Veronica Lake: Out Of The “Ashes to Ashes”

Where is the troubled, sin-compelled pornstress Veronika Lake now? In the re-released porn-noir "Ashes to Ashes," she plays a femme fatale obsessed as much with Five Copious Loads as she is with Seven Deadly Sins.

Ashes to Ashes: Lust to Dust

Studio: Viv Thomas
Director: John Chalk
Cast: Veronika Lake, Sandra Russo, Mili Jay, Rita Neri, George Uhl, Robert Rosenberg

Review by: Gram Ponante

The first surprising thing about "Ashes to Ashes" is that it is a porn noir with an Irish voiceover, like "Miller's Crossing" if the whole movie had taken place in that bathroom.

But this Playboy TV series, featuring the Czech porn dude George Uhl as private dick John Ash (Uhl doesn't speak in the movie - another actor overdubs his thoughts) is just the sort of thing for people who claim they watch porn for the stories.

Ash is on the case of Veronika Lake, who each morning wakes up with a page from the "Book of Sins" stuffed in her pocket. These are the Seven Deadly Sins we're all intimately familiar with, except they have new and exclusive packaging away from the source volume, like if you carried a mini-dictionary around that just had the Rs.

Lake is compelled to act on these sins so, for example, she is driven to masturbate with a dildo when her page of the day is Vanity. (Some of us don't need books.)

And Ash and friends follow Lake through porn versions of Gluttony (milk poured on her) and Envy (a twosome becomes a threesome), waiting to be included in the final sin of Lust but, true to its noir intentions (and admirably so, for porn), Ash only gets the girl in a dream sequence.

Presented in repetitive snippets that betray its television roots, "Ashes to Ashes," originally released in a softcore version in 2003, is primarily a showcase for the stunning and ripe Veronika Lake who. to quote a fortune cookie, would be welcome in any gathering.

Another surprise is that Lake, who also went by Veronica Lake, Jewel, and Veronica Sage, is a California girl from sunny Van Nuys. Her IAFD listing drops off around 1998, when she was 25, and then picks up with this movie which, depending on where you look, came out anywhere from between 2003 and 2005. I suspect the original XX movie ran on Spice in the late 1990s and just came out in various DVD editions, the latest from Viv Thomas, which specializes in The Glamorous Ones.

No matter what year this movie came out, or what name the girl from Van Nuys goes by, it is worth a look for Veronika Lake, for whom no sin would be asking too much.

· Buy "Ashes to Ashes" (vivthomas.com)