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From: [email protected] (Thom Burr) The first Kelly the Coed (hereafter KTC) episode to be released on DVD has been comprehensively reviewed (and overwhelmingly praised), so I'll just skip to a review of the second, KTC #2: Initiation Night. The first thing I note was that KTC #2 is a DVD-9 release, single-sided but double- layered, with almost twice the data capacity of a regular DVD. This is the first such double- layered release I've seen from Heatwave... Though double-layered DVDs are pretty much standard for mainstream releases, I can count the number of porn studios using them on one hand, giving lie to the old saw about porn and technological innovation--when it comes to DVD potential, virtually all porn studios are playing drag ass...KTC #2, anyway, comes very close to matching the kind of presentation and extras that you'd find on one of the better made mainstream titles. But I'll get to that later. First, the sex. KTC #2 has only five scenes (two fewer than #1), and virtually no plot--wall-to-wall sex but for the few stray segments of mindless dialogue. First up is a DP with the well- known British porn starlet Sabrina Johnson. She looks unusually young and fresh in this one--which is odd, as she was well into her career when the vid was lensed (9/9/1998)... And despite the fact that DPs were hardly anything unusual to Sabrina by the time, she does it all with some enthusiasm and snap, from the oral to the two-on-one straight sex to the guys trading off her ass to the (fairly long) DP, concluding with two simultaneous facial climax shots. It's a model of how to do a scene with two guys and a girl (would that the folks with the sitcom of the same name were to take notes!), and easily the best scene on the disc. Next comes in the boxcover girl, Allysin Chains, playing, of course, Kelly. Unfortunately, we have to suffer through seven minutes of painful dialogue during which Kelly's professor discusses her poor classwork with her. Some of it almost comes close to being funny, but Allysin's weak, tinny, off-key voice is always there to ruin things. Memo to the scriptwriters: Don't give this girl any more lines! I won't even start on the limits of (what I would be generous to refer to as) her "acting ability". Fortunately, fast forwarding through a DVD takes only a second or two, and the actual sex isn't so bad. It is, however, a fairly vanilla straight sex scene, without even a decent facial. Still a good scene, but not as intense as some of her others. The third scene is a little odd. It features McKenna, who achieved some notoriety on RAME last year for being deaf and largely unable to speak verbally. She's a fairly cute brunette, and has a nice body and small natural breasts, but her facial features are a little coarse. Her inability to speak transfers over to her vocalizations during sex (they sound vaguely like off-key squeaks), which might (incorrectly) lead one to suspect mental retardation. It's easy now to see why Patrick Riley dubbed her scenes with Max Hardcore "The New Low In Porn"--on the other hand, the DVD extras demonstrate that she is quite normal, except for having to use sign language. In this scene, she's spanked with of of those moronic frat paddles till she's bright red (the actual spanking must not have been shown, as its hard to reconcile the dark reddish pre-bruise condition of her cheeks with the couple lame love pats they did show), and then put through the standard treatment up to and including a lengthy anal segment and a weak facial climax. An interesting scene--quite good in and of itself, and the freak value may be an intangible asset here... The remaining two scene are quite poor, in my opinion, anyway. "Cheerleader" Candy Apples (with a horrible curly-que perm) does an anal scene with the "janitor" in the girls' locker room...Candy looks as skanky as ever...small droopy tits, garish tattoos, out-of-shape body, and a hard personality. Her face can be oddly, almost classically, attractive in stills (particularly when she's dressed), but seeing her in action is an instant turn-off. For those who care, the decent facial is ruined by the janitor simultaneously sticking a sports trophy in her mouth...Go figure. Finally, the Initiation NIght at the Pi Pi sorority mentioned in the title brings things to a dismal close. Allysin is the new initiate, and Katie Gold, Gwen Summers, and Kristan are there to break her in--after, that is, they bury her in buttered popcorn. The idiot who came up with the bright idea of doing the scene entirely surrounded in popcorn should be expelled from the Porn Screenwriters' Guild...Add head-mounted black dildos and poor lighting to the typically unenthusiastic sex you get with this kind of multi-girl grope, and you have a largely unwatchable scene. I'm not sure I can recommend the disc on the strength of the main feature alone, but the disc has an impressive raft of extra features. The "Virtual Sex with Allysin" feature is basically a single standard scene with her, shot so that you can't see much more than the masculine unit of the guy, and broken into three parts (masturbation, oral, and straight). Not that impressive, unless you're a huge Allysin fan. The "Meet the Cast" feature has 3-minute interviews with all 7 of the girls from the video. Unfortunately, the interviewer here is (I believe) Steven St. Croix, in full-blown smarmy mode. His hoarse, whiny, wheedling voice gets on my nerves as few things can. The interviews are quite interesting, however, if you like this kind of thing (as I do)--and if you don't, most of the girls fondle themselves while they're talking (the actual size of the video, however, is a little less than a third of the TV screen). Candy Apples come across as very intelligent (though possibly even more unattractive); McKenna needs an interpreter to speak, but also establishes that she's not a mentally- handicapped hostage being sodomized against her will. Allysin again demonstrates that she probably shouldn't open her mouth outside of an oral scene. St. Croix does much better with his Behind the Scenes 10 minute segment, if only because one doesn't have to hear his voice so much. Certainly the most interesting segment is where McKenna, her sign language interpreter, the director, and the guy who's gonna do her discuss the particulars of her scene. But Sabrina Johnson is also quite funny--just watch her face as her scene suffers delay after delay...Overall, it's one of the most entertaining segments of its kind I've yet seen. Out of the four DVD Previews, only one (Trixxx) looks halfway decent; the others (Austin Prowler, Chamber of Whores 2, and Haunted Nights) go on my to-avoid list. My rule of thumb for all (mainstream or porn) movie trailers: If they can't even get the trailer right, you sure don't want to see the actual movie. In addition to English, they've also dubbed to the movie into German, French, Italian, Hungarian, and Spanish, and these are available as other sound tracks. Maybe they think the whole polyglot thing has been the key to Private's success. Why they couldn't have spared one track to be music-free is beyond me, but maybe they just haven't gotten the message. Finally, each of the sex scenes has a second angle available throughout the duration of the scene, and most of the time, it's in real-time synchronization with the first angle. The second angle does add quite a bit to the quality of the three good scenes, though frequently the lighting is not so optimized and behind-the-scenes elements will intrude (which is why of course such footage was not used as the first angle...). Video and sound quality is mostly very good, but the sound does seem to fade off in places, and there seem to be a number of artifacts in the DVD bonus feature segments. So, all told, Kelly the Coed #2 isn't as impressive as #1, despite the large improvement in DVD presentation and extras. It is, on the other hand, very easy to recommend, mainly on the strength of the Sabrina Johnson, McKenna, and the aforementioned bonus features. Had there been more and better scenes in the main feature, Heatwave would have knocked this out of the park; as it is, they did a very nice job with what they had. It will be interesting to see what they do with Kelly #3, and hopefully we won't have to wait as long as we did for this most recent release.... Review IV
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