Jodi West represents a femme correlative to the famous Management concept, I'll name it the Petra Principle. She was a personable, successful porn actress in Lesbian Cinema, not a star but a useful player, who decided to start her own XXX empire in Florida teamed with hubby Jay. The result is Forbidden Fruit Films, a consistently low-brow and low-grade porn purveyor exploiting the fake incest craze and touting itself as the pre-eminent source of "taboo" porn, merely a marketing gimmick to capitalize on Kirdy Stevens' classic '80s films.
Like their local ancestors, Bang Bros., they are successful in turning out cheap product without the overhead of quality Chatsworth purveyors on the Left Coast. But everything from scripts, photography, editing and acting is deficient.
I was taken aback at the low quality of these Jodi-directed (and self-consciously starring her too) efforts a year or two ago, and gave up on them. But casting an underutilized performer I admire, Amber Lynn Bach, brought me back to the table, and her vehicle "Accidentally Lesbian" proves to be enjoyable, if sharing the same faults as its FFF brethren.
Jodi's approach is perilously close to gonzo, as her scenarios are paper-thin, ill- thought-out and poorly performed by a cast just as committed to the all-sex approach as she is. Fortunately the untalented local male contingent is absent from this all-girl show, with yucky Levi Cash banished to being camera man only for a change.
Bach's segment has her paired with local Florida performer Ashlynn Taylor, who 8- months-pregnant starred in Jodi's "Family Ties & Little White Lies", which I previously reviewed in IMDb. In the BTS short subject talking to Ashlynn & Amber, Jodi mis-remembers that feature, but seems proud of its risqué "sex with pregnant girl" content.
This time around Ashlynn is back to jail-bait status, thin and naive, so Amber finds easy pickings seducing the young girl. Their scene is poorly photographed - apparently Jodi never learned basic camera technique working for Girlfriends Films and other labels as an actress, as her handling of reverse shots is poor and much of the scene is photographed in long shot as if the crew set up a tripod and left for a lunch break. I enjoyed Amber's acting and her hot bod sex action, but the rest of the feature is generic porn.
Typically inept is Jodi staging a car-crash, when Mary Jane bumps into Totally Tabitha's parked car. Poorly improvised dialog makes their relationship confusing but I got the drift that Tab is apparently her step-mom or something like that. It's just an excuse for another seduction, and so it goes for four segments. One of them stars Jodi herself, walking through her usual Chatty Cathy routine.
The BTS is the only interesting content on the DVD, as suddenly AnnaBelle Lee pops up to kibbutz with the cast, and we find out that she was handling the camera for one scene, uncredited. Jodi and Jay do not use a professional crew it would seem, and the sloppy footage that results is the price they pay for being cheapskates.
I've bought the sequel and will be watching it on a slow, slow Saturday afternoon anon. These amateur efforts, in which 90% of the creative juices go into creating a good-looking box cover (just as porn has emphasized marketing over content dating all the way back to the video boom of the '80s) have value for calibrating the quality of mainstream product by comparison -otherwise they are a complete waste of the viewer's time.
