On her Facebook page, newcomer Russian/Brazilian actress Savannah Thorne expresses her goal of TS super-stardom, and with her second outing for filmmaker Nica Nicole she makes great strides toward accomplishing just that.
I was impressed with her debut in "TS Sister in Law", playing a key supporting role to superstar Jessy Dubai. Now ST's been elevated to toplining in 3 of the four vignettes playing the title role here, and delivering 3 money shots on cue.
Gay matinée idol Nick Capra is her fiancé, introducing Sarah (Savannah's character) to his diminutive son Harry (newcomer Vadim Black). Gay, straight or somewhere in between, we XXX fans know where this is headed, but first Harry takes quite a disliking to Sarah when he witnesses her cheating on daddy in daddy's basement with an old pal, stud Ty Roderick. End credits reveal that Ty also stepped behind the cameras to join Nica's distaff camera crew alongside herself and usual d.p. Diana DeVoe.
Infidelity is raging in these rural New England environs, as Nick makes a booty call to Black beauty Natassia Dreams, a striking TS girl who looks a lot like the young Tina Turner. My mind wandered momentarily, wondering if good taste would permit a roman a clef with central characters based on Tina and Grace Jones and positing them as secretly trans-females rather than cis-females, but that's the sort of dramatics I like to conjure up, not necessarily ready for the general public to cope with.
Back to Nica's particular screenplay, when Harry confronts Sarah with the revelation that he saw her doing the nasty (humorously he tells his dad he saw her "dropping a load in the basement", a nifty double entendre matching laundry with humping), she wonders what she can do to keep him from telling Nick. Oh, the most common situation in current porn -blackmail paid off with sex, and a truly open- ending (where will this family in the making be heading?) is delivered once again by Nica.
The new wrinkle in this formula "family film" (porno division) is that in the opening scene Savannah is flat-chested, just as in her previous movie, defying the "big breasts" stereotype of trans-females. Sarah goes to Brazil for seven weeks and returns to reveal a brand-new pair of sizable breasts, not merely a key moment in the character's evolution but also a transition for the budding actress.
One aspect of this "life mirrors art" moment (in mainstream cinema recall the famous case of Mariel Hemingway's plastic surgery to play Playmate Dorothy Stratten in her breakout role starring in Bob Fosse's "Star 80") occurs in her next two sex scenes in "TS Stepmother". Savannah in the nude bears the prominent surgical scars of cosmetic breast enhancement. Normally, one sees these in countless porn films and they are a negative distraction, taking the viewer from his Russ Meyer/Hugh Hefner mammary fantasy back to the reality that many big boobies are fake. In this film, the scars are completely in character and part of the story - a plus for a change.
Flat or not, Ms. Thorne is an impressive screen presence, bearing an alluring face a la young Lauren Bacall, and displaying good acting chops as well. She stands more than a head taller than future step-son Vadim, which adds much to the depiction of conflict (turning to passionate love) between them. This pays off during a wonderfully '60s S.O.L.I. sequence of the two of them wandering happily outside before he witnesses her betraying his daddy.
