Anal Manor Review

Reviewed by Nat Hocken  on  2/4/2003

Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t being a lord and leader of an order of monks solely devoted to carnal pleasures kind of lose its allure when your cock and balls are floating in a box in one of the dimly lit rooms of your grand manor house? It doesn’t seem particularly troubling to Lord Edward of Willoughby, leader of the Order of St. Judas. The man’s got moxie, I’ll give him that. I’d give him a cigar if I thought he’d forgive the Freudian faux pas.

“Anal Manor,” Private’s second feature film, from 1993, is about what happens when American rock star Rosanna (Danyel Cheeks), her female assistant (Donna Starr), and her chauffeur experience car trouble on the way to a concert and have to seek shelter in Lord Edward’s rambling abode. No mere coincidence, this is synchronicity of the highest order. Rosanna, who has never found a man who could keep up with her sexually, suddenly finds herself in a house filled with horny monks who have no trouble getting up for that erotic challenge.

Where Rosanna is concerned, however, the monks have to wait, which, as it happens, isn’t much of a hardship. In fact, one wonders if they even notice. The film begins with Marianne La Monte being gangbanged while Lord Edward watches. It’s an initiation, one that Marianne passes, whereupon Lord Edward announces that she’s been admitted to the Order. She’s evidently the third woman to be so admitted: Melanie Rowan and Malaysian Aysha Hart are already members, and the monks find plenty with which to keep themselves busy while Lord Edward primes Rosanna for her own initiation.

Odd as it is, it isn’t the story that sets “Anal Manor” apart from most contemporary porn films, it’s the way the sex is handled. This movie comes closer to establishing and maintaining a decadent atmosphere than any film in recent memory. And it does so by intercutting a number of sex scenes so that for long stretches of time that’s about all we see on the screen: sex, sex, and more sex. One extraordinary sequence cuts between three different scenes, one of which ends just as another takes its place. It’s remarkably fluid for a porn film, and all the more impressive in its variety (the sequence includes a boy/girl coupling, a lesbian tryst, and another girl/girl encounter that shifts to a threesome when the chauffeur interrupts). The cumulative effect is highly erotic.

The sex itself is often quite good, as well. Aysha’s monk picks her up and fucks her standing in a nice segment, Marianne La Monte simultaneously puts two fingers from one hand in Melanie Rowan’s pussy and ass in another, and later, during the threesome, Melanie takes the chauffeur’s cock in her mouth mid-cum and attempts to execute a cum-swap with Marianne in the film’s most surprising segment. (The swap is denied by Marianne, but the two girls kiss afterwards, which brings the scene to a happy close.)

The opening and closing gangbangs are the least interesting parts of the film, but they suit the mood. Generally I don’t like movies in which the male members of the cast are reduced to images of their cocks, and that’s what happens here since the monks all wear masks, but again it suits the mood of decadence in a way that differentiating them by showing us their faces wouldn’t have done. My only real complaint is that director Steve Perry is fixated on getting the girls to look at the camera. This doesn’t destroy the mood, but it dampens it.

“Anal Manor” stands out as a film not for the things it gets wrong, however, but for the number of things it gets right. In spite of the gothic premise and Lord Edward’s predictable infatuation with De Sade, the sex is erotic without ever delving into humiliation or pain. It’s good, clean, decadent fun.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re wondering how it is that Lord Edward pees (seeing as how his cock and balls are floating in that box of his), you can put your mind at ease. Turns out he and his monks are ghosts—and we don’t really need a more detailed explanation than that, do we?