As with most of his other Wicked films, Brad Armstrong gets a pat on the head from most IMDb raters, but I found him falling far short in the quality department in this release spotlighting the label's contract star Temptress.
Just as mainstream Hollywood has overworked the mother lode of irrational subject matter for fantasy fodder, this ghost story is often risible and beggars belief at crucial moments. The viewer is supposed to swallow every silly thing that happens and even dumber explanations for paranormal events, whole hog.
PLENTY OF SPOILERS:
Stripping away the fantasy, it plays like a mediocre police procedural episode of a TV show, but with XXX content of course. Temptress, in a good acting performance, plays a cop whose partner Randy Spears dies in her arms in the second reel, shot during a routine robbery call.
A year passes and on the anniversary of his death he shockingly comes back, uniform still on, as a ghost haunting Temptress, anxious to solve the cold case of his murder as well as an open internal affairs investigation concerning a presumably dirty cop (Alec Metro).
Brad's script posits that a ghost returns to haunt the person who was present at the person's demise (Temptress) in order to take care of unresolved matters before resting in peace. She's the only one who can see him, a hoary Hollywood gimmick best left to comedies like "Topper" rather than a cop thriller like this one.
It turns out that Metro is the killer, but even worse Spears' wife was in it, bamboozling our dead hero into thinking they must work overtime to have a child, when in fact she was secretly on the pill and humping lover Metro on the sly.
One good scene by Brad has him exploiting yet another gimmick: Spears' ghost has the power to inhabit another person's body a la a fantasy shape-shifter, and he takes over Temptress (shock time for her again) when she has lesbian sex with his villainous ex-wife Alexa Rae. Brad has matched cuts throughout the sex scene, replacing Temptress's body with that of Spears, e.g., contrasting Alexa's cunnilingus on Temptress with her fellatio on Spears -not making much sense but visually effective. He utilized the same matched cutting procedure several years in his film starring Spears again "Educating Alli" when Randy had his sex-pupil Alektra Blue making love to a stud inter-cut with her imagining it was Randy instead.
Film builds to a shoot-out climax that is poorly staged and a truly idiotic final twist in which Spears in farewell inhabits the body of Temptress's wounded new partner Jason McCain. Final shot of T & McCain riding along stoically in their patrol car, business as usual is dumb and anticlimactic for anyone like me with enough patience to sit through the whole thing.
Sex scenes are mechanical, with the obligatory extraneous sex (for variety's sake) provided by Justine Romee adding some anal content to the picture just before the finale.
Just as mainstream Hollywood has overworked the mother lode of irrational subject matter for fantasy fodder, this ghost story is often risible and beggars belief at crucial moments. The viewer is supposed to swallow every silly thing that happens and even dumber explanations for paranormal events, whole hog.
PLENTY OF SPOILERS:
Stripping away the fantasy, it plays like a mediocre police procedural episode of a TV show, but with XXX content of course. Temptress, in a good acting performance, plays a cop whose partner Randy Spears dies in her arms in the second reel, shot during a routine robbery call.
A year passes and on the anniversary of his death he shockingly comes back, uniform still on, as a ghost haunting Temptress, anxious to solve the cold case of his murder as well as an open internal affairs investigation concerning a presumably dirty cop (Alec Metro).
Brad's script posits that a ghost returns to haunt the person who was present at the person's demise (Temptress) in order to take care of unresolved matters before resting in peace. She's the only one who can see him, a hoary Hollywood gimmick best left to comedies like "Topper" rather than a cop thriller like this one.
It turns out that Metro is the killer, but even worse Spears' wife was in it, bamboozling our dead hero into thinking they must work overtime to have a child, when in fact she was secretly on the pill and humping lover Metro on the sly.
One good scene by Brad has him exploiting yet another gimmick: Spears' ghost has the power to inhabit another person's body a la a fantasy shape-shifter, and he takes over Temptress (shock time for her again) when she has lesbian sex with his villainous ex-wife Alexa Rae. Brad has matched cuts throughout the sex scene, replacing Temptress's body with that of Spears, e.g., contrasting Alexa's cunnilingus on Temptress with her fellatio on Spears -not making much sense but visually effective. He utilized the same matched cutting procedure several years in his film starring Spears again "Educating Alli" when Randy had his sex-pupil Alektra Blue making love to a stud inter-cut with her imagining it was Randy instead.
Film builds to a shoot-out climax that is poorly staged and a truly idiotic final twist in which Spears in farewell inhabits the body of Temptress's wounded new partner Jason McCain. Final shot of T & McCain riding along stoically in their patrol car, business as usual is dumb and anticlimactic for anyone like me with enough patience to sit through the whole thing.
Sex scenes are mechanical, with the obligatory extraneous sex (for variety's sake) provided by Justine Romee adding some anal content to the picture just before the finale.