In almost every actor's career, there are some early film efforts that were clearly done just for a paycheck. If these actors had their way, these movies would be wiped off of the face of the earth and never mentioned again.

Actress Alyssa Milano (who got her start on the hit 80's TV show Who's the Boss?) made quite a few of these type of movies early on in her hit/miss (but mostly miss) movie career. Most of them were essentially sub-par soft-core erotic thrillers (like Embrace of the Vampire) that just basically sucked on almost every level. Some may argue that she may have been trying to shed her wholesome image from her prior TV show Who's the Boss but I think that she was just desperate for work and would take anything she could get her hands on, no matter how bad the script was. Either that, or she actually thought that these were supposed to be good films. If that was the case she ought to slap her agent during that period!

A friend of mine recently lent me her 1995 film Poison Ivy 2: Lily on DVD with the recommendation that it was good on a so-bad-it's good level. All I can say is that it was just bad on every level and actually made most USA Network sleazefests look pretty good by comparison.

The film is a sequel (in name only for the most part) to the 1992 film that starred a young & decidedly sexy Drew Barrymore in the lethal nymphette role of Ivy. On a guilty-pleasure level the original movie worked due to the movie's reliance on solid acting instead of just wall-to-wall sex and nudity.

Poison Ivy 2 involves Lily (Alyssa Milano) who is an art student/painter from Michigan who has just arrived in California to start attending an art school. She quickly finds a house that has a room for rent and quickly moves in. She starts attending her classes and quickly catches the attention of a male classmate. They start going out and it soon becomes obvious that Lily's much older (and married with a child) teacher has the hots for her as well and develops an unhealthy infatuation on her. Lily ends up inexplicably finding a hidden diary and nude photos from a girl named Ivy (presumably the one from the first film) and immediately becomes fascinated by Ivy's wild and free sexual ways. Lily immediately begins to start dressing in very revealing clothes and basically acting like a tramp, much to the surprise of her boyfriend (who doesn't mind one bit.) Her teacher ends up talking her into letting him paint semi-nude portraits of her and before too long he can't resist his urges and starts trying to force her into having sex with him. She tries to refuse and eventually her boyfriend catches on and gets disgusted with her. She tries to confront her teacher about it at her house and he tries to practically rape her in the main hallway (while his wife and young daughter are home no less). His daughter and wife catch them in the act(WHOA!! I didn't see that coming!)and the little girl inexplicably runs out into the street and gets hit/killed by a car(!). Everyone exchanges some heated words and the movie ends.

The plot, as you can tell, is predictable and thoroughly generic. Probably the worst part is that the running time of the movie is an unbearable 108 minutes. Most of the scenes go on ridiculously long and will more than likely cause unsuspecting viewers to doze off periodically.

All of the actors involved look like they were blackmailed into making the movie. Alyssa Milano is there purely for the skin factor and all of the other cast trudge through their roles looking like someone slipped valium in their meals/drinks.

As is almost always the case with direct-to-video skin flicks, Poison Ivy 2 is available in both unrated and R-rated versions. The DVD I watched included both the R and unrated versions of the movie on the same disc as well as offering a choice between widescreen or full frame viewing options. The only version that I checked out was the widescreen unrated version. According to the back of the DVD box, the R-rated version looks to be missing around 2 minutes of explicit sexual content. To be honest, I couldn't really tell what about the uncut version caused the MPAA to demand cuts. Out of the whole film there are probably literally only 2 1/2 minutes of footage that feature any sort of nudity or sexual content. Even when sex does occur it's so poorly lit and the editing is so choppy that not that much is really shown. The sex scenes are also pretty brief for this dubious genre. There's one in particular that's good for a laugh in which a guy who is lusting after her confronts her in his room at some goofy party. (It is rumored that this particular scene originally contained an explicit shot of Alyssa simulating oral sex on the male actor who played her boyfriend but that she forced the distributors to take that shot out of the film.)

Since this was an unrated film, there was tons of room to make a truly erotic and extremely explicit sex scene. But what we get is something that isn't that much more than we see in most R rated erotic films. Any shots that showed below the waist sexual activity usually only lasted for a second or two.(The only scene that probably could have ruffled the ratings board's feathers was a brief sequence in which the sleazy teacher performs oral sex on Lily.) All of the participants are clearly not that comfortable with the material which makes the few sex scenes boring, laughable and about as far from erotic as you can get. I've seen R-rated films that were a ton more explicit than this.

As can be expected, the sole reason most people will watch this movie is to see Alyssa Milano nude. While she looks great with her clothes off, it's clear that she wasn't all that comfortable in those scenes and she just looks flat out embarassed in the sex scenes. And to be honest, she's not naked all that much in the movie. When she is it's mostly just shots of her fabulous breasts (with a few moments of her toned bare butt), but unfortunately no full frontal. People would be better off just downloading the stills off of the internet instead of trying to make it through this piece of crap.

This direct-to-video dud is a thorough waste of time and really isn't worth watching for any reason whatsoever. For a film that advertises itself as soft-core porn, it is sorely lacking in the sex and nudity departments and features instead some of the worst scenes and acting around. Only Alyssa Milano addicts will find anything worth salvaging in this mess, everyone else should just act like this movie doesn't exist.

Poison Ivy 2: Lily is unrated and contains strong sexual content, nudity and language.

(as mentioned before the R-rated version is 2 minutes shorter and edits some of the more explicit sexual footage while also using some alternate camera angles.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age