Game Is Afoot, The Review

Reviewed by astroknight  on  4/23/2006

The Little Details

Running Time: 101 min.

Production Date: 9 / 15 / 2002

Director: Jon Woods

Cast: Karina Santos, Amber Michaels, Sara Nychols, Julie Simone, Talia Monet, Cleo Nichole, Liz Tyler, Calli Cox, Jodi Baldwin, Cassandra Knight, Courtney Chambers, Ava Barton, Lexia, Zana, Ikaras, and Leonard Ayresteel

The Short Story

Initial Expectations: I haven’t had the best of luck with the movies I’ve checked out from Harmony, and their authoring doesn’t help a single thing. I’m a little leery going into this one, but with a shoe and foot fetish aspect worked into this one I do have a little hope.

Initial Reaction: This one just didn’t do it for me.

Who Should Watch It : Rope bondage fans

Who Should Avoid It: Foot and shoe fetish fans

The Technical Stuff

Audio /Video Quality: The technical aspects are pretty good. The audio is a little hollow, but there are very few background noises. The video is also well done, and in fact is very impressive for a fetish release. It’s nicely lit and only has a hint of grain. There’s a fair amount of panning and zooming, but it never holds the movie back by feeling sloppy. This is a pretty good looking and sounding fetish release.

Music: There’s a little music which pops up here and there. It’s normally decently balanced with the rest of the action, and also adds a bit of a menacing feel here and there. It’s not bad, but it would have been better if it would have had a little more variation to it.

Disc Complaints: Once again Harmony’s technical expertise holds back the entire DVD. To start with, the movie is spread over four titles, which makes navigating the movie very hard. There are chapters inside each title, but if, for example, you watch the last scene in a title and want to go back, you’re shit out of luck if the next title starts unless you want to go through the chapter menu again and start skipping through chapters. There’s also no time stamp, so if you want to go to a specific instance in a movie you better have your remote handy because the only way you’re going to do it is by scanning through the movie to get there. The authoring on this DVD doesn’t give a feeling of Harmony really caring about their overall DVDs.

Menus: The main menu is pretty basic. You get a still and the choices, and that’s all. The chapter menu is very generic, and lets you choose a scene based on a small clip of each scene and a chapter number.

The Feature

Supposedly, a certain pair of size 8 high heels has the supernatural power to bring the owner good luck, wealth, power, and all that stuff. Cop Karina Santos is assigned to investigate a series of shoe thefts revolving around somebody trying to find the supposedly magical pair of shoes. Whoever is after the shoes attacks women from behind, and leaves them bound, gagged, and without their shoes.

I’m going to break away from my usual style of reviewing and the scene by scene review because the action here is so similar from scene to scene. I’ll admit that I was afraid that with the large cast listed on the cover there would be a few cameos by the big names where you didn’t get to see much of them. The good news is that everybody on the cover gets some nice screen time, and there’s some good consistency to the scenes. The rest depends on your focus and what you’re looking for from the movie. The movies I’ve seen from Harmony has done a nice job with rope bondage, and that continues through this release. The bad news is that with the movie being a fetish feature about magic shoes, there’s barely any attention given to shoes and feet. I’m afraid I might be overestimating the foot fetish aspect of the movie if I’d say that for every minute of foot or shoe fetish action there’s ten minutes of rope bondage, and I’m not sure there were four different styles of shoes in the entire movie. Yes, the girls are barefoot through the ropes, but the feet are never really focused on. As somebody looking forward to a fair amount of foot fetish action here, I was definitely disappointed by the action.

My disappointment continued into the details of the movie. Even by porno standards the plot and acting are laughable, and the movie is so loose that I’ve seen vignette porn that’s more cohesive than this one. When Karina’s doing one of the dialogue scenes in the beginning at the cop shop you could tell she had her lines in the folder she was holding, and she followed them so closely that I almost expected her to start keeping her place following the lines with her finger. Although some of the scenes fit into the story well, the story seems to fall apart after about forty five minutes when there’s a possible explanation about the shoes. At that point, the movie shifts from having a dialogue scene here and there to just showing girls tied up and struggling saying that they were robbed or that somebody got back at them. If you’re into girls being bound and gagged, struggling against their restraints, this might be good, but if you wanted anything close to a story or a little foot fetish action (like I did), it quickly nosedives into fast forward fodder.

The Game Is Afoot wasn’t a movie for me, and one which I probably would have skipped if the boxcover gave a better description of the action. Harmony does very nice rope bondage, and I hoped they’d bring in the same care with the addition of some foot fetish action. Instead the action in the movie is almost entirely focused on girls being bound and gagged, with the foot aspect only seeming to come in because the cameraman didn’t zoom in enough to cut them off. The feature aspect is horribly done, with either Harmony or Jon Woods deciding to save money on the script and write it out on a used match rather than the matchbook that one expects for a low budget feature. I guess I don’t blame them for cutting it short with how poor the acting was. I realize that fetish porn isn’t something that one compares to the Oscars, but at the very least it should be able to stay focused and go from point A to point B without getting lost along the way. If you want girls being bound and gagged, then The Game is Afoot might be for you, but otherwise this one’s probably best skipped.

The Extra Stuff

The slide show lasts a little over four and a half minutes with about ten seconds per okay looking screen capture. The outtakes feature a few flubbed lines, crackups, and the camera catching a little more than it was supposed to for about three minutes that are pretty forgettable. There’s also a listing for “Other Vignettes”, which just takes you to several of the specific scenes in the movie like a chapter menu would.

The outtakes last almost three minutes. You get a few flubbed lines, crackups, and the camera catching more than it was supposed to. It’s okay, but nothing special.

The Down -n- Dirty Sex Stuff

Themes: Bondage and feet (very light)

Raincoat Factor: High if you want rope bondage and bound and gagged women, very low otherwise

Condom Usage: None needed

The Bottom Line:

Currently, many of Harmony’s DVDs can be found online for between about $16 and $25 with most stores offering them for about $20. Rent this one first or aim very low. The action almost completely ignores feet, and focuses almost completely on women being bound and gagged. There’s some pretty good effort put into the technical aspects, but the extras just don’t seem to come close to what they seem they should be. This isn’t a really bad DVD, but it isn’t what it makes itself out to be and is for a very specific group.

Note to Harmony Concepts:

If you have any questions or comments, please e-mail me .

Other reviews by Astroknight