Scarlet Women

At Harmony Films in Britain, one anonymous filmmaker called "Strangelove" toiled in the shadow of legendary Tanya Hyde. Their features bear a familiar house style, but the Kubrick/Terry Southern-monikered director lacks the flair for the bizarre and outré in depiction of fetish sex that puts Hyde in a class of her own.

Even the naming/titling betrays this gap: instead of the colorfully, often obscene vignette titles Tanya employs, all we have her are four vignettes labeled Part One through Part Four. That's generic with a capital G.

Fortunately, and that's why I'm reviewing the feature, an extremely talented group of Euro players has been assembled for the occasion. Domination, bondage and anal sex are the emphasis, along with the fascinating latex costumes (a long list of suppliers is provided handily in the end credits as evidence of a product- placement element to these videos) the girls wear. I would reckon my favorite actresses on view, all giving it their all, are Susie Best, Rio Lee (most distinctive looking -she is a star who doesn't blend in like most of these BDSM performers) and especially Annette Schwartz, who comes off as the most uninhibited (or would least inhibited be the proper phrasing?).

There's no dialogue, just non-stop enacted sex. Opening segment seems to imply various typically British themes, as a sexy blonde crawls along a vast dining table to service one after the other Tony DeSergio and Clarke Kent, portraying presumably a master and a butler. Before the inevitable d.p. the sequence is notable for its CFNM content.

The second segment relies on a sepia tint monochrome and '60s style use of split- screen, actually more in the DePalma mode (which he affected early in his career) of presenting the same scene or action simultaneously from multiple angles.

Various fetishes are indulged in the final 2 vignettes, ranging from light knife play to the still mysterious (to me at any rate) fondness for presenting women wearing military caps. Perhaps that turns on people like General Petraeus, a figure brought down by scandal who oddly enough was only parodied in a forgettable Hustler video which foolishly cast Evan Stone as Dave when I, with zero experience as Casting Director, immediately thought of Steve Holmes as the proper actor for the part.