Down Loaded

Vivid is often unfairly stereotyped as a company that produces high-end couples friendly features with a soft edge. In fact, this stereotype is so strong that some hardcore fans avoid Vivid titles like the plague. While my opinion of Vivid isn't quite that extreme, their releases are a little soft for my taste. Therefore, when I sat down to review Down Loaded, I was expecting to see the same prima donna Vivid girls talking dirty and doing anything possible to keep the pop shot below their collar bone. To my surprise, this feature had none of that. Instead I was treated to five hot scenes with some great perfromances and even some nice facials. Short of setting me up with one of their contract girls on a Saturday night, there's few better ways to impress this reviewer than to exceed my expectations.

A few years back Jim Enright directed Vortex for VCA, and has returned to a similar sci-fi theme (and set design) for this feature. The movie opens as Sky (sporting black hair) awakens in a laboratory surrounded by scientists...or at least people dressed like scientists. As implied by their frantic questioning, she has just emerged from an experimental virtual reality session: yeah, I also thought that premise was beat to death by The Lawnmower Man movies. Anyway, when the scientists ask her what the experience was like, there's an abrupt cut suggesting a flashback sequence.

In the next frame, a shirtless Randy Spears confronts Sky with these very touching lines: "You finally made it. I've been waiting for you." Adorned in nothing but a tan trench coat, Sky lets the garment slip off her naked body in response to Spears stern but profficeint delivery. Trying not to giggle, the two quickly embrace to hide their grimaces from the camera. What follows are several long moments of kissing and fondling before Sky finally exhibits her competent oral technique on Randy's tried and proven shaft. Cupping his balls in her hand, she bobs up and down on his vertical cock, nearly swallowing his entire length. After subjecting Randy's cock to some intense sucking, Sky mounts him and impales herself with quick but controlled strokes. Randy continues the feverish pace when the two switch to missionary. When Sky kneels in a doggy position, Randy sqeezes his cock between her round butt cheeks and into her ass. While the butt fucking starts off pretty slow, after a short time Randy's taking quick full strokes deep into Sky's pooper. Instead of popping on her butt crack, Randy straddles her chest and unloads into (and on) her open mouth. Vivid or not, this is a pretty hot scene.

Although the action of the first scene is hard to top, Enright managed to capture four more hot performances to fill out his feature. The second scene involves Azlea Antistia, Sky, Dillon Day, and Erik Everhard as the four scientists celebrate the completion of their latest project; it's more like two parallel scenes than a real four way as Azlea pairs with Dillon, Sky to couple with Erik. But they both get decent facials in the end. The third scene is a nasty all girl fest with Sky, Chandler, and Chennin Blanc going at it with the support of several dildos; Chennin gets two of them jammed into her twat at once. In the fourth scene T.T. Boy joins Lola in her office for a sweat inducing desktop romp. Although T.T. Boy pinches her nose closed occasionally during the blowjob, he never really gets out of third gear, giving Lola only a small sampling of his wild-man potential. In the final scene, Sky gets it on with Ian Daniels in a pretty high energy sequence that ends with a titty fuck and a facial.

As DVDs go, Vivid rarely disappoints when it comes to disc quality and quantity of extras, and Down Loaded is no exception. Shot on digital video, the DVD tranfer looks pretty good all around with hardly any pixelation. However, the colors look sort of drab and washed out, giving the entire movie a dim look. The audio is offered in 5.1 digital surround, but the only audio present in the surround channels are the music track and some occasional sound effects; the dialogue and natural diegetic sounds are completely isolated to the center channel. On top of that, the center channel is mixed really low and even sounds overmodulated at times...not exactly the crisp audio once expects from a DVD. I appreciate the effort of 5.1 surround, but why put forth the effort if you can't pull it off successfully? I would have settled for regular stereo if it meant I didn't have to adjust the volume everytime I wanted to hear the dialogue.

As expected, Vivid has shoveled a ton of non-related extras onto this disc. But fans will be happy to know that they've included four bonus scenes featuring Sky. There's also a few other grab-bag bonus scenes included too. Most meaningful of the extras (at least to the feature) are the multiple angles. Like most of Vivid's other discs, the multiple angles aren't true, meaning the two secondary angles aren't synchronized with the sound of the primary angle and are most likely similar footage thrown in under the guise of a different camera persepctive. These angles aren't provided throughout the entire feature, but rather at key moments indicated by an icon that appears in the bottom right-hand corner. Fortunately, Vivid has provided an option to turn off the angle indicator, allowing viewers to watch the whole movie without being bothered by that annoying icon or the angles themselves.

Down Loaded isn't a great movie by any means, but the scenes were much hotter than I expected. The narrative is a mess and altogehter laughable, but all of the sex scenes are really good, especially if you like Sky. Although I prefer her with blonde hair, Sky is a great performer and appears in four out of the five scenes providing fans with four solid reasons to pick up this disc.