FORBIDDEN DESIRES

It takes roughly five seconds for FORBIDDEN DESIRES to let it's viewer know what it's intentions are: the opening credits are accompanied by a montage of softcore lesbian scenes, intercut with footage of a bored-looking Anne (Darian Cane, SECRET DESIRES) walking through the snow.

As the film begins proper, we see Anne on the telephone to her boyfriend one evening, and learn that she has recently moved from "the city" to "the country" to pursue her dream job as a taxidermist. She's bored by her new surroundings, she's lonely and she misses her fella.

Oh, and she's also a little perturbed by the six girls she's house-sharing with. Particularly as a day earlier, she caught two of them doing something peculiar. Cue flashback to "yesterday": two well-toned women stripping each other and making love to Latino music on a settee while Anne watches gobsmacked from behind a plant.

The following morning Anne bumps into a male neighbour prone to filming her on his handheld video camera, and spurns his advances in favour of retiring to her bedroom to have phone sex with her boyfriend. Meanwhile, we meet two more of her housemates as they get it on in the kitchen (including novel use of a two gun).

The morning after that, Anne answers the door to her neighbour who films her while she potters about the house in her knickers then asks if he can sleep with her. Anne is mortified by the neighbour's advances and promptly gives him his marching orders. Feeling sorry for herself, she retires upstairs to stare sadly out of a window.

It's here that she's approached by a brunette housemate who offers to befriend Anne - and swiftly seduces her.

Despite clearly enjoying this little encounter, Anne goes to bed with a heavy heart that night. She calls her boyfriend and whines about her boredom, and her reservations about her housemates' lesbian tendencies. But when the boyfriend is hardly sympathetic, Anne succumbs to a large breasted blonde the morning after …

I could go on, but there's little point. From one over-stretched scene of softcore lesbo fumbling to the next, DESIRES is a tedious exercise in schoolboy smut held together by a nonsensical plot that simply doesn't go ANYWHERE. Indeed, nothing adds up and no loose ends are tied by the end of this snooze-fest. But we do get to see a lot of tanned boobies and pert female backsides in the meantime.

My main concern with DESIRES is wondering whom on Earth its target audience is? Literally, if you removed the scenes of women groping each other (each one set to either Latino or Scottish folk music, and dragged out for an endurance-testing 10 minutes a time), you will reduce the running time of this 84-minute film to a mere 10 minutes. But the sex scenes, while predominant, are so tame, so timid (plenty of T&A but nothing stronger) that it's impossible to bracket them as pornography.

So … who is this for? Prudish perverts? Schoolboys with hard-ons, who are not tall enough to reach the real filth on the top shelves?

DESIRES is directed by Thelonius Punk, who I assume is a man. He gets reasonably spirited performances from the attractive female cast, but doesn't know toffee about editing or comprehensible storytelling (he co-wrote the "script" with Cane). Which leaves it to the nipple-sucking and bottom-nibbling to hold our interest. Which they don't.

The film is presented in a 1.33:1 full-frame ratio and looks pretty good. Images are sharp with decent colours and brightness.

The English 2.0 audio is a good solid affair too.

Although there's no scene-selection menu, the film can be navigated through by way of 12 chapters.

The most substantial extra is an 11-minute featurette entitled "Keli In Bed". This stars Keli Anderson, who plays one of the housemates in DESIRES. Here, she cavorts on a bed for an eternity, slo-o-o-wly stripping down to her white socks and sucking a blue dildo, before pleasuring herself. Again, it's all excruciatingly tame stuff - after 5 minutes or so, I found myself counting the moles on Keli's body (there's a lot) as there was precious little else to look at.

The disc is rounded out by a 6-minute promo clip from 42ND STREET PETE'S BUSTY STAG COLLECTION and trailers for 11 titles, including FORBIDDEN DESIRES.

The disc also opens with trailers for DRACULA'S DIRTY DAUGHTER and SEX HEX.

To summarise, FORBIDDEN DESIRES is crap on a serviceable but unremarkable disc.

Review by Stuart Willis