Amazonian Dreams

Pierre Woodman is a cranker: before all-sex took over the porn world he was already busily cranking out basically all-sex videos by the bushel basket for the Private label. This independent production, released Stateside by Michael Ninn's Ninn Worx, has little to offer beyond pretty scenery and humping.

When I was growing up, travelogues were still popular in cinemas and on TV - I lived in Cleveland and Jim Downey's "Adventure Road" was a television series I remember fondly. He would have on guests who brought along home movies of their adventurous trips to far-flung locations, and they would narrate the silent footage. Similar such features were shown in movie theaters as documentaries in the true sense of that term -actually documenting a trip.

In an odd way that is what we get from Woodman's film, and innumerable similar "tropical" genre porn released by Private and Marc Dorcel -I don't know of American pornographers who specialize in this material, though Jake Jacobs shot a number of similar works a decade ago on location in Brazil. In that earlier era everything was G-rated; now we have XXX.

Woodman's mix of Euro and local Brazilian girls are beautiful and exotic, but nothing much happens. He saved money in the scripting department, and delivers a lengthy but empty display of the usual positions, the European fondness for anal sex and d.p.'s and nothing more than masturbation fodder. In the decade since, pornography has deteriorated both in its goals and execution, so this could pass for entertainment in a debased marketplace. Certainly not the marketplace of ideas, but the marketplace of flesh peddling.