Hotel Bliss

Studio: Suze Randall/PurePlay Media
Director: Big Bad Onxxx
Cast: Autumn Bliss, Mya Luana, Gigi, Sandra Shine, Samantha Ryan, Celeste, Jasmine, Kurt Lockwood, Scott Nails

Veteran adult photographer Suze Randall produced this movie about an erotic hotel (proprietrix: Autumn Bliss) in which “fantasies hold sway and forbidden desires become sensual realities”. Yes, it’s that kind of movie.

A little while ago I passed gracefully out of a particular freewheeling and tolerant demographic and lately have been noticing certain prejudices creep in. Of the two (the other concerns the decisions I make about people who park badly), the more extreme is the one I’ve formulated around Couples’ Films and the people who buy them.

Suze Randall hired a guy named Big Bad Onxxx (of course) to direct this very well-lit movie, featuring sets that weren’t just thrown together and lingerie that looked like the most expensive stuff one could buy off the rack of certain underpants-outlet establishments. The women were pretty and their makeup was porn-flawless.

This is true of many couples’ movies. An additional characteristic is that the sound is awful. The director Celeste at Digital Playground avoids this by making all her glossy movies nothing but music videos in which no one says anything. This masks a multitude of ills, the biggest one being that many porn performers are sexy right up until they open their mouths to speak (opening their mouths for anything else extends the sexy a little longer).

The capable and sassy performer Autumn Bliss is our narrator through several boy/girl, girl/girl, and solo girl vignettes taking place in different parts of a loft. In the first scene Bliss looks poutingly at the camera and taps herself tentatively with a feathered paddle. A knock is heard from somewhere behind the camera.

“Come in,” she says, and from a set of curtains opposite where the knock came from a robed man enters and they get into it.

Was he supposed to have knocked on the curtains? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter in spades.

The performers in this movie are so conditioned to the structure, the pout, the walk, the phoned-in groaning, that they cease to seem real. They would do better as a series of exquisitely shot still images. This feeling was broken up briefly in a scene with Kurt Lockwood in which the much-mailgned performer dresses and acts like the young Robert Evans in the latter’s “Coke makes what I say interesting” phase.

Only Mya Luana seems to transcend the staginess of the production, flashing an engaging smile now and then.

What made this movie worth it for me was the behind the scenes footage. Everyone is so much more alive and likeable when laughing at themselves, the crew, or sitting around the set.

For most porn movies that are shot to fulfill a quota rather than a need, it is the behind the scenes footage of the interesting people who do this for a living that redeems everything.