Get Off With Carmen Luvana Review

Reviewed by astroknight  on  12/29/2004

The Little Details

Running Time: approx. 170 min. total footage (approx. 35 min. each for Spanish and English with two angles available and approx. 15 min. shared footage with two angles available)

Production Date: 10 / 29 / 2003 (cover) 6 / 15 / 2004 (DVD)

Director: Andrew Drake

Cast: Carmen Luvana and “you”

The Short Story

Initial Expectations: Adam & Eve has been trying to expand themselves nicely recently, which gave me some hope here. Unfortunately, Andrew Drake is behind this one, whose work I normally look forward to about as much as a case of the clap. As soon as I saw his name associated with this one my expectations were flushed down the toilet to join his past work.

Initial Reaction: It leaves a bit to be desired, but it’s the best thing I’ve seen from Andrew Drake and Carmen does a great job.

Who Should Watch It : Fans of Carmen Luvana

Who Should Avoid It: Anybody who wants a top notch virtual sex simulator that can compete with some of the best out there.

The Technical Stuff

Audio /Video Quality: The technical aspects are okay. The audio is pretty good, but Carmen’s voice is so quiet with the level it’s at that to hear her decently I had to crank the volume so high that I was getting a lot of speaker hiss. There are also places where it becomes completely hollow and seems to be off a little between the left and right speaker, such as during the sweet finger section. The video is a little below average. There’s noticeable pixelation throughout the entire movie and the lighting is a bit inconsistent. There’s also a large border around the action, but it doesn’t frame the action evenly the entire time.

Music: None

Disc Complaints: There’s a very large watermark in the lower right corner of the action, as well as a watermark in the upper right corner to let you know where you are in the movie and a watermark of Carmen along the lower right portion of the screen. The upper right corner watermark was the least obtrusive, and frequently took up dead space. There were times, however, when it covered up most of Carmen’s face. The Carmen watermark was also annoying and often covered up a bit of Carmen’s shoe and leg. As a shoe and leg man, I was more than a little frustrated here several times. Finally, there’s the company logo watermark. I don’t really mind companies wanting to put small and tasteful watermarks in if they think it will help stop piracy, but this sucker’s at least a quarter the height of the picture! Unlike the other two, which are transparent, the Adam & Eve logo watermark is solid so it interferes with things more. Get Off With Carmen Luvana shows exactly how watermarks shouldn’t be done, and interfered with my enjoyment of the DVD to the point that I’m deducting a half point from the overall score because of them.

Disc Problems: I stumbled upon a few technical glitches in Get Off With Carmen Luvana. If you want the Nasty Ass Tease in English, you have to do it by starting with the Sweet Ass Tease and then going to Nasty. If you’re already in the Nasty mode it will go to the Nasty Ass Tease in Spanish, and I couldn’t see a way to get back to the English version of the movie without going through the main menu. The Sweet Finger Foreplay goes directly to the missionary pop shot when it finishes, and if you want to go to the Finger Foreplay from the Blowjob Cumshot, you can’t.

Menus: The main menu is very basic. There’s a still of Carmen and the choices, and that’s it. It doesn’t even come close to giving a good first impression.

The Feature

Adam & Eve continues to support their contract girl, Carmen Luvana with their first interactive virtual sex DVD. For those who have somehow missed Carmen thus far, she’s a overly implanted bleached blonde from Puerto Rica with a great ass and a spunky personality that’s hard not to like. Her look doesn’t really work for me, but I seem to be in the definite minority and can often get past it just due to her personality and great smile. Carmen’s gotten a lot of notice in the few years she’s been in the business, and has the experience with virtual sex behind her to make her a great choice for Adam & Eve here. They even try to make this one something different by letting this be the first bilingual virtual sex DVD with a star who’s more than willing to do whatever it seems she can for both her English and her Spanish speaking fans.

For her part of the virtual experience, Carmen does a fantastic job. She shows how the moods should work, coming off as shy and innocent with the sweet side and dirty and naughty in the nasty side. She also does a nice job sexually. She plays to the camera as she would to a partner, looking at it and away without staring, rather than focusing so heavily on the camera that you wonder if she’s ever going to blink. For those who have watched a lot of Carmen, it looks like she gets into the sex quite well as she starts crying out in Spanish a few times rather than keeping things in English, but more on that later. There’s a couple times she seems a little cold as well, but for the most part, Carmen does a fantastic job sexually.

The camera work and multiple angles are handled pretty well throughout the feature. It does a nice job of staying focused on Carmen, and frames her nicely throughout the action. There’s a few times where the watermarks interfere, but the menus normally stay off to the side and out of the way. The multiple angles are also well done, and seem to be true. The first angle stays with a distance shot throughout the feature, while the alternate angle is either a close-up of the penetration or a side angle. Throughout the tease, foreplay and masturbation is stays with the close-up, and then for most of the sex it goes with a side angle. The camera work works well throughout Get Off with Carmen Luvana.

That said, there are plenty of problems as well. The first major problem is the cumshots, or lack thereof. Out of five cumshot sequences, one has a laughable animated pop (missionary), one has Carmen supposedly taking a pop in her mouth and swallowing it (blowjob), and the remaining three (doggie, cowgirl, and reverse cowgirl) have the guy jerking into the air and Carmen acting like something happened . I never saw a single drop of cum, or even a sign of cum, throughout the entire DVD! On a much lesser level, the cumshots are shared between the sweet and nasty moods. Sometimes this works and sometimes it seems a bit off. Cumshots like this being a problem should surprise nobody. When the first virtual sex DVD came out one of the biggest problems with it was the cumshots, and when somebody (I think it was Digital Sin / New Sensations but I’m not positive) released the first virtual sex DVD with all real popshots it was a huge thing that was welcomed by the fans with all the fanfare of the Minnesota Vikings actually winning a SuperBowl or the development of cold fusion (the two of them seem to be on about the same level of reality). The cumshots in Get Off With Carmen Luvana definitely hold back the action.

The other major problem with Get Off With Carmen Luvana is the looping. The loops for each sequence last between about a minute and a quarter to two minutes, with the majority of them being about a minute and a half. The pop shot loops are much shorter, and last between about fifteen and forty five seconds. This is a bit shorter than the loops used by most companies, but they’re still a manageable length. The problem is that they always loop back to the beginning. This isn’t as big of a deal during the sex portion of the movie, but during the tease, foreplay, and masturbation sequences it sticks out like a sore thumb. You go from a hot and heavy Carmen who’s well into whatever deed you wanted her to do back to a Carmen who’s just getting started or a half naked Carmen back to a Carmen with all the clothes she started with. Other companies have learned that if you loop back to a point in the middle of the sequence you don’t really lose that momentum and things can continue with the same feel. Of course, Andrew Drake is in charge here who normally made me wonder if he needed Post-It Notes around the set and his office to remind him that women are the ones with the vagina.

Finally, there’s the bilingual aspect of the DVD, which is hit and miss. I went through the DVD completely in the English mode and then went back to do a little checking here and there on the Spanish version. Throughout the tease and Foreplay, there’s quite a bit more footage than in the English version. While the English version averages around a minute forty, the Spanish version rarely drops below two minutes. The masturbation segments are roughly the same length. Surprisingly, the sex is the same in either version, which really stood out to me. When I watched the sex in the English version I thought Carmen was really getting into the sex. She seemed a bit cold through some of it, but normally when she starts speaking Spanish while getting fucked it means she’s really into it. Here, it just got colder at the end because Andrew Drake was too cheap to do both English and Spanish sex scenes. This really stands out to anybody who checks out both versions, and took away most of admiration I had with Adam & Eve for releasing a bilingual virtual sex DVD.

Adam & Eve has some great ideas with Get Off With Carmen Luvana, and Andrew Drake almost shows competence. Adam & Eve definitely deserve credit for the bilingual aspect and having Carmen do both moods and most of the action in both English and Spanish rather than just dubbing one or the other. They also deserve credit for supporting their contract star with a project that she can shine in showing off both her naughty and her nice side. They even do a nice job with the multiple angles, which were true every time I flipped back and forth. The problems with Get Off With Carmen Luvana lie in the details. Cumshots in virtual sex DVDs have been one of the most complained and talked about things, and they’ve never been worse than they are here. The sex loops have been another problem, since the ending and start rarely seem to match up if the full loop is used, but that’s just what’s done here. There’s also the poor video quality and a few technical glitches. If those two things were fixed,Get Off With Carmen Luvana would have been a top notch virtual sex DVD two years ago. Today, however, Get Off With Carmen Luvana comes off as a nice showcase for Carmen Luvana that screams of having somebody in charge who wasn’t fully capable of doing things the best possible way.

The Extra Stuff

The slide show lasts about a minute with roughly seven seconds per nice looking snapshot of Carmen Luvana from many of her movies. There’s also credits and an interview with Carmen.

The interview with Carmen Luvana can be viewed in either English or Spanish and lasts about eleven minutes. She talks about getting into the business, the adult industry in general, shooting Rawhide, and being a contract star for Adam & Eve. She also talks about a bit of personal things such as her measurements, her fantasies, what she likes about men, and herself in general. It’s a nicely done interview, and also works in some nice editing to make it feel much like a promotional short.

The Down -n- Dirty Sex Stuff

Themes: Straight, interactive, tease, masturbation, and toys

Raincoat Factor: High

Condom Usage: None

The Bottom Line:

Currently, most of Adam & Eve’s DVDs can be found online for between $10 and $25 with many stores offering them for under $17. At the low end, this one’s a decent buy but I don’t know that I’d pay much more than that unless you’re a big Carmen Luvana fan or feeling the need for a Spanish virtual sex DVD. Carmen does a fantastic job, but the virtual aspect is a couple years behind the times. The technical aspects are also lacking and there’s no real effort put into the extras.

Note to Adam & Eve: This is an admirable first effort at an interactive DVD. If you would have dumped the watermarks and kept the technical aspects at the level you normally have for your Premium Collection I would have had a hard time not recommending it to people as a purchase rather than just as a rental.

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

Other reviews by Astroknight