Hotel Hyde Review

Director

Tanya Hyde

Cast

April, Danielle, Louise Kelson, Lucy Law, Luisa De Marco, Sandra De Marco, Sasha, Taylor J. Morgan, Ian Tate, James, Kevin Long, Pete Le Meat, Steve Hooper, Tony De Surgio.

Genre

All Sex, Vignette

Condoms

None

Female Orgasms

None

THOSE WHO MIGHT LIKE IT

Fans who enjoy rubbery, fetish oriented sexual depravity (including a little anal) without too much of a rough edge..

THOSE WHO SHOULD STEER CLEAR

Those who hate any kind of stylized presentation with their porn, or who are looking for ear-splitting, hard as nails, anal-gapin', cum-garglin' sex.

REVIEW:
While I don't doubt that most directors in porn certainly feel that they have their own unique approach to shooting a porn movie, from a consumer's point of view, most of it still tends to be rather indistinguishable from the mass-produced, "just get it in the can" all-sex paradigm. Certainly there are small differences among different directors, and some directors are better than others at actually achieving what they claim to achieve, but there are only a relative handful of directors in porn that have a style and consistency of meeting expectations that truly defines them. Tanya Hyde, I'd argue, is one such director. There is absolutely no doubt that Tanya Hyde's heavily stylized, kink-ridden, sometimes downright strange approach to pornography will not be to everyone's liking--however, for those who do like her style, she really has a knack for creating a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts, and she manages to do it almost entirely on the merits of imagery alone--a rare gift among porn directors to be sure.

Unfortunately, over the past couple years, Tanya Hyde's work has been hard to come by in the United States. I don't own a huge amount of porn, as I don't consider most of it to be worth keeping for any significant length of time, but I do own almost all of Tanya's releases for the Private Pirate line, including Hell, Whores and High Heels, Xtreme Desires, Tanya Hyde's Twisted Dreams, and Tanya Hyde's Rubberfuckers Rule. Her departure from Private was, unfortunately, the end of her distribution in the US--until now.

Arguably one of the most respected and successful gonzo/all-sex oriented, hard-core adult companies in the United States, Evil Angel, has struck a distribution deal with UK based production company, Harmony Ltd.  Lucky for me, one of Harmony's signature directors just happens to be Tanya Hyde.  This not only means a rebirth in the US market for Tanya's work, but it virtually guarantees that her DVD releases will be given the careful attention to quality control that Evil Angel is famous for.

At her best, Tanya Hyde creates kinky, if stylistically distanced, hardcore imagery. She's not afraid of exploring themes that traditional US porn-makers avoid--particularly those of the fetish-oriented underworld where, more than anything else, female power reins supreme. Through visual juxtaposition and suggestion alone, Hyde manages to create an environment where the women, even when in the most submissive situations, are the ones in unquestionable control.  It's a delightful world to find yourself observing, particularly if you enjoy the idea of real power exchange as a mutually pleasurable experience, as opposed to the frat-boy piston-fucking of whatever docile, teenage piece of meat happens to be in vogue at the current time.  Now, by no means do I mean to say that Hyde's work is the perfect manifestation of latex and PVC oriented BDSM hardcore (for that, I would still place The Fashionistas in a class by itself), but I think in a much less threatening (and lower budget) way, Hyde's work is effective in staying with you, even after you've long since busted your nut and turned off the movie.

There's more to the story of Tanya Hyde, and her much debated true identity. For my own reasons I don't feel comfortable elaborating on that point of contention here, but I will say that at this point, the cat is pretty well out of the bag, and a simple internet search will reveal volumes. In any case, I'm looking forward to this, my first Hyde movie since I bit the bullet a couple years ago in order to get a Hyde fix, and ordered a PAL version of Wasteland from overseas. For the Hannah Harper scenes alone, I wasn't disappointed with that title. Let us see what Hotel Hyde brings...

THE BITCH'S ROOM
Performers' names Unknown

We are welcomed by the skimpily clad lady at the front desk to "Hotel Hyde".  She tells us to feel free to go into any room we wish, and our first choice is evidently the bitch's room.  Three cages suspended from the ceiling house two men and a woman--apparently all sex-starved, judging by their tongue flicking and cock-stroking habits.  "The bitch", a pretty brunette in fishnets and a corset comes into the room acting like she owns the place, and before long she is sucking and stroking the two men's cocks through the bars of their cages.  She finally makes her way over to the third cage, where a very pretty blonde is clearly waiting to get fucked.  She's dressed in a criss-crossy, strap-laden, body stocking that, I must say, does look rather yummy.  I'm more attracted to the blonde here, but both girls are quite well presented.  

It's a shame I don't know who they are, as there is no cast identification mechanism anywhere on this disc.  The adult industry has made good strides in this kind of thing over the past few years, but evidently Tanya Hyde, and Harmony haven't caught on to the idea that most porn consumers (well, at least those in the United States) base their purchase decisions on the girls above all else.  I wish I could say who these lovely ladies were, and who did what, but in the absence of a scene specific cast break down, all I can do is provide as many R-rated vid-caps as I can.

Anyway, I digress.  The point is, I really think the blonde is attractive and I like the way she's made up and dressed here.  She gets some oral attention by the guys, thanks to orders issued by "The Bitch", and before long both girls are nicely fucked.  I don't believe there is any anal here, but the lighting is particularly poor in places--to the point where even when I brought my eyes inches from the screen, I still couldn't tell which hole the dick was in.  Even so, Tanya Hyde has a way of immersing you into an environment.  The techno-esque, above average porn music works as a tapestry in the background to contribute to that feeling, as does the mood-dripping environment in which the action takes place.  All the performer moans and talking is overdubbed, which I usually hate, but in this case I have mixed feelings about.  Tanya Hyde's scenes, I've found, simply somehow manage to work.  I can't explain why, but perhaps it's that she provides me with just enough hardcore sex, unusual kink, and interesting visuals in her stylized environments that my imagination is happy to fill in whatever is missing.  That's the best way I can describe it, I think, but I certainly understand why that wouldn't work for everyone.  Anyway, this scene is a pretty darn good one in that regard, even if its not fantastic.

The Bitch's Room Video Captures
Click for Larger Size

THE RUBBER ROOM
Performers' names Unknown

I can't identify any of the ladies here, but as far as I can tell, there are three of them.  The reason I'm not positive, is that this scene is rather segmented and each woman is given her own little section.  First we start out with a rather pretty blonde stroking and sucking the cock of a man who is wearing high heels while he lays on his back with his legs in stirrups.  Yes, it all sounds rather weird, doesn't it?  And it is weird, but then again, that is what Tanya Hyde (at her best) is all about.  In any case, he gets his cock sucked for a bit, and then the scene shifts to another focus entirely.  

Another woman is in a breastless, crotchless, white rubber body suit with dark sunglasses.  She unveils a black rubber-wrapped man laying on his back on a platform on whose face she proceeds to sit.  He laps at her cunt under the verbal direction of the same disembodied, cockney voice who over-dubbed the first scene until she bends over and sucks his cock in a 69 position.

The scene shifts again, this time to a pretty, dark haired woman getting fucked by a mechanical machine that a man controls by rotating a hand-crank.  Another man is feeding her his cock.  The rubber dildo on the machine fucks her cunt with clockwork regularity for a while, before the men take a more personal approach and penetrate her with a sort of corkscrew rubber toy, and alternate that with their latex-gloved fingers.  In fact, the fingering goes just about as far into the fisting arena as most US producers would dare venture, but without the frat-boy brutality that you might tend to associate with such an act.  It's all rather arousing, actually, and before long she finally gets some dick stuffed into her pussy as well.

The blonde from the beginning of the scene is back (I think--unless it's another girl altogether), and she takes on two rubber-clad gentleman in what eventually becomes a very brief double penetration.  One man cums on her pretty tits, and another fucks her ass for a couple seconds more before busting his load over her rump, and finally, this interesting, but disjointed scene comes to a close.

The Rubber Room
Video Captures
Click for Larger Size

THE WEDDING SUITE
Unknown & Luisa De Marco

A blonde I don't recognize and a man are getting married.  Overdubbed in the Hyde style is a woman, this time with an American southern accent, saying how this is the happiest day of her life, and that they spent their wedding night in a suite at the Hotel Hyde.  In full wedding dress regalia, she bends down and sucks her new husband's cock for while.  She has large (probably unnatural) breasts, and a very nice body.  After sucking his cock for a while, she then sits on his face, all accompanied by some rather inane and downright laughable, echoey monologue that sort of comments on the action as if she's saying these things to him in the moment.  Inexplicably, Luisa De Marco interrupts them and they ask her to join in.  Once she does, she dons a black strap-on and the bride gets a DP.  Her husband unlaods on her face and then the scene transitions to a confessional, where Luisa must ask forgiveness for her sins.

When Luisa explains what naughtiness she's been up to, the father promptly stuffs his cock through a little glory hole in the confessional, and Luisa starts sucking on it.  Luisa is very sexy, I must say, and after a little bit of sucking, he joins up with her and starts licking her pussy.  Obviously, Luisa eventually gets fucked by the good father, and he doesn't forget to sodomize her yummy ass either.  He comes on her pussy in slow motion, at her overdubbed request, and so ends this pretty, but still somewhat superficially flat, two part scene.

The Wedding Suite
Video Captures
Click for Larger Size

GANG BANG BOUDOIR
Luisa De Marco

Luisa, who still looks rather good, I must say, starts things out by masturbating herself on a bed in a couple different positions.  There are six pictures of women's faces on the wall beside the bed and after a while of Luisa working on her self, three hard dicks pop through the bottom row of pictures unexpectedly--centering themselves where the women's mouths were.  Luisa picks up on this turn of events immediately and goes over to suck on each cock in turn.  As time goes on, the cocks disappear from their holes and reappear with a man attached to each of them in the room with Luisa.  She finally fucks them all in earnest, with plenty of gang-bangy type cock-sucking, pussy fucking, and double penetration to go around.  Luisa looks nice, and the action has that inexplicable effectiveness about it, despite the overdubbed voices and stylized presentation.  I just can't put my finger on why it actually works for me.  In any case, there's nothing super-original here, and certainly nothing exceptionally hardcore by today's "gonzo" standards, but the environment works, and I particularly liked the ending.  We hear Luisa (or whoever dubbed for her) repeatedly asking the men for their "spunk" and each guy lays a load on her in different locations.  One on her pussy, one cascading down her gorgeous ass, and one substantial one on her face before the scene abruptly fades to black.

Gang Bang Boudoir 
Video Captures
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THE CHAMBER OF THE UNDEAD
Performers' names Unknown

This one starts out demonstrating the trappings of vampiric, religious iconery--a coffin, candles, and the dark moodiness of reds and blacks.  Like the other scenes on the disc, it also has an interesting musical track, thrumming underneath in a sort of dark, minimalist, techno style that builds and develops as the scene progresses from plateau to plateau.  The action begins with two ladies (whose names I simply don't know, and whose faces you barely see) pleasuring each other with a black plastic dildo with ball-like extrusions along the shaft.  This doesn't last long before the primary lady in the scene (an attractive honey blonde with pretty breasts) makes her way toward the coffin.  She's wearing a frilly pink top with matching sheer, pink stockings and a garter which pretty well stay on for the whole scene.  She finds the coffin and opens it, revealing a sleeping (dead?) man inside, complete with a dark shade of goth lipstick.  She pulls down a convenient flap in his pants and starts sucking his cock to life.  After a while of this, and when his cock has gotten good and hard, the man comes to life and slowly starts transitioning to a more active role in the scene.  Before he does, though, the woman places her nicely trimmed pussy onto his lips, and he eagerly tongues her as the music grows in complexity and tempo.  All the sounds of the performers are dubbed, of course, but the music is really the primary sound-scape here, and even given my usual dislike for such choices, it actually sort of seems to work.  There is no anal in the scene, but it does progress through a number of vaginal positions, and even if the lighting is a little dark, and the picture is a little grainy, the girl is very nicely presented.  Finally, a very substantial facial finishes things off, and I leave the scene not with the biggest hard-on I've ever had, but certainly with a hard-on, as well as an appreciation for Tanya Hyde's ability to really create an effective sexual environment with her scenes, while still managing not to skimp on the hardcore acts (even if they are presented in a sort of distanced way).  This one is no exception.

The Chamber of the Dead
 Video Captures
Click for Larger Size

EXTRAS:
Much touted on the back of the box cover is a special photo gallery by Trevor Watson from his book, "Kink".  In truth the photo gallery is quite disappointing, as not only are there only ten total photos in the set, but they're presented in such a way that they don't make use of the full screen.  It's bad enough that the photos have to deal with the shortcomings of NTSC video, but to not make use of all the resolution available to you just makes it that much worse.  The photos are nice, although eerily reminiscent of the video for which they are an extra...  The shortcomings of the photo-gallery are easily forgotten, however, with a behind the scenes featurette that is about 42 minutes long.  It includes some cool footage from the Rubber Room, the Gang Bang, and the Wedding Night sets, including the set up of the locations, makeup application, some impromptu interviews, and a little camera behind the camera action.  I quite liked it, especially when you get to see the performers interact together outside the confines of the Hyde "environment".  There are also a couple of trailers on the disc for other Harmony releases which will soon be distributed by Evil Angel in the US.  

I must also make note of the menus, which I actually rather liked.  They were nicely uncomplicated, but still somehow immersive in getting you set up for the environment that Hyde was going to place you in.  There was some interesting authoring that I noticed here and there as well.  For example, if you skipped to a specific scene from the scene menu, after the scene finished playing, it would send you back to the scene menu rather than continuing onto the next one.  Of course it would simply play through if you selected the "play movie" button, so this wasn't any kind of problem for me.  It was just an interesting choice in the authoring that I noted, and perhaps one that other people might find annoying. 

One thing I really found frustrating, however was the lack of cast identification.  Evil Angel's regular releases include an immensely helpful cast list by scene extra, and although I realize this is simply Evil Angel's distribution of a Harmony authored disc, I still wish that the cast were identified in some fashion, even if it was just in the closing credits--although an image along with a name would have been nice.  That said, even if the cast was specifically identified in the credits, I'm not sure I'd have been able to read it easily, what with the choice of scripty font that was used for the lettering.  It was very difficult to read, and though I realize that might seem nit-picky, these are the things that Harmony and Evil Angel might like to know in order to consider future improvements in their releases.

At any rate, I liked the extras that were included, and I expect that fans of Tanya Hyde and the performers will appreciate seeing some of the light-hearted backstage machinery as well. 

OVERALL:
I think for me, there are as many shortcomings to Tanya Hyde's style as there are advantages.  On the unfortunate side, there is the overdubbing, the skipped frames, the black and white, and the forced stylism that somehow serves to dehumanize the sex--to bring it out of the realm of the real and into the realm of the manufactured. On the flip side, those very same elements can simultaneously serve to create an unfamiliar, carefully controlled world that caters to our innate interest in sex as an idealized dream.  Hotel Hyde certainly had it's moments in this regard, and my favorite scene on the disc was also the strangest and most disjointed.  The Rubber Room was bizarre and gutsy, and so unlike most of what everyone else is doing in US porn that I can't help but embrace it simply for its originality.  Yes, it certainly turned me on as well, but at the same time, I also loved it for the idea that somehow all the power resided with the women in the scene.  

Hyde has an exquisite way of presenting women as mature, sexy, and completely in control of their own depravity.  That theme, while remaining relatively unthreatening, is evident in all of Hyde's work, including all the scenes presented here, but the Rubber Room, specifically, represented all the kink and craziness that made me fall in love with Tanya Hyde in the first place.  I've enjoyed some of her past scenes more than any I saw in Hotel Hyde, particularly in Rubberfuckers Rule, and Hell, Whores and High Heels, and I'd say as her work goes, Hotel Hyde is certainly not her best.  But I would also say the reason for that was not so much due to the style, or the way the women looked (which I found nothing to complain about), but more to do with a conspicuous derth of originality and bravery to explore fetishes that are outside the mainstream--an area in which only The Rubber Room marginally succeeded.

At any rate, the work of Tanya Hyde is most assuredly not for everyone.  You have to have an appreciation for stylism that the gonzo purists will outright reject as "artsy-fartsy" boredom-incarnate, but if you haven't given her a try yet, and you enjoy the enigmatically beautiful, rubberized underworld of fetish oriented sexual kink, there are certainly worse places to start than by checking in for a brief visit to Hyde's Hotel.

Questions or constructive comments about this review? Email me at MLyons@my.adultdvdtalk.com


Other Adult Movie Reviews by Mike Lyons