This first volume collecting first-time femme directors for Femme Productions' Star Director Series represents excellent, personal short stories from actresses Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera in the director's chair. Kudos to the late Candida Royalle for spearheading this ambitious project, as artistically resonant as it is uncommercial.
The audience is missing, unfortunately, as these short films on shot on video lack the hardcore content and gonzo gusto associated with Vera and Sprinkle's work before the camera. It is to be appreciated by a thinking audience, not limited to feminists but certainly aimed toward that wing of the human race.
"The Search for the Ultimate Sexual Experience" is billed as "a true story from the life of Annie Sprinkle". With her voice-over narration, this trippy episode deals with tantric sex, as Annie (wonderfully embodied by the dissimilar actress Jeanna Fine, styled with long blonde hair early in her career) has a nothing sex coupling with a guy she picked up in the village, Roger T. Dodger, bearing a shaved head with pony tail in the back.
Fantastically, a spirit clad in Arabian Nights costume materializes in her apartment, handsome and acrobatic David Sandler. He teaches Annie about her body and guides her in the ways of love from an Eastern philosophical viewpoint, and she finds ultimate bliss, even going back to teach Dodger how. Name dropping many New Age concepts ranging from Quartz Crystal effects to Eye Control and other matters only Sting really understands fully. Though preachy, this heartfelt essay by Sprinkle gives the viewer a peek at her true calling, so radically different from the self-imposed "gonzo slut" she played so many times on screen during Adult Cinema's Golden Age.
Vera's segment is a satire titled "Shady Madonna", in which Nina Hartley and Scott Baker work at a Manhattan TV production house called KFEM-TV, recording a show for pompous televangelist Scott Baker. Baker' overacted routine is overwritten by Vera, as he parodies the money-grubbing fakirs who have dominated the airwaves for many decades. He falls asleep in the waiting room and dreams of a sexy three-way with Nina and Bullock, which like Anna's segment is light on the XXX content but has some solid soft- core eroticism courtesy of young and fresh Nina, styled as an Eve replete with an apple.
For its 2005 DVD reissue, Adam & Eve Productions advertises this 2-fer at 80 minutes in length, but it only runs 63: 35 for Annie and 28 for Vera's opus.
