From The Erotic Witch Project. Screenshot by DVM.
L.I.P. Service: Director’s Cut, 1999. Surrender Cinema.
The Erotic Witch Project: “Uncut” Collector’s Edition, 2000. Seduction Cinema.
L.I.P. Service serves up another helping of Surrender Cinema’s hermetically sealed, but reliably diverting, adult product. Three babes, differentiated only by their hair color and by the fact that one babe has a British accent, run L.I.P. Service, a detective agency in Los Angeles. A hunk hires them to spy on his porn star fiancée, whom he suspects of unfaithfulness. Lots of carefully posed slow-motion sex scenes, both hetero and lesbian, follow in the Surrender Cinema tradition. (Imagine a full-color version of Madonna’s “Vogue” video sans that reference to “Jimmy Dean,” either the actor or the sausage king, which reminds me: this company’s movies never feature, uh, sausages, which might disappoint, uh, nonvegetarian viewers. And yes, I’ve rented and watched far more Surrender Cinema tapes out of masochism, boredom, or horniness—or some combination of these—than I care to admit.)
Besides slowly-jiggling silicone, the flick also offers us serious talk about the financial travails of actresses in the adult film industry; a sullen-but-cute, goth-slash-Valley Girly makeup girl who unfortunately stays clothed; and a pretentious, toadlike director who provides a few laughs (“You know, they call me the porno Orson Welles”). However, we never do find out what the initials L.I.P. mean.
In contrast to the above tape’s self-conscious sophistication, The Erotic Witch Project projects an affable unpretentiousness. The latter tape obviously spoofs The Blair Witch Project but with, er, more interesting visuals. Three babes, one of whom looks and talks like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, trek into the woods of Bacchusville, New Jersey, in search of the fabled Erotic Witch. No mastering of one’s domain here—the Elaine lookalike gives herself a hand, so to speak, even before the trek begins. And once it does, well, things get pretty Sapphic pretty fast.
Throw in interviews with stereotypically dumb, incestuous hicks; a phony-looking gorilla that escapes from the zoo; and a nude blow-up woman that forms a close relationship (heh heh) with the gorilla, and you have good old-fashioned knuckleheaded fun, though maybe not for actual rural folk regardless of their intelligence. (Imagine a full-color version of a Cracked magazine movie parody, with a couple dildos of the non-human variety.)
Best of all, this tape ends with trailers for other Seduction Cinema releases, including Vampire of the TITanic (a flick apparently shot entirely inside someone’s rumpus room) and Santa Claws (an entry in the killer Kringle genre from some of the same Pittsburghers behind the original Night of the Living Dead!).
Previously unpublished
Copyright © 2023 by David V. Matthews
Circa 2000-2001 (revised May 19-21, 2023)
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 