Transmission

Lesbian Cinema's latest money-spinners Mills & Stills play the Film School grad game of jumping from genre to genre, self-indulgence at the viewer's expense. This is their very meager stab at sci-fi (as was A.I. preceding it), packing in a ton of "sounds intelligent" verbal exposition but failing miserably at dramaturgy.

Of course it's great to see icon (from a decade ago) Hillary Scott making a comeback as a MILF type, oddly miscast as an astronomer who makes a crucial discovery, that an intelligence from the M13 cluster in Outer Space has returned Carl Sagan's famous "message to space" broadcast back in 1974. Scott is celebrating the Earth-shaking discovery with her lesbian lover Samantha Rone.

Screenwriter/director Alan seems to have done his Wikipedia-level research as Scott and Rone throw around a ton of credible-sounding dialog, but the joke's on the filmmakers, rather than the viewer, when Scott commits an unpardonable howler early on. Reciting some of the info Sagan packed into his message to convey to aliens particular data about Earth and its inhabitants, she mentions the basic elements of human DNA, including hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon. She goes on to say the message just received back (42 years later) adds "SILICONE" to that list (the aliens' basic elements), meaning to say silicon of course, but a flub left in the final print by Alan -and having rather obvious blow-back on Hillary's fake breast implants for all to see. No, this was not an intentional joke -just watch the movie and see.

After they stop yammering mindlessly, the stars get down to some quality Sapphic humping, but are interrupted, as luck would have it, by the dreaded NSA. Abigail Mac, big up front but rather unconvincing as a mean agent Dick Chaney would be proud of, leads some male armed personnel (so this isn't an all-female cast for a change) to terrorize the young women.

Mac reads Hillary the riot act, and blackmails her into some satisfying three-way lesbian sex, or else! Both Hillary and Sam comply, and subscribers to this Girlsway/Gamma Ent. content are undoubtedly satisfied with the result, storytelling be damned. Punchline is predictable - instead of fulfilling her promise and letting the innocent astronomer off the hook, after sex Mac has her male minions whisk Rone off to captivity in some secret site, to keep the pesky Hillary from further threatening "national security".

At this point Bree and Alan can't leave bad enough alone, so they contrive to have the star character from their "A.I.", Celeste Star, suddenly show up as a deux ex machina, working with Hillary to save the day. Celeste is not a robot (as she insists on reminding the viewer, over and over and even into the BTS "bonus") but rather an artificial intelligence fabricated into a woman's body and capable of near- omniscient feats. Just the ticket for Scott to extricate herself from her mess. Or more importantly to have Hillary tribbed into orgasm, courtesy of the double-jointed lesbian icon Ms. Star.

This three-part saga ends with a title card "The End?", with nothing resolved and promising a sequel, which I dread. But fortunately the DVD concludes with a supporting (and unrelated) program starring Lexi Belle and Charlotte Stokely that saves the day.

Lexi, who's been playing a cute sweet thing for well over a decade already, is radically different here -her body having filled out incredibly, a whole new look. She's cast as a private detective, likely a pilot episode for a potential Stills & Mills series in the future. The great man himself (Alan) cameos ever so subtly as Charlotte's husband - he hires Lexi to put his wife under surveillance and get the goods on her suspected cheating, anent forthcoming divorce proceedings.

Lexi sneaks into Charlotte's home, which just happens to be the "Immoral Proposal" mansion, my favorite porn backdrop already featured in hundreds of adult movies shot over the last five years.

Wonderful cat & mouse visual gags and elegant timing denote Lexi's hiding nearby as Charlotte on the phone speaks potentially incriminating sweet nothings, before she's found. It's some of the best work Stills & Mills have ever done, and the beautiful pair segue to hot lesbian sex before a twist ending. Even the mansion is put to better photographic use than usual in this fabulous, stand-alone vignette.

Is it worth the price of admission, namely to buy the clunker "Transmission" in order to see its short subject? The answer is no of course -the modern audience out there streams and downloads this content and can easily skip "T" and merely watch Lexi & Charlotte instead, but an old sort of Luddite like me is stuck with the whole enchilada on DVD.