From the Blue Room Feature 'A Look at Andrew Blake'

Tired of all the loathsome gonzo porn that seems to be everywhere these days, plastered over all corners of the Internet and even reviewed, title after title, on this site? Tired of spitting, ass-to-mouth, and gagging? This may seem a ridiculous question, but when did adult films become so debased? I remember a time, back when I was a horny teenager—not so terribly long ago—when a good porn film featured beautiful people having pleasurable, mostly vaginal sex, and when a great porn star was renowned more for her good looks and passion than for her willingness to perform any ugly act imagined by man. Not too long ago, erotic films were truly sexy, favoring passion over shock value. Sure, there's always been a subculture of violence and filthiness in adult entertainment, but that soul-staining cult aspect seems to have gone mainstream.

I've seen a good number of adult films, and the most erotic and arousing have always been the early efforts of Andrew Blake. Here's a man who understands erotic desire and knows how to show it. I was introduced to Blake through his earliest films, such as Night Trips, Secrets, Night Trips 2, and House of Dreams, in which the director/cinematographer/editor explored a tapestry of sexual hunger and captured it on film more effectively than anyone before him. He was also unafraid to delve into fetish fantasy, and in his films you could always expect high-fashion leather kink, playful teasing, imaginatively designed dildos, whips, masks, and toys full of strange and captivating promise.

Most of all, his performers were universally beautiful, captured on film in slow motion, with nary a blemish on their skin. I once likened Andrew Blake films to erotica by way of Patrick Nagel—idealized, high-gloss erotic perfection. Some viewers balk at Blake's so-perfect-it's-unreal approach, but to me, the gloss is part of the fantasy. Blake is the most careful of pornographers, a perfectionist editor and a photographer with a practiced eye for the erotic. You can sense his control over every frame, as if he's maximizing the passion quotient of each moment. Blake's early work is beautiful adult entertainment, absolutely perfect for couples and very accessible for first-timers. As Blake himself once said, "Porn can be art, porn can be sensual, porn can be uplifting. It doesn't have to live in the gutter."

In my experience, you either love or hate the work of Andrew Blake. If you're into the aforementioned scat play and rough, hard sex, you'll probably find these films frustrating. And it's true that Blake's most recent work tends toward softcore eye candy—which is even frustrating to me, a longtime fan. But in this reviewer's mind, there's just nothing hotter than Blake's late-80s and early-90s erotica. In this edition of Blue Room, I want to take a look at a large sampling of Andrew Blake titles, all released by his own Studio A Entertainment—from his early work to his more recent, tamer, experimental films.

Andrew Blake's Classic Hits: 3-Disk Set

Andrew Blake's early films have been frustrating no-shows on DVD (or at least have been available only on lackluster discs with horrid image quality) until now. Sadly, we have yet to see top-notch editions of those previously mentioned classics, but Studio A Entertainment has just released his early-90s hits Hidden Obsessions, Sensual Exposure, and Les Femmes Erotiques in a scrumptious 3-disc set. All three hardcore films are from Blake's "late" classics period, before he turned to softer material.

Hidden Obsessions

Hidden Obsessions stars Janine in her first erotic performance (she's billed as Janine Lindemulder), and it's a doozy. The plot is almost a riff on Night Trips' notion of erotic segments produced by a sexually charged dreamscape. In this film, Janine plays a writer paid by a handsome stranger to write erotic stories. These stories are, of course, lovingly filmed, mostly in slow motion and to a jazzy, sultry soundtrack. There are scenes of incredible eroticism here, beginning with a fantastically hot lesbian encounter between Janine and another blonde, involving a long ice dildo. The pulsating soundtrack provides excellent counterpoint to this sizzling scene. You'll also find a wonderfully filmed lesbian encounter that takes place almost entirely underwater, in a pool. How often in adult entertainment are you aroused by the simple sight of a nude woman gliding through water? It helps, of course, that these women are very much into cunnilingus, but you see what I mean. My wife's favorite scene occurs on a boat, in the deep blue sea, between Deidre Holland and Jon Dough, and Holland looks as perfect as I've ever seen her. I could go on and on about this film's many gorgeous shots of female flesh, and its splendid attention to coupling detail, but it's better that you experience it for yourself. This is high-class porn at its finest, offering arousing hardcore action combined with sensual lighting and pacing and movement. It's adult entertainment as erotic dreamscape. And your wife will adore it, too. My grade: A

Sensual Exposure is in much the same vein as Hidden Obsessions—a film made up of erotic segments, surrounded by a flimsy narrative device. The beautiful and demure Kelly O'Dell and Raven headline this film, and it mostly follows Kelly's experiences at a mansion full of sexual surprises. As with all his films, none of the scenes in Sensual Exposure are like any other scene in any other film. Look at the scene in which Kelly watches a threesome from a distance. She's masturbating with a black-gloved hand while Peter North, in full suit and tie, has his way with two stately lasses, looking perfect in their leather boots and stockings, hair lush and flowing, moans breathy and barely discernible beneath the jazz. This film also boasts one of the finest blowjobs I've ever witnessed, occurring outdoors next to a swimming pool, followed by some very acrobatic sex on a lawn. And watch for a surprisingly hot scene between two lovely ladies involving garden hoses. Scene for scene, Sensual Exposure isn't quite as effective as Hidden Obsessions, but it's still a very sexy film, full of the sense and style of Andrew Blake, and better than most on the market. It rates a B+

Les Femmes Erotiques might be the hottest of all three of these classic Blake films. It's jam-packed with gorgeous women and erotic scenarios, dispensing with overt attempts at a binding narration and instead going for a wordless theme: A beautiful woman wears a pair of virtual-reality goggles and witnesses sex scene after sex scene through them as she pleasures herself with two other women. There are so many scenes in this film worth savoring: an outdoor coupling near a stable, a volcano-hot lesbian encounter in and around a swimming pool, an acrobatic threesome on an open stairwell, an outdoor lesbian coupling with a western/denim theme, and a surprisingly hot black-and-white scene of a woman simply posing and masturbating in the surf. But as with all these films, such scene encapsulations don't do justice to the eroticism of the images. With Les Femmes Erotiques, Blake is in full command of his powers, creating truly passionate—even artful—adult entertainment that makes most porn ugly in comparison. This film gets an A+

The audio/video quality of these three films is about the same throughout—full-frame presentations that accurately capture the 1.33:1 aspect ratio in which Blake originally filmed them. And here's another Blake hallmark: He shoots all his movies on film, as opposed to the stark, ugly video that most pornographers use. By using film, Blake gives his films an even more sultry, soft, arty appeal, very different from the hard-edged images that video provides.

The three films in this set look very good—but not great. For the simple reason that they're about 10 years old—a particularly long time in the porn universe—they don't look as spectacular as I hoped. Yes, detail is good, and colors appear accurate, but I noticed quite a bit of compression artifacting and unnecessary grain in the image. Many of the image's problems might be due to a breakdown of the source material. Of course, I'm watching these films on a 65-inch monitor, which tends to magnify flaws. On a monitor half that size, these flaws might be unnoticeable. These are minor concerns. As I write this paragraph, I'm rewatching a scene from Les Femmes Erotiques, and I'm just overjoyed that these films are available on DVD at all.

Sound quality is exceptional for a Dolby Digital 2.0 track. The jazz soundtrack comes across with terrific depth and spaciousness. The front soundstage, in which the music is mingled with moans, is very wide and sexy.

The discs don't contain many extras. They're limited to trailers for other Andrew Blake films. But these trailers, I must say, are pretty fantastic themselves. On each disc, they amount to about 25 minutes of erotic scenes and fragments set to excellent music. But still, I can't help but be disappointed. How wonderful an Andrew Blake commentary would have been! Or some kind of behind-the-scenes peek at how he works with his actors, how much attention he gives to setup and filming. (Hint: Keep reading.) Such is the type of attention I'd love to see him give to his classics Night Trips, Secrets, Night Trips 2, and House of Dreams, but sadly he's retained no control over those older films.