The Darker Side of Desire 2

I didn't like Jacky St. James' "Darker Side of Desire", one of her first films for Sweetheart Video, but this sequel more than makes up for it. It plays like a BDSM primer, as Jacky takes the viewer through the basics and appeal of why women supposedly go the submissive route.

I would like to see St. James balance the scales with some women in control stories, as she has been caught in the "50 Shades" rut of proselytizing for girls to submit for several years now, but at least she makes a case psychologically in this feature. Gia Paige is back, working on her master's thesis about BDSM and interviewing three women who've taken three different, but parallel paths into the Dark Side. This makes for a convenient plot structure to yield the required four sex vignettes of a Sweet Sinner release (Gia of course has sex in the fourth).

Told in flashbacks, first vignette is titled "The Slave", in which a perfectly cast Katrina Jade relates how she went from submissive to becoming a sex slave under the control of master Toni Ribas. Script carefully spells out the distinction: a slave sets no boundaries and has no safe word or choices, but is fully dominated by her dominant. Ribas, an actor who I have never liked, is the weak link in this segment, but Jade in fetish heels more than makes up for his wooden performance.

Next up is Giselle Palmer in "The Pet", a slightly kinky exercise in role-playing. Her boyfriend Tyler Knight gives her a birthday present of a cat suit, replete with tiny ears to wear, and though Palmer is disappointed (who wouldn't be?) with such a crummy gift, she soon cottons to the fun of fulfilling his erotic fantasy. After lapping up milk from a bowl, the scene soon becomes fairly standard interracial sex content, as Jacky has made her success dangling kink before the viewer but delivering meat & potatoes XXX sex content.

More adventurous are the last two segments, starting with Aidra Fox as "The Masochist". She plays a sub who's not satisfied with the usual domination/submission thing, but enjoys misbehaving for her master Steve Holmes, so that she can be punished. He abuses her in many different ways, and we watch Aidra loving it, particularly the forced deep-throating of his extremely big cock.

Upshot is that Holmes won't put up with this for long, and banishes Fox, but she has had the self-realization that she's a masochist as her reward (a weird sort of victory in Jacky's often illogical sexual universe).

But this gives our heroine Sydney ideas, as she has a yearning to return to the life of a sub that she had in the last installment of the series. She visits Holmes, rightly figuring that he's in need of a compliant new sub, and they undergo a long list of sexual proclivities, ranging from bastinado to forced orgasm via the violet wand and a vibrator, seemingly leading them to live happily ever after.

Or at least until next year's Part 3 from Sweet Sinner.