"Award-winning" is an Adult Entertainment marketing gimmick meant to deceive the customer, much like the packaging of video boxes, dating famously back to the VHS heyday, always promised greater beauty on the outside than was ever found on the tape/disk inside. Such is the case with this idiotic sex spoof from a veteran "parody" (= ripoff) director, recently bowdlerized from 120-minute XXX version to a 79-minute Showtime on-demand soft-X time-killer.
Sarah Vandella is looking fine as the TV news producer Maggie McCormick, under fire by her boss to get a big story on the air, as their L.A. station's ratings have slipped from #1 to #3 in the market. Veteran non-sex-role Adult Industry actor Frank Bukkwyd plays boss Lou, which in obeisance to his parody day job filmmaker Will Ryder pauses to compare explicitly to Ed Asner's Lou Grant character dating back to "Mary Tyler Moore" show days. Thanks for the plug, Will!
Nonsensical plot has Sarah going after a story about an escort service, trading places with call girl Skin Diamond to get the big scoop. How this constitutes an interesting news story is a secret known only to Will and the execs at Adam & Eve Pictures, which backed this junker.
Since Skin is certainly riding high on Showtime in many guises, notably as a co-star of the new "Submission" TV series, one suspects this filler will get eyeballs and is certainly up the CBS subsidiary's alley. Would that it were better.
Ryder adopts a 3-camera flat lighting approach which is as crummy as any sitcom look of yore. All that's missing is a laugh-track, actually sorely needed as I couldn't see what was funny. Especially in the A&E XXX version, where the humping takes precedence over all else. Will foolishly shot the wrong sort of coverage, so unlike the umpteen soft-core porn features one sees on cable late night, christened Skinemax content many moons ago in honor of Showtime's rival network HBO: this included endless "back of the girl's head" shots representing blow jobs, a new low. (In traditional soft-core dating back to the '60s sex scenes are well-represented by humping motions that do not reveal insertions, not stupid shots of a girl's coiffure.)
Conniving Diamond backstabbing dear Sarah to take over her job (and escape the skin trade for gutter journalism, not much of a step up, as is her real-life move from XXX to crappy Cable X) makes for a true yawner of a tale. The consistent overacting by the cast, whether conforming to "parody" rules of crudity or merely encouraged by the director to "give me more!" is embarrassing, as is yet another fake industry award handed to vet porn director Roy Karch for his non-acting as the show's old coot of corporate magnate.
Other key demerits: veteran porn actress Karen Summer doing a granny number as Madam of the escorts, wearing a crummy wig, that tarnishes her rep, as a third-rate imitation of Selma Diamond from the good old days is not how I want to remember the wonderful starlet from porn's Golden Age. Further desecration occurs with Ryder using my favorite porn location the "Immoral Proposal" mansion (oval-paned door/spiral staircase) as the site of Karen's brothel. Its facade doesn't match and its beauty and atmosphere are utterly wasted -might as well have used a crummy studio set.
