Nina Hartley's Guide To Alternative Sex Review

Reviewed by astroknight  on  7/26/2002

Running Time: 110 min. (cover states over 2 hours)

Production Date: Jan. 1995

Director: Nina Hartley

Cast: Nina Hartley, Anna Malle, Hank Armstrong, John Decker, Christi Lake, Sahara Sands, Dic Tracy, Ariana, Luc Wilder, Shannon Rush, Magnum, Dallas, and Duane

Initial Expectations: After Adam & Eve’s last fiasco with Nina Hartley’s Guide to Seduction, I’m not expecting much here.

Initial Reaction: Pass it up like you would your sister when you needed a prom date.

Who Should Watch It : Prison inmates

Who Should Avoid It: People looking for something new since the original features are much better

Audio /Video Quality: The audio and video appear to be about the same quality they would have originally been on VHS. The audio is pretty good but has some wind noise and unevenness. It has a slightly muddy sound in parts and the dialogue can be kind of hard to understand at the party. The video has a slight graininess but it doesn’t interfere with the feature too bad.

Music: There isn’t any music during much of the feature, but when there is music it’s very quiet, soft in feel, and non-threatening.

Disc Problems / Complaints / False Advertising: Oh, where to start. First, there’s somebody not being able to tell the difference between over and under two hours. If the cover had said “approximately two hours”, I wouldn’t have had much of a problem, but even that would have been a borderline claim. To state that the feature is “over two hours”, however, is an out and out lie. Then there’s not letting the consumer know that this is just an edited compilation of the previously released Nina Hartley’s Guide to Swinging and Nina Hartley’s Guide to Anal Sex. Rounding out this list of problems / complaints is horrible softcore censoring during Nina Hartley’s Guide to Anal Sex.

Menus: The menus are very simple. The main menu has a bit of minor animation and is easily navigated. The chapter menu lets you choose a scene based on a small clip of the scene and a title for it. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as nice as the menus for Nina Hartley’s Guide to Seduction and started to make me feel disappointed almost immediately.

The Feature: Nina Hartley has been one of the mainstays of the adult film world through three decades. In that time, as well as making hundreds of features, she’s been a vocal supporter for first amendments rights, health issues, and responsible porn. I don’t know if she has a degree in Sexology, which is probably more of a lay term (pun intended), but after the amount of time she’s had devoted to sex I think I’d trust Nina on most common sex matters more than a PhD. If it’s sexual, you know she’s probably had some kind of experience with it, as opposed to the PhD who, odds are, was studying instead of getting busy. This time around there’s nothing new. It’s just an edited compilation of the previously released Nina Hartley’s Guide to Swinging and Nina Hartley’s Guide to Anal Sex.

The first part of the feature comes from Nina Hartley’s Guide to Swinging and is edited down to 58 minutes from the original 72 minutes. As far as I can tell, the fourteen missing minutes are all from the sex and setup scenes and over half of that comes from the final orgy scene. Although I hate to see anything edited, I’m happy that the core lessons were left in this portion of the feature.

Of course, that means that if you’re looking forward to some swinging sex to watch, you’re going to miss quite a bit of it. The finale of this feature was originally an orgy that lasted over a half hour, so with the number of couples involved the missing footage isn’t that hard to spot. The sex shouldn’t be ignored throughout the feature, since rather than lecturing for a good portion of the feature, some of the principles of swinging are presented through situations in the sex scenes. This makes me a little upset that they were edited (especially when there would have been no problem fitting both features on this DVD at their full length), but as I said before, most of the edits are barely noticeable.

The second part of the feature comes from Nina Hartley’s Guide to Anal Sex, running 52 minutes rather than the original 78 minutes. The good news is that once again, the educational portion of the feature made it through virtually untouched. If you’re looking at this feature purely for education and don’t have any interest in the sex scene from the original feature, you’re still going to get all the tips and advice that was included on the original feature. There appeared to be a bit of fluff chopped out, but nothing that hurts this portion of the feature at all.

The bad and confusing news, is that the sex portion of the feature is badly edited. The original sex scene was a bit jumpy in the editing, so many of the cuts aren’t too noticeable and rarely affect the flow of the scene. Although the complete cuts aren’t too noticeable, other changes are very noticeable.

Unlike the earlier sex scenes on this DVD, the sex scene for the anal portion is converted into a softcore scene, and done quite noticeably and badly. I don’t think you can see a cock during any of the sex, with the entire width of screen being blacked out from where the cock would appear on the screen to the bottom of the screen. As the cock jiggles, so does the height of the blacked out area.

This ruined the entire sex scene for me as it looked completely juvenile (which is rather ironic on an adult feature). Rather than just blurring out an area, which would be noticeable but not overly so due to some of the grain in the feature, they noticeably censor out over a third of the image. Technically, it appears about one step above filming the scene as its shown on a TV while somebody holds their hand over the “naughty parts”.

The softcore censoring also baffles me since there’s plenty of cock shown during the swinging portion of the feature. What makes the sex here offensive, yet earlier it’s just fine? In my review of Nina Hartley’s Guide to Seduction, which is a similarly styled DVD, I mentioned the idea of Adam & Eve editing out the sex scenes and compiling just the instructional portions to better break into the mainstream market, yet with how they’ve done it here it only acts as a drawback to the entire DVD.

Overall, Nina Hartley’s Guide to Alternative Sex bears many of the same the same good and bad points as Nina Hartley’s Guide to Seduction. It’s a great idea to put two features together that might both interest the same type of people. Nina always comes off as a great teacher, and presents everything in a simple and very non-threatening way. The people she has help her also normally seem realistic and fairly normal as well as enjoying the subject their helping her with. Things like this are what have made this a very good series.

Then comes the bad. For this reason, it seems extremely deceptive to not state anywhere on the cover that this DVD is just the two aforementioned DVDs put together on one DVD. It feels like a cheap gimmick to try and sell more products. This omission is large portion of my problem with this DVD, and I’m extremely glad I got it as a screener. If I had actually paid money for it, I’d be extremely pissed and this might be the last Adam & Eve or Nina Hartley’s Guide to DVD I’d pick up for a long time. It shows a lack of care, and more so, could be taken as an attempt to trick consumers. I don’t see Nina Hartley’s Guide to Swinging or Nina Hartley’s Guide to Anal Sex being pulled off the market, which makes me think Adam & Eve is still selling them just like this one, possibly in the hope that they’ll pick up this one after checking out one of those.

Due to these problems, I can’t even call Nina Hartley’s Guide to Alternative Sex an average rating, even though Nina has done a good job. There are some very good ideas to the overall DVD, but unfortunately they never really mesh. The educational portions are kept basically intact, but the rest of the feature feels shoddily put together and brings down the entire DVD. If this DVD looks interesting to you, either rent both of the original features or spend the extra few bucks to buy them rather than spending much on this cobbled up mess.

For other perspectives on this DVD, please check out reviews from reviewer and dumblonde.

Extras: A bio for Nina and weblinks.

Themes: Educational, swinging, straight, group, lesbian, orgy, inter-racial, anal, toys, rimming (male > female), and spanking

Raincoat Factor: Medium low

Overall: Currently, most of the Nina Hartley’s Guide to series can be found online for between $13 and $22 with many stores offering it for under $15. This one, however, can be found for about $18 or $22 and at only two stores. There’s an obvious reason for this, and I can’t help but pan this disc. It feels shoddily put together, has no extras to speak of, and slightly below average technical aspects.

Note to Adam & Eve: You had a great idea here, but once again the execution killed it. With a bit more thought and care this could have been a great DVD, and I hope to see that thought and care return to your DVDs in the future.

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

Other reviews by Astroknight