The Blowfish Blog

The Reject Bin: Girl in a Box

One of the questions that we are often asked here at Blowfish Control is: “So, what do you think about the toys / books / videos you didn’t like? What about those?” Sometimes, said question is phrased as, “Hey! You like everything that’s in your catalog! That’s suspicious!” Um, OK. For obvious reasons, we don’t add stuff we don’t like into the catalog, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have opinions about them. Thus, without further ado, allow us to introduce a new feature in the Blowfish Blog: “The Reject Bin.”

I wanted to like this one. For one thing, my favorite song by the Blake Babies is called “Girl in a Box,” so I picked this up with a certain predisposed fondness. (It turns out I would have been better off spending two hours listening to that song 50 times on repeat.)

I also thought the cover was promising — cute girl in a collar and wrist cuffs, in a box! I was expecting bondage, and while there’s a little bit of that here, it’s really rather misleading packaging, and I didn’t get what I expected.

Alas, it’s no good. The film quality is just lousy. It’s lousy in different ways, to different degrees, at different times, so I suppose they used a few bad cameras, but it’s never good. The soundtrack is also problematic, with a lot of hiss and background noise, and uneven levels. The lighting is erratic. Some of the camera angles are weird and awkward. It’s just hard to watch, like something filmed by high school amateurs with the camera they found in their dad’s closet. Which is a shame, because the performances — especially by Jennifer Steele — are good, with some real acting, and the story is promising. Steele plays a porn star who, in the first scene, divorces her husband. The rest of the movie is a series of flashbacks documenting the collapse of their relationship. Though initially excited by dating “the girl on the box cover,” he begins to be disturbed by her sexually liberated and voracious lifestyle. It’s a good premise, with lots of excuses for sex, and if it just looked and sounded better, I’d probably recommend it. As it stands, though, it was hard to watch.

In the first scene, with Steele sitting at the kitchen table with the divorce papers, the camera wobbles and trembles and shakes, not in a “cool-in-the-late-’90s-MTV-handheld-camera” way, but in a “I am a filmmaker who inexplicably lacks a tripod, so I’m just going to hold the camera as still as I possibly can” way. When I saw that, I thought “Uh oh.” And it didn’t get any better. I can’t really fault the cast, or even the script, but the crappiness of the presentation overwhelms their efforts.

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This entry was posted on Friday, 26 January 2007 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Videos, The Reject Bin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.