Family Secrets

Made as a piggy-back second feature during the shooting of Vivid's big-deal (but lousy) production "Wetwork", Kimberly Kane's "Family Secrets" is a most satisfying film noir, worth catching even though the distributor (Vivid Entertainment) and the fans have shunned it.

I'll keep this review relatively brief to avoid spoilers, but the story concerns a dead girl (Penny Pax) found on a beach and police detective Kane investigating the murder. Interesting facts involving and linking nearly the entire cast lead to the solution of the murder, and along the way Kane wearing her director's cap stages invigorating sex scenes carefully integrated into the story.

The cast and the cameraman are courtesy of Bryn Pryor (he' s the lenser) who was busy directing "Wetwork" in which Kane was a co-star. Why the big-budget film stunk and the little quickie succeeds has to do with the usual hubris and pretentiousness that plagues "prestige" porno just as it ruins many a mainstream movie.

Shooting title was "Who Killed Vicky Valentine?", referring to Pax's character. On the DVD is an excellent 52-minute documentary sort of titled "Kimberly Kane Pornographer: The Story of the Making of..." and you can fill in the blank with either the shooting title or Family Secrets as the release title. It provides almost the opposite of those boring and misleading BTS short subjects which fill out most DVDs - I must have seen a thousand of them by now and can count on the fingers of one hand those of any value. This is valuable, as it documents how a quickie, almost an afterthought of a feature was made, and even includes, warts and all, blow-ups and real problems on the set, e.g., lead Steven St. Croix blowing his top when cameraman Pryor blows a set-up and they have to go back and start over.

I like Kane a lot, and have seen some of her other major work including a lesbian feature she directed "Pink Velvet" and her debut "Naked and Famou$", and hopefully the porno backers will afford her further assignments.