Babes Illustrated 5 Review

Reviewed by Nat Hocken  on  1/3/2004

Girls: Average to better than average
Scenes: Four 2-girl, one threesome, one 5-girl group
Energy: High
Enthusiasm: High
Emotional Intimacy: Low
Kissing: Sparse
Foreplay: Very little
Toy Use: High, including dildo, two-headed dildo, vibrator, strap-on, and butt-plug

Jim Enright is cuckoo for close-ups. Not the inserts that emphasize and enhance the action, the confusing and annoying kind that somehow detract from it. Being the respected, acclaimed, award-winning armchair porn director I am, I believe I’ll give Jim a tip. Jim—don’t shoot sex; shoots girls having sex. Big difference, my friend.

“Babes Illustrated 5” was killed in the camera and buried in the editing room. It isn’t awful, it just isn’t very good. And this despite a cast of willing and enthusiastic girls who, with better direction (and fewer toys), could have made something special.

This is a movie with a plot. Sexy, 40 double-D Shyla Foxxx is looking for the mother who abandoned her when she was two. Somehow her search takes her to the Babes Illustrated swimsuit and lingerie company, run by Shanna McCullough and her pissed off former lover and partner Kaityln Ashley. Shyla interviews as a model slash sex toy, gets the job, and ultimately finds her mother.

That’s the plot. Anybody care? Of course not—because (get this, Jim), regular plots don’t work in porn, characters and situations do. My votes for the film’s two Most Promising Characters go to Shyla Foxxx and Felecia. Shyla not for the Finding Mama angle, but because she’s just an ordinary girl who finds herself in an extraordinary situation: a straight girl surrounded by lesbos. Enright’s vision, though, like that of most porn directors in similar situations, is myopic; he sees only so far as the napkin the script is written on. So when photographer Caressa Savage puts the moves on Shyla, all she has to do is suck the new girl’s nipples and the dyke conversion is complete. (Shyla’s standing there, stripped to the waist, wearing a cute black skirt and stockings, and the next shot Enright gives us is of Ms. Savage with her face buried between Shyla’s legs. Where’d all the good stuff go? The slow seduction, the gentle probing, the delicious awakening? I wish I could say it was left on the cutting room floor but of course it was simply never shot. Instead, we get lesbian virgin Shyla four-fingering Caressa Savage and eating her ass her first time out. Sure, I buy that.)

Felecia makes out in a couple of scenes here. The first time is a 5-girl grope on a staircase that is more confusingly shot than performed. For the most part, Felecia, for example, sticks to Shyla, so all Enright really needed to do was divide the scene between one couple and one threesome. He manages somehow to muck this up with close-ups and poor editing. It ain’t a great scene, even if it’s fun to watch Felecia at first (before the toys come out). But when the best thing about a scene is that the director chose to drop the girls’ voices in favor of music, that isn’t saying much. (I’ll give him credit, though: I love girls, but all-girl group scenes can be hard on the ears.)

Anyway, Felecia, only 23 or 24 when this movie was made, with her hair up and wearing a fetching pair of glasses, gets another shot to close out the sex in this movie—again with Shyla. Shyla’s complaining about her family troubles; Felecia nods and says, Yeah, she’d take her friends over her family any day. And after what happened on the stairs, she adds, she kind of figures Shyla’s her friend now. It’s sweet—in a pathetic, needy sort of way; I only wish Shyla had responded in an emotionally appropriate manner. Instead, it’s Felecia who goes down and even that isn’t good enough for Shyla: by the end of this scene, Shyla’s got a vibe on her clit, another in her pussy, and a butt-plug in her ass. Enright gives us the pathetic and the needy and ignores the sweet in Felecia’s character. (By the way, for those who care, the story has Shyla’s mom spying on these two and getting off. Course, she doesn’t know she’s her mom yet.)

What’s left is a threeway with buyer Tiffany Mynx and models Celine Devoux and Tracy Love and a 2-girl tryst between Kaitlyn Ashley and Monique DeMoan. Narratively, the 3-way’s stupid, of course: Tiffany doesn’t even bother to put up the pretense that she’s there to look at the clothes; the assumption from the moment the models arrive is that they’re all going to screw and that’s what happens. Weird thing, though: Tiffany winds up masturbating while the other girls get it on. The other girls aren’t putting on a show for Tiffany’s benefit; Enright just loses control of the scene. It gets better later when Tiffany scooches close enough to Tracy to go down on her, and you gotta love the way she sucks labia.

Kaitlyn outperforms Tiffany in her scene with Monique. She uses a lot of spit, but she starts slowly, goes deep, and ends hungrily. I don’t know, but it looks like it felt good. Monique reciprocates with some four-finger action, butt-slapping, and rimming. The scene ends on a slow, too-tight anal strap-on sequence; not a lot of friction generated here.

Perhaps I should clarify something. I’m not against toys. But “Babes Illustrated 5” is 77 minutes long. It has six sex scenes and a plot. You do the math. I figure anyone can shove in a vibrator about as well as anyone else. I’m not against toys unless they keep me from getting those things only girls can do to other girls. And from that standpoint, every one of these scenes seems rushed, as though each were a race against time to get the toys in. Maybe some of you like that. I still prefer the view from my armchair.