The Many Loves of Jennifer

Talented cinematographer and pornographer Gary Graver took a flier back in time at least 20 years with this well-made softcore sex film. I can't imagine why it was made, as it served no audience in the early '90s.

Title star Sharon Kane had already appeared in over 300 XXX movies & videos prior to JENNIFER and must have been relieved at the momentary respite here, where all she is called upon is to look beautiful and simulate having sex. I enjoyed watching, but I suspect the film had no bookings due to its lack of hardcore content.

Credit sequence turns out to be a flash-forward to a later group-sex on the beach outing with some bikers, which is actually played three times, thanks to an extraneous "highlights" filler sequence at the end of the film.

Film proper presents Kane as Jennifer Wood, an oversexed housewife whose hubby John (Richard Parnes/Robert Bullock) can't satisfy her. Narrative consists of depicting how she manages to get off, and off, and so on.

First scene has her masturbating in her sleep, awaking to try and get John to service her, but he's off to work. She uses a vibrator to satisfy herself, and then masturbates a third time in the shower.

A sexy gas meter-reader Susan (pseudonymous Debbie Steinbeck) arrives, and Jennifer instantly seduces her, with effective use of ice cubes on nipples in an arousing softcore lesbian scene. Hubby phones home while they're still making love. He doesn't notice the groaning over the phone, being preoccupied with imagining his pretty secretary "Sonny Day" naked, a throwback yet another decade earlier to THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS genre.

This lesbian tryst features full frontal nudity and even a split-beaver closeup, but throughout the film we go no further, thus delivering circa 1969/1970 soft porn to a 1991/1992 hardcore-tested audience.

Jennifer visits a cocktail bar, picking up stud George ("Ed Ullrich") for stand-up sex in the ladies' room. Next stop is The Cave, a storefront porn theater, where she rides one of the other audience members, while fellow patrons gape. We hear the on-screen groaning but the porn film is not shown.

Hubby makes love to a waitress (superstar Ona Zee in a rare softcore role) in his car, but Jennifer next heads to the beach where biker girls mock her suburban look, but she gets the last laugh by humping three biker studs in the surf, featuring full-frontal male nudity (but no erections).

Next vignette has women competing in a wet t-shirt contest on-stage, upstaged when Jennifer comes up as an audience volunteer and puts them to shame. She humps the emcee ("Bob Durkin") backstage with effective eroticism as Kane sucks on her fingers in tight closeup instead of showing fellatio, further evidence of this being a strictly softcore project.

After this Graver goes off the tracks with the first of many fantasies and/or flashbacks which amount to mere (soft) porn filler. As she stands outside her door, Jennifer imagines Leanna Foxxx (previously a biker girl mocking her on the beach) and a biker stud (Cal Jammer) attacking her in her bedroom for a rape & threesome sex, the rape being exceedingly tame as Jennifer's agony almost immediately turns into ecstasy.

Jammer humping Kane looks like the real thing, but we can't see the penetration, in the manner of a Sarno softcore movie.

When Jennifer finally enters her house, to masturbate in the bathroom, we're treated to a lengthy series of flashback highlights, dragging in footage from the gas meter reader to the bikers on the beach to the sex in a porn theater. Jennifer finally winks (literally) at the camera in the shower, for a total non-ending.

By adopting the wall-to-wall sex (with pointless story filler) format of hardcore porn but leaving out the XXX payoffs, Graver has fashioned a "neither fish nor fowl" movie, with the title simply displayed as just JENNIFER in the opening credits. Watching it 20 years later was fun, but it remains a mystery why it was ever made.