A movie with the title Married People, Single Sex 2: For Better or Worse probably isn’t going to be taken seriously by any kind of press. It appears that I will be the first (and possibly last) person to take on the challenge - the results didn’t do irreparable damage to my soul, although side effects often vary from person to person.
The sole reason I picked up this movie (at the pawn shop for a dollar, like seemingly everything else I’ve watched in the past couple of years) was because it starred the always entertaining Monique Parent. She appears in many direct-to-video erotic features, including Playtime and Temptations. Both are fun, sexy movies with lots of eye candy, including Parent, who is attractive in a natural, everyday-woman kind of way, often the best kind. And she’s good because her acting style isn’t “porno bimbo” or whatever cliché people expect when thinking of erotic movies.
The movie itself is an odd one. With that title, with stars like Monique Parent and Kathy Shower, and a director with a number of these features under his belt, it’s obvious this film was marketed as a softcore video. But the result is weird, as if nobody behind the camera had any idea who the audience for this film was.
The story is about three troubled married couples. One couple, John and Carol (Shower), move to another town as a result of John’s affair with another woman - but even with this move, Carol is unwilling to totally forget and forgive. Valerie (Parent) and David are having troubles because Valerie wants to put some romance and spice back into the marriage, while David turns cold to the whole thing. And Karen and Sam have problems because Karen doesn’t want to be the good wife - she wants to be wilder in bed - and she sees Sam as a wimp.
It’s not much of a surprise to note that some of these participants will stray. Actually, David and Karen stray with each other. Karen wants excitement in her life, and David, who has a thing for bondage and other kinky stuff, supplies it. One scene involves a little tryst in Karen’s car, while other romps occur in a hotel room.
It’s also not much of a shocker to say that John is fooling around again. This time, he uses an escort service, maxing out his wife’s credit card in the process. John is visited by the same woman each time, but he can never close the deal, so to speak. He has a guilty conscience.
The movie blends two genres with limited success. The production has the look and feel of the low-budget softcore movies made around this time (1994), and involves many of the same cast and crew. It has a truly cheesy score as you would only find in these films - generic guitar music during the love scenes, and tinkly piano during the sappy ones. But the script is straight out of made-for-TV land. I’m sure some of the scenarios - minus the R-rated content - have been played out in numerous ways in many earnest TV dramas.
I’m not an expert on softcore movies, but I have watched a few of them, seen portions of others on TV, and read about even more. So I think I have a theory to what is going on here. The movie was made during a time when the makers of these type of movies were trying to expand their audience beyond the restless male who just wanted to look at some naked bodies and had no need for a woman with a personality. In other words, the producers hoped to get women and couples involved, with movies containing both hot sex and an appealing story, or at least a story where women weren’t depicted as bimbos.
Playtime was a classic example of the ‘new’ kind of erotic film. The characters seemed more real than fantasy (although usually still played by good-looking people), and the women and men were both on equal footing, in sex and in other matters. It’s not great (or even very good) cinema, but it is what it is, and that’s OK.
The problem with Married People, Single Sex 2 is there’s too much drama and not enough softcore. That would be fine if it were a really good drama, but it’s not, despite some promising developments. The script is merely a checklist of all the things you would talk about in a domestic-strife kind of story, but with little real urgency. And all the actors lose the battle with those pretentious black-and-white documentary sequences where they express their feelings with pretentious dialogue. It’s like the director told them “act forlorn and solemn, and speak in a quiet monotone, so the audience will get it.” Sigh.
What’s interesting is that all the sex scenes - formula for a softcore - are part of the drama. In fact, some of the scenes aren’t meant to be sexy, but discordant and unsettling. There’s one scene where Sam practically rapes Karen out of frustration over what he sees as her sickness (he earlier yelled at her “Why does passion have to be violent?”). And Karen really learns her lesson later in another rendezvous with David, where he ties her up and then surprises her with another woman, who has sex with him while she is forced to watch. In both instances she is scared, and realizes that being ‘wild’ isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Another observation is for a movie billed as softcore drama, it’s not nearly as naturally erotic as the Austrian film Antares that I watched the night previous. The sex scenes in that movie felt ‘real’ while most of the sexuality here feels imposed by the genre, and are played safe.
The movie fails because true drama fans will find it to be utterly bland, and fans of erotic cinema will be equally disappointed because there’s little heat. It’s not even good mindless sexy entertainment 95 per cent of the time. I’ll say that Monique Parent was still entertaining - she does put her heart into her dramatic scenes - but that’s not enough.
*I have a feeling I’ll be hearing from Monique about this review. I visit her website and talk to her on her forum, and my profile has a link to Epinions... oh well.
Monique Parent
www.uniquemonique.com/forum
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