By the mid-'80s, porn's Golden Age was already in its last throes, with budgets and ambition in mutual decline as the advent of video made it possible not just to produce porn more cheaply, but for consumers to watch it in the privacy of their own homes too. FRISKY BUSINESS is the perfect relic of this transitional phase - unambitious and dull in the extreme.
Left home for the weekend while their parents are out of town, sisters Kimberly Carson and Cara Lott end up fighting for the affections of John Leslie after Kim catches John and Cara in flagrante. Seems while time off at school has left Kim too preoccupied to pay Leslie any mind (yeah, right), she still considers him hers, and the daytime tryst flies in the face of an agreement with her sister that they keep their hands off each other's men. Escalating tensions lead to a duel for Leslie's affections, complicated by the arrival of the girls' brother (Randy West) and his girlfriend (Honey Wilder), who have erotic ideas of their own.
Shot almost entirely in a single house save for early scenes of Carson leaving school, BUSINESS, despite being well photographed in 35mm, hearkens back to the earliest days of adult filmmaking, when a non-movie like this would have been cranked out in 16mm over the course of a lazy weekend. The storytelling is so haphazard it often leaves details like characters' relationships frustratingly unclear - I spent the first 20 minutes thinking Lott and Leslie were Carson's parents before learning they were her sister and boyfriend. Similarly, it only becomes clear West is their brother about halfway through the film, and the siblings' relationships are so thinly drawn that (SPOILER) the eventual incest scenes carry absolutely no gravity or dramatic weight (END SPOILER). Instead, the film spins its wheels endlessly, devoting a good 15 minutes to the opening encounter between Leslie and Lott before flashing back to the two sleeping together again! When a sex flick has to double up on a single pairing like this, it's a sure sign of creative bankruptcy.
(SPOILERS)
The final minute or two do gesture toward something intriguing, with Leslie finally extricating himself from the sisters and running off with Wilder, leaving the three siblings comingling on the living room couch. It's a bold ending and surprising twist on the complete non-starter of a set-up, but unfortunately it arrives so late the damage has already been done, hardly making it worth the effort of slogging through this cheap and artless 82- minute morass.
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