Battle of the Stars 2: East Versus West (1985)

There were sixteen reasons I moved down one spot from Battle of the Stars to Battle of the Stars 2 when the former came up in my random movie picker. Based on the scene breakdowns, the formula looks pretty consistent: two female stars (Kristara Barrington and Heather Wayne) are pitted against one another by pairing them with the same guy (Tom Byron), with each other, and then in two separate small group scenes (Barrigton with Gail Sterling, Don Fernando, and Jonathan Younger; Wayne with Nina Hartley, Fernando, and Jessie Adams).

On paper, that's fine. "Getting to know" movies were nothing new, from the OG Inside Jennifer Welles to Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, Inside Little Oral Annie, and Centerfold Celebrities and its sequels. And the interest in these productions didn't go away as evidenced by Evil Angel's I Am... movies. In practice, Battle of the Stars 2 is fucking exhausting. Both the sax and piano-heavy jazz background music and Kristara Barrington's incessant porn moaning is non-stop and mixed too loud.

Much of the movie - which, like Centerfold Celebrities was shot on video, so looks pretty shitty - was edited like a trailer, cutting between the two women in flagrante and Tom Byron's talking head answering questions and comparing/contrasting the women. Early on, it feels like a novel choice, when, for instance, he was discussing the differences on how the women liked their nipples treated (which was basically a microcosm of the two women's sex styles: Barrington rough and ready, Wayne demure and seductive). After a bit of that, I kept waiting for the bounce-around editing to mellow out and just focus on the sex, and that just never happened.

Skin Flicks (1978)

I like Gerard Damiano, and a film written and directed by Damiano about making an adult film should have been a slam dunk, but Skin Flicks is just under-cooked.

Young director Harry (Tony Hudson) is struggling to complete his film, getting pressure from his best friend and manager Max (Beerbohn Tree) on behalf of - and then directly from - made man financial backer Al (played by Damiano himself). He maintains he needs more time for shooting, more time for editing, more time to get the music right.

It's impossible to tell what sort of movie he's actually making. Of the eight hardcore scenes in Skin Flicks, only two are for Harry's picture and they're shot on wildly different sets. One looks like a bedroom in a low-tier bed and breakfast and is decorated with a bunch of creepy dolls and the other could have been used for Damiano's sci-fi film Satisfiers of Alpha Blue.

During what seems like an audition, Bethanna is paired with Tony Mansfield and they have sex in front of Harry on a set made up to look like the yard of a house, complete with a swing that gets put to creative use.