Candida Royalle's Gift

The first example is Candida Royalle. Though her name sounds like a baroque ice-cream flavor, she's the producer-writer-director of women's erotica or pornography (choose your term) through her Femme Productions label, founded in 1984. These are sexually explicit films, edited in both "hard" and "cable" versions with a distinct feminine sensibility. As Ms. Royalle said in an interview last summer at the VSDA convention, she started making these films because she "recognized that the women's movement had enabled women to embrace our sexuality. Women were curious, and with the advent of home video, they had a safe place to look at it - at home."

She's an articulate, thoughtful advocate for her field. In dress and appearance, she looks like she'd be more at home in a PTA meeting than on a sex movie set. Anyone who saw her recent appearance on a Maury Povich Show panel discussing women in the commercial sex business will understand that.

Her first films were rather tame or "vanilla," but recently, her work has become hotter. "I sense that women are very open now," she said, "They really like their sex, they like seeing gorgeous guys. They want to see it all. They want to see men directly. They don't want to see down-and-dirty ugly stuff. They want quality and class, but they want to see 'it.'"

She does just that in The Gift. It's about an old blanket found in an attic that magically helps Liz (Shanna McCullough) and others straighten out their messed up love lives. It's a simple story told with attention to character and setting. It's also standard shot-on-video skin flick - one guy leaves his black socks on; several cast members are abundantly tattooed; some exude that gamy quality so pervasive in the genre. As for the sex scenes, they're lusty, sweaty and athletic. Does the film deliver what the target audience wants to see? Eroticism is in the mind of the beholder, so I'll leave that to individual viewers. More objectively, the shoestring budget in all too apparent in places. Videophiles expect a relatively high level of production values in any genre, and Ms. Royalle is trying to make films comparable to mainstream romances, not mainstream porn.

As she said, "We know on these budgets we can't really create much of a story but we try. Women want to get pulled into the entire scenario, the plot... you care more when you're involved with the characters. But other than that, my feeling is really that women and men are not all that different. If you strip away centuries of conditioning - which we're just beginning to do now - I think we're going to meet somewhere in the middle.

"Men have been allowed all this time to develop their own sexual proclivities. They know what gets them off, what pushes their buttons. It's right there, under their fingertips. Whereas we've been so repressed that a lot of women don't even know their fantasies. It takes work to get in touch with them. We have to be convinced that it's o.k to open up, to get our needs met.

"I think men's sexuality will become less simple and more complex. It will be influenced by women's introducing their needs, and [for] women, I think our sexuality will become more adventurous, maybe less complex."

If she's right, we're going to see a sharp escalation in the ongoing war between the sexes in the who-controls-the-remote arena.

The second confluence of video erotica and trash TV comes with Femalien 2. It's a disappointing sequel to the 1996 video premiere from Charles Band's Surrender Cinema. Star Venesa Talor (aka Vanessa Taylor) returns briefly as Kara, strange being from another world who comes to earth to discover sex. Unfortunately, nothing in this one comes close to her memorable scene of extraterrestrial bipolar gamahuche with Jacqueline Lovell (aka Sara St. James) in the original. More recently, Ms. Taylor has been identified as Jerry Springer's new squeeze.

The Gift - two stars (out of four)
Starring Shanna McCullough, Mark Davis. Written, produced and directed by Candida Royalle. Femme Productions. PHE Distribution. Unrated. Contains graphic sexual content in both "hard" and "cable" versions. approximately 80 min.