Girls Home Alone 17

"Girls Home Alone 17" is a masturbation movie with a twist. In what appears to be a departure from the norm, this time out the girls are not, in fact, alone; each is visited instead by a sexual psychopath and to masturbate for his amusement. It gets better, too. Guess who the psychopath is? None other than me and you, that's who. He's the camera, and the camera is us. It's kind of a warm up, I guess, for when we're ready to take that next step to becoming a virtual .

So, okay, maybe it isn't much worse than all those slasher flicks that implicated us in the murder and of innocent young boys and girls. Lord knows I watched a lot of those movies when I was younger, though mostly, I think, to get a glimpse of the tramp's tits before she got whonked on the head or whatever. When I got older and discovered porn, these films lost a great deal of their allure. And maybe that's the problem here: "Girls Home Alone 17" is, paradoxically, an adult kids' movie. It's explicit hardcore presented in a rebellious teenage framework.

But it doesn't work, not even on this level, and that's the real problem. The slasher flicks, after all, were horror movies, and they were all of a piece. The suspense, murder, and mayhem all struck basically the same note; the teenage shenanigans only served to sound that note more loudly. Here, the girls' fear of the intruder clashes mightily with the sex, negating the excitement of the latter instead of emphasizing it.

Bobby Rinaldi, who directed this picture, gave himself a loophole to crawl through if anyone was nutty enough to criticize his work here. You see, these girls, though fearful, actually get turned on by their situation. All 12 of them. Just so long as the pervert-their word, not mine-keeps his distance, they're good. Well, not so good that they aren't still frightened or "creeped out," but good enough to get off. And that makes it okay, right? Right?

The girls' performances swing wildly from semi-believable to utterly outrageous. Sandy Knight is the first to be assaulted, and I suspect she's first because she most nearly sounds the chord Rinaldi is looking for, that discordant mixture of fear and sex. It's hard to get into the sex, though, when she's continually begging the intruder not to hurt her. We've got to get off on her fear to enjoy the scene.

Miss Arroyo and Brandi Starz star in one of the film's most ridiculous scenes. I think they're supposed to be college chicks or something; at any rate, I had the impression they were in a dorm room. They're just hanging out, lying on the bed, getting into the mood when the intruder walks in on them. Far from being afraid, they all but invite him into bed with them. Well, hell, they were going to have sex anyway, so who cares if some creep wants to watch? (Maybe they'd have been a little more distracted had he wanted to see a little lesbian action because that's not what they're into evidently. This is the film's only two-girl scene, but it's strictly side-by-side masturbation.)

Of course, it's hard to take this film seriously, but while I'll grant you that we're probably not supposed to, it isn't to Rinaldi's credit that we can't. There's nothing witty about this film; it's not as though Rinaldi has made or even attempted the porn equivalent of a black comedy. We don't laugh at the scenes, we scoff at them. And it would be unfair to lay the blame on the girls. Yes, their performances are amateurish; yes, they're all over the emotional map; but look what they had to work with.

I'll go that one better: what entertainment value this film possesses is thanks to a couple of the girls, who don't so much rise above the material as work around it. Alex Foxe gets some pretty good mileage out of a crystal dildo and Kym Regal does some impressive hands-free work with a dildo she's propped up on her blanket. Absent the draining influence of the intruder, these two scenes might have been pretty hot.

But the bottom line is, they're not. Whether you take this film seriously or treat it as a joke, you can't get away from the premise - and just try getting off when you're either feeling queasy or laughing your ass off.