The Golden Box

I like Marsha Jordan a lot, and usually enjoy the work of her favorite director Don Davis. But their collaborative effort THE GOLDEN BOX is a real stinker.

You know you're in trouble when the idiot shilling on the back of the SWV video box cites this as his favorite. I was dumbfounded a full 90 minutes later at the amount of dull and pointless footage tossed in here in hopes of distracting the viewer from the crumminess of the film.

Jordan and future porn director Ann Perry (pseudonym: "Ann Myers") portray busty blondes who are spies of sorts. The film is crudely and awkwardly structured in a series of flashbacks that merely confuse the issue -why Davis adopted this approach is quite a mystery. He uses "Man from U.N.C.L.E." style opticals for transitions in & out of the flashbacks redundantly and in boring, repetitive fashion.

Their mission is to find a secret box containing gold ingots, being sought by the bad guys, too. Along with the gold is a book containing coded financial records of the mafia -awfully important to both the mafia and the government.

Soft porn stalwart Forman Shane briefly appears as the mafia bookkeeper who hid the golden box, but he dies early on. Mark Edwards becomes the hero, with an uncredited Steve Vincent and Jim/Roger Gentry the other chief protagonists.

Though both leading ladies deliver full-frontal nudity and brief sex scenes, film collapses under the weight of ill-advised location work. Usually soft (and hard) porn is claustrophobic, often never escaping from a chintzy studio set or motel room.

But THE GOLDEN BOX goes to the opposite extreme, showing our heroines and hit-man Gentry wandering around all over the country, with scenes (strictly second-unit type pick up shots with the thesps on-screen) shot in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Grand Rapids & Detroit, and even Norfolk where the gals go to a screening of Davis's MARSHA THE EROTIC HOUSEWIFE, with both actresses' names displayed on the theater marquee.

All this travel footage is idiotic and uninteresting -taking up seemingly half the picture. The film's "mystery" puzzle revolving around the clue line "Six bridges to cross, one under construction" is repeated endlessly and goes nowhere.

In Davis' oeuvre, HER ODD TASTES (also starring Jordan) and FOR LOVE AND MONEY (featuring Michelle Angelo) are my favorites, while the lost THE DAISY CHAIN (with legendary Lee Germain) is near the top of my Wish List. What a disappointment to suffer through GOLDEN BOX.