Best Friends (Wicked) Review

Reviewed by Nat Hocken  on  4/16/2003

Forty-one year old Randy Spears (looking exactly like 41-year-old Randy Spears) begins Wicked’s “Best Friends” as a college student preparing to leave for med school. April Flowers, his much younger-looking best friend, is worried that they may never see each other again. Written by Melissa Monet, this is the story, told vignette-style, of the ups and downs of their relationship over a period of several years, during which Randy gets married, has a couple of kids, and gets divorced, and April experiments with lesbian love, takes up with kinky Eric Masterson, and dumps him when she catches him screwing around with the couple next door. It’s the story of two best friends who go their separate ways only to wind up together again, unattached, and mature enough to finally admit their love for one another.

That’s the story, all right. Of course, it’s crap.

It’s crap because all the interesting stuff happens off-screen. Well, not all of it; I’ll get to that later. Randy’s first sex scene is with Aria and it takes place on their wedding night. We know the two have to get divorced (I mean, we figured out the plot of this film when we saw the title, right?), so their wedding night, when all is sweetness and light, isn’t really the point, is it? I want to see a sex scene that gives me an idea of why the two can’t live together. Maybe Aria’s a shrew and Randy is forced to exhaust himself banging her into submission. That could be interesting. And what about April? She tells Randy that Eric is too kinky for her—yet she seems into it when he ties her hands and blindfolds her in their scene together. Where’s the fear, or at least the reluctance to play along? This story is so misguided, the ropes on April’s wrists fall off shortly after Eric puts them on and she loses her blindfold halfway through the scene.

I don’t know why it is that couples films have to be so tepid. As April is counting off her boyfriend’s perversions, she mentions his wanting to introduce other women into their bed. When Randy calls her on this—“Well, you did have that thing with your roommate in college,” he reminds her—she turns frosty and says, “That doesn’t count and you promised you’d never bring that up again.” Everyone knows that lesbian scenes in couples porn are dicey. At least, that’s what everyone says they know; the fact is, couples porn and straight porn alike tend to include their one token girl/girl scene. And if a recent Northwestern University study is accurate, preliminary results suggest that this one-scene rule is unnecessary anyway. According to a story in the “Washington Times,” early reports “indicate that women's responses to…pornographic videos did not differ whether the images were of male-female couples, lesbians, or homosexual men.” I suspect most women willing to watch porn in the first place would be just as receptive as men to meaningful depictions of sex, rather than the watered-down fantasies many porn producers foist off on the public as woman-friendly.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying the sex in this movie is just like the sex in most other porn movies. On this level, “Best Friends” works. The least exciting scene, of course, is the last one, with the lovers Randy and April. The other four scenes are pretty good, and two of them deserve special mention: the lesbian scene that opens the movie and Randy and Aria’s wedding night tryst. The latter is distinguished by Aria’s deep-thrusting blowjob and the real-sex way Randy keeps on eating out Aria after she’s cum, taking care around her clitoris. An effective anal segment ends in a cum-on-tongue facial that isn’t swallowed but isn’t drooled either until after Aria takes Randy back in her mouth. The threeway lesbian scene, marred by too many close-ups held too long, is something special anyway, thanks largely to Stormy’s presence. Stormy’s a gorgeous 5’ 7” blonde, and looking at her 36DD chest straining against a tight T-shirt is a powerful reminder that sexy, beautiful women are inherently pornographic. As Dennis Miller says of Demi Moore in “Disclosure,” just looking at her gives you lift-off.

It’s long been my belief that no one cares about the stories in porn movies because the stories in porn movies are usually so badly integrated with the sex that they come off as a distraction. That’s certainly the case here. But with constant exposure comes immunity and so I can say, without really contradicting myself, that “Best Friends” is both bad moviemaking and good pornography.