ever seen. He and lighting crew member Karla Kush stand in an under-dressed set which looks like an office/storage area - perhaps the porn film was set in an office? At any rate, there are no movie props, nothing to match their yammering about making a movie, all as an excuse for them to get it on.

Not trying at all is the subtext of this stinker, down there in the lowest percentile of the hundreds of Penthouse videos purporting to be features.