Love Muffins Review

Reviewed by Nat Hocken  on  1/28/2003

“Love Muffins” has a lot going for it: a silly storyline right out the 80s, attractive performers giving good performances, sexual variety, good-looking sets, and high production values. It should have been a better film. It would have been, too, if a better director had been at the helm.

I wish it weren’t so. Jim Enright admits that his viewing preference is girl/girl. He says he was lucky Wicked allowed him to include two girl/girl scenes in this movie, instead of the usual one. I can’t help feeling a certain fondness for a guy who bucks tradition in exactly the manner I like to see it bucked. The frustrating fact is, however, that it amounts to very little if he’s incapable of giving his scenes, lesbian or otherwise, any real pop.

Joelean stars as the inheritor of her grandmother’s “magic muffin” recipe. A secret ingredient, crushed mandrake root, turns the muffins into aphrodisiacs. It takes a bigger woman that Joelean to keep the family secret: she decides to get rich in the muffin-making business. Along the way, she and her friend and partner Alex Foxe meet a loan officer, a venture capitalist, and a couple of bar-owners, while recruiting Taylor St. Claire and her boyfriend to help out. It’s a silly storyline, sure, but it does what a good porn plot ought to do: it gives the film direction and the sex scenes an underlying purpose that the scenes in plotless sex films don’t have.

Though the least experienced cast member, Joelean, a relatively new talent from Indiana, with her long blonde mane and ready smile, handles her part well. All the performers, in fact, manage to stay in character when they aren’t having sex, and Randy Spears puts in an excellent performance as the venture capitalist. He has only a handful of lines before the sex begins, but he delivers them beautifully. It’s a shame his part was such a small one.

All but one of the scenes plays off the erotic effect produced by the muffins. The exception is the first sex scene, with Alex Foxe and Joel Lawrence, the loan officer. Here, it isn’t the muffins that get Joel started, it’s Alex’s whorish behavior. Somebody forgot the plot or Alex forgot the film HAD a plot and instinctively shifted into the office scene default: that of a woman on the make seducing the man with the money she needs. In terms of the narrative, it’s a weak opening, but the sex is on a par with most of the other scenes.

But it’s the sex that holds this film back, that and the way the scenes are shot. Enright doesn’t show much flair for sexual choreography; he runs his actors through an unimaginative series of positions that hit all the common denominators, but fails to make use of his character types to enhance the sex. The loan officer may be outclassed by Alex, but he is the one holding the cards; couldn’t he have been more dominant, at least to begin with? Then, too, in the film’s only threeway—with Joelean, Randy Spears, and Shelbee Myne—Enright engages all three performers simultaneously only about half the time.

Through it all, Enright relies much too heavily on the close-up. The scene with bar-owners Jezebelle Bond and Kylie Ireland plods along until suddenly the image cuts to a long-shot. Such shots don’t merely establish the complete sexual context, they heighten the effect of the sex itself. There’s something undeniably erotic about seeing the actors engaged in the act. That’s why good directors mix their shots—to maximize erotic effect. Enright keeps his cameras in close as if he’s afraid he’s going to miss something.

The “Love Muffins” disc is loaded with bonus material: a “making of” feature, a couple of interviews, a blooper reel, several photo galleries, and previews. The viewer can also choose to watch the feature with commentary by Enright and “Production Manager” Shanna McCullough. I watched the last scene—the second girl/girl with Joelean and Alex—a second time, with the commentary on. I’d made a note the first time around that Alex was a pretty good pussy eater. It was somewhat gratifying, therefore, to watch her go down again and hear Shanna say, Now THAT’S how you eat pussy. So don’t just take my word for it.