User Reviews

You know, it is possible to make a good softcore skin flick. Well…okay, maybe not good in the traditional sense of the word. T he fairly degrading nature of the genre pretty much precludes that. You can, however, make a softcore skin flick that doesn't make you feel like punching yourself in the face while you watch it. Yes, your actors won't be very good but they can at least not embarrass themselves. Yes, your script will be fairly dumb but it can at least have some primitive logic to it. Yes, your direction is going to be elementary but it can at least look like a film and not some corporate training video. And yes, your actresses are not going to look like Venus emerging from the surf but they can at least look better than your average truck stop whore. All of those things are possible. They just didn't happen with this movie.

For starters, there's only one truly attractive woman in this cast. There are two others that are okay and then there are a couple that you wouldn't take home with you unless it was 3 am and you'd had way too much to drink. One of them is almost the perfect stereotype of the sad female who never gets higher than the ass end of show business. She's too thin with obviously fake boobs, fish lips and is clearly too old to be taking her clothes off on screen in the hopes it might lead to something better. And the other one looks even older than that.

The sex scenes in Wild Spirit are also pathetic. They're incredibly brief and about as non-explicit as you can get and still merit an R rating. These sorts of movies tend to get re-edited and then passed off under different titles, so there might be a more graphic version out there. I doubt it's any real improvement. Bad camera work and poorly simulated sex doesn't get better in larger quantities. As disappointing as the sex scenes are, there also aren't enough of them. This sort of motion picture needs at least one person taking their clothes off every ten minutes. It's the only reason anyone watches these things and Wild Spirit has too many long stretches where nobody's getting naked.

Out of the cast, the only one who comes off as a legitimate actor is Rafe Urquhart as the male lead. He doesn't exactly give a great performance but seems to have the basic tools to have made some commercials and even landed a supporting role on TV here and there if he'd gotten the right breaks. The rest look like the producers drove a van around LA and hired "actors" off the street like migrant workers.

As for the script? Well, it includes a scene where a ghost has a dream sequence. There's another scene where the screenwriters confuse a séance with an exorcism with Manchurian Candidate-style brain washing. I've seen car assembly line robots behave more like believable human beings than these characters. And there's a bit a writing here that ranks among the most idiotic I've ever encountered. The leading man has a best friend. The best friend goes to his new girlfriend's house to have sex. After they boink, the leading man shows up to talk to his best friend and the girlfriend leaves her own house to stay with a neighbor so the two guys can spend the night at her place. Let me repeat that. She leaves her own home to sleep somewhere else so her boyfriend and his best friend can be alone together all night at her place. I would bet a million dollars that no female has ever done something like that since the first new amphibian crawled out of the primordial sea. I'd like to think that co-writers Ted Newsom and Brinke Stevens realized what a ludicrous scenario they concocted and were simply too lazy to fix it, but they could just be that stupid.

I won't blame director C.B.Tilden for the sex scenes because, as previously mentioned, they may have been butchered in re-editing. What I will blame him for is having dialog scenes that ramble on and on and on, camera work so boring it'd put a meth addict to sleep and that séance/exorcism/brainwashing montage which is amazingly inartful. I don't care how terrible it was on the page, Tilden brought it to freakish life as this bizarre collage of disconnected and ridiculous imagery.

You can make a "good" softcore skin flick. Wild Spirit isn't it. This isn't even an average or mediocre effort. It plain stinks. You'd be better off digging up a 1975 JC Penny catalog and staring at the bra section, otherwise known as farm kid porn. It's still kind of degrading, but you won't want to punch yourself in the face.