Jay's One A Week Reviews #25: Vamp Vixens (with a surprising twist at the end)

Read to the bottom, as that's where I "Buried the Lead," as it were...

Vamp Vixens 

 The kind and lovely people over at MVD Entertainment Group saw my review of their recent release I Am Virgin and most generously proceeded to send me a big ol' box of fab DVDs for my perusal and review. Typically, I took that opportunity to flake out for a month and am only now turning my weary, bleary little eyes back to their box of delights.

What can I say about the oddity Vamp Vixens? As it launched from a menu featuring a gal with plastic fangs and silicone implants and into credits that state it's "Hosted by Mistress Luna Moon" (her given name, I'm sure), I wondered what was in store.

What I didn't expect is a woman in a leather getup and Betty Page bangs lisping around her mouthful of fake vampire teeth introducing a series of vignettes... which turn out to be all the sex scenes that felt shoe-horned in to I Am Virgin. It's no wonder they felt so awkwardly injected into that film's storyline, as they're a kind of multi-purpose semi-porn. She has a "pet" man on a chain and aims for the witty aside, a la Elvira, but doesn't add much spark to the dire, simulated, and very unconvincing scenes of (ahem) "erotica."

Ok, seriously, it does take marketing balls to sell this as a separate item. Kinda smart to repackage these soft-core sex scenes featuring tattooed, kinda "Suicide Girls"-style strippers simulating sex with each other or a couple of nondescript hunks who don't have much more presence than the gals do. Even in terms of appealing to those with the fetish for vampire-play or the near-"Rollergirl" look, I find it hard to imagine Vamp Vixens delivering for them.

Slowly paced and, yes, almost depicting intimacy on occasion, on the whole the aesthetic is just off. Dime-store Halloween fangs added to shot on video soft-core do not make it somehow hotter. Also, even though they have discretely labeled this DVD as being "Rated X," this is definitely soft-core. If you're going to watch adult programming designed with fetishes in mind, and something this completely lacking in storyline, you may as well go "balls out," as it were, and watch the real hard-core thing.

Awful, awful, awful. Sorry, folks, there's just no point to this flick.

And now, the "surprising twist"...
In the end, I suppose you could play this in the background at parties and bars, but the only thing really recommending this DVD is the "special feature." Surprising and timely, the "Also from Brookland Brothers" link leads you first to the trailer for Palin: Erection 2008, a satire-porn featuring Stephen Hill, AKA Steve Driver, the porn actor who murdered a coworker and attacked two others with a prop samurai sword and then fell to his death off a cliff June 5th, 2010 after a 9-hour standoff with police that ended in a tasing that may or may not have contributed to his fall. A surprising coincidence to see the same day on a DVD in my home I'd received a month before. Ah, coincidence...

One A Week Reviews #19: Final 24: Nicole Brown Simpson and Gianni Versace

A slightly different title for this belated One A Week Review, Final 24 is a Canadian cable television crime series showing the last 24 hours in the life of a celebrated personality. This week we'll be looking at a couple of episodes from season two featuring celebrity murders, the deaths of Gianni Versace and Nicole Brown Simpson.

Gianni Versace: His Final Hours features appearances by his partner, old friends, and celebrity pals like Janice Dickinson. Back-story is interspersed along with historical footage and actor-recreations of the innocuous daily activities of breakfast and window-shopping. Versace's rise to the heights of fashion, from young man bringing sexy to staid Milan to his time at the very top of the couture heap, is related during pockets in the day-to-day structure of of his and partner Antonio D'Amico's life. It's also played in counterpoint against the sad, murderous journey of Andrew Cunanan as their paths inexorably lead to their fatal crossing. It's terrifying to think that one chance encounter with someone can be unregistered by one party and seen as a snub by the other, who'd dwell upon it for years. Yet that's what happened with Cunanan and Versace's first encounter.

Cunanan was traveling the US on a spiraling murder spree (Maureen Orth is here commenting and wrote the book Vulgar Favors about the crime) and stalked Versace and his friends the night before the murder. The tragedy of the spree, the sheer banality of crime, is displayed here effectively. The facts are presented simply, making the selfishness of the crime committed all the worse.

Nicole Brown Simpson: Her Final Hours does kind of belie the statement on the back of the DVD box that the series reflects on the deaths of "Global Icons." Simpson only became an icon of any visibility after her death. Her jogging is shown in contrast with OJ Simpson's golfing, and their days get laid out in parallel.

Sister Tanya Brown and a several old friends reminisce on the Simpsons' courtship and marriage (it's surprising that the very, shall we say, "media friendly" Kris Kardashian doesn't make an appearance here). They married and achieved great success and material wealth, but they also had a fight-filled, tempestuous marriage. Reviews of Brown and Simpson's youths don't reveal anything we haven't already learned, ad nauseum, in the mid-90s. In fact this is all pretty well-trod turf. However, treating it as their lives leading up to the crime, instead of the great international circus that commenced afterward, does make it a lot more humane and easy to relate to. The tragedy of their history of domestic violence is made fresh and saddening again. We forget that people were people before they were pawns in "The Trial of the Century." The ominousness of the ticking clock also conveys the sense of ominousness we all have when we look back on the events in our lives that happen immediately before something goes wrong. Left behind eyeglasses bring Ron Goldman into Nicole's circle right when their end arrives.

Not many people assume that OJ Simpson didn't do it. This production shifts to an evidence-heavy look at the final few minutes and hangs out with the "allegedly" game and the "person or persons." The recreation of their murder is harrowing in the same matter-of-fact banality that made the Versace program so effective.

File footage and interviews are sprinkled in with somewhat mediocre recreations featuring actors who notably in no way resemble the people they're playing. The reenactments bring back memories of the best of Unsolved Mysteries and Rescue 911. There's decent production values here and, while this is some pretty exploitative and morbid stuff, it's not that terribly prurient. This is not classy television. But it's well produced true crime programming that anyone who likes this sort of Dateline NBC crime recreation is sure to enjoy. Soon I'll be taking a look at another pair of season 2 programs, the deaths of rock stars Janis Joplin and Keith Moon.

I do wonder if Juditha Brown tortured herself every single day after for dropping and leaving behind her eyeglasses...

Full Disclosure: 
MVD  Entertainment Group approached me with these discs for review. I welcome opportunities to review, and if you'd like me to review your DVDs, I'm more than happy to. Please contact me at biglugland@gmail.com and we'll set that up!