ULTIMATE PLEASURE BOX

Special to PollyStaffle.com

I’m not a porn fan particularly; I was drawn to these films because their curious existence was brought to my attention by my friend (Polly Staffle’s own) Chad Clinton Freeman. They were actually created by a subsidiary company of Full Moon Entertainment, the straight-to-video studio of one Charles Band, the creator of Ghoulies. These were made back in the 90s in Southern California. Charles Band just decided to re-release them in a box set. These are based strongly in science fiction and fantasy elements, and would be far too plotted for any standard porn audience most likely. The sexual content is very tame. Charles Band did not direct these films. That was Sybil Richards and others. Merely, it is his company that releases them. He remotely oversaw their creation.

....

One of the films Exotic House of Wax is almost twenty minutes in before a proper sex scene occurs. It’s also about wax statues comes to life. These films are all like that in one manner or another. Soft core about time travel, things like that. At that point the concept of virtual reality still existed in our culture, so that of course is in these films. There is something Los Angeles about it all, Los Angeles of the 90s. There are references to new age mysticism in a few of them, soft S&M elements. Exotic Time Machine 2 has a back to the sixties drug sequence. The dialogue and acting are of course, totally insulting to any human intelligence, but in this very paradoxically pleasant way.

....

I think more highly of these films than the burlesque revival thing the world has been throwing at me for a decade now, which might be a distant cousin of Surrender Cinema. They both incorporated elements of grade b-horror/science fiction with “erotic” material. Surrender Cinema is vastly superior, though, in my opinion.

....

These films on Ultimate Pleasure Box are all silly films and the filmmakers surely knew how silly they are. Aladdin is blonde in The Exotic Time Machine. If you look closely during Femalien 2 the aliens have a communication device that is actually a hand held CD player. The soundtracks for these Surrender Films are remarkable in that I’ve never heard anything that dispassionately shaped out of plastic by bored studio musicians; synthesizers and electric guitars heavily processed through effects pedals. I’d even be inclined to not watch the films and let the pleasantly emotionless soundtracks play. These films are largely about plasticity. A lot of them are about making love to pieces of plastic or silicon, in one way or another, sex with machinery, in the then trendy form of virtual reality. Quite a few breast jobs in these films. They are synthetic.

....

The other side of that is that there is the fairy tale essence of them. Dungeons of Desire and Virgins of Sherwood Forrest are about women transported back in time to the medieval ages, in the case of Dungeons of Desire porn models transported back in time. The plotlines are very non-confrontational. There are plenty of sex scenes involving the unconvincingly evil “villains” in these films, the female villains come off more so as dominatrix types. Cheating gives rise to conflicts frequently resolved and forgiven in the end. These are all little sexual fairy tales with happy endings. Magic might manifest itself in the form of technology from the future or from another planet, but they are still effectively fairy tales with happy endings. There is the joke in Exotic Time Machine 2 about the character of Chuck traveling back to the 1960s and accidentally having sex with his own grandmother, but other than that, the films don’t get into especially taboo subject matter. Even the sex scenes are very fake looking.

....

My personal favorite of the collection is Femalien, about a being from an alien race, who have evolved past having material bodies and have no concept of sexuality, sent to earth in human form to gain an understanding of the foreign concept of “pleasure.” That is somewhat thought provoking to ponder how a being from a race that had no concept of sensory or physical pleasure would respond to sexuality or even eating - questions the film does actually bring up. The format on that film is the same, though, with the very artificial feeling dialogue and sex scenes.

....

They have their own distinctive aesthetic feel because of all this. Make no mistake, these are classics of what they are. These are synthetic fantasies. There are aesthetic values to them that have little to do with sexuality. These films are artifacts from another planet. My jaw just sort of drops watching these films that they were ever funded to exist or released, even only on video. I would say that is more the reason to watch them than sexual excitement.

- William Wheaton, February 2010

For more from Wheaton, visit his Myspace