The White Room

This early Vivid release from pornographer David Stanley lapsed into obscurity (for good reason), only added last week 18 years late by me to IMDb. It finds him at his most self-indulgent, not a recipe for enjoyment.

Ostensibly just another vehicle for contract star Kira Kener it clearly does not do her justice. Title is somewhat arbitrary (or given Stanley's love of rock music perhaps a reference to the great Cream song from their "Wheels of Fire" LP).

Eschewing dialog (at one point a character is admonished for speaking), this pantomime porn pretentiously portrays a science-fiction premise, set in the year 2001. Heavy (and annoying) voice-over narration carries the plot line, that even though Y2K was a big nothing, an Apocalypse is imminent a year later and mankind will be surviving by relying on collected sperm stored in refrigerators.

Stanley structures the feature as something of a nightmare for protagonist Tony Tedeschi, who wanders around corridors and with minimal SPFX observes sex acts and is encouraged by fantasy figure Kener to make a sperm deposit in a little plastic specimen cup. His entrance into the cheap-jack fantasy world that includes a white room (duh!) is through a refrigerator.

Economizing on props, costumes and set decoration (one would think from Stanley's films that Vivid was a poverty-row porn studio rather than the industry's leader a decade or two ago), we have merely boring sex scenes spotlighting Kener and other actresses. Tedeschi is married to Chloe in the wraparound story but annoys her at bedtime with his insistent foot-fetish, a constant feature in Stanley films reflecting the auteur's own predilection. She shows utter disgust when his money shot is deposited on her foot, right before he lapses into nightmare land.

A lesbian scene is thrown in as filler, with Chennin Blanc and Dayton going at it in blonde on blonde in the white room, the justification for which is apparently to visually stimulate Tony so that he will ejaculate, which he doesn't. Stanley smugly presents a TV documentary about the impending Armageddon and scientific preparation to save the human race via preserved sperm, but he completely misses the opportunity to mock those industrial and educational films of the '50s that the late Mike Vraney preserved on his Something Weird Video label.