Emerald Straps It On 3

"Emerald Straps It On 3," according to the box cover, stars Emerald, Skylar, Paige, Karma, and Mona Lisa. Five girls - just enough for Emerald ("at it again, dunking dildos with her friends") to pair with each of the others for the usual four scenes of all-girl sex. Ah, but box covers can be deceiving. Blonde Emerald blows the gag in the first scene when she introduces two of her co-stars, Karma and Skylar Paige. Having just rolled two girls into one, Emerald goes on to announce that she isn't even in the first scene, she's just introducing it, thereby putting us on notice that we might as well forget about our expectations and just sit back and watch what happens.

What happens is really a bit bizarre. Emerald's movie is only three scenes long. Skylar and Karma get things rolling, Emerald pairs with Mona Lisa next, then all four girls find themselves together in bed to wind things up. That's the end of "Emerald Straps It On." What follows is a jarring juxtaposition of talent and technique as scene four wings it way in from the 80s. I can't place the source, but the scene, starring Sharon Mitchell, looks like an "Aerobisex Girls" clone; "Aerobisex" was produced in 1983. Scene five, which shows six girls working out, is more from the same, but incomplete, ending just when the girls start making out.

All-girl fans may well remember Sharon Mitchell, whose performances bore out her admission that she preferred working with women. Wesley Emerson counted on this recognition when he cast Sharon as a director of all-girl porn in "No Man's Land 16," and Sharon herself played up to her reputation when she exhorted one of her stars to give her partner a lick for her. Her scene in this film, from her glory days, is a fair demonstration of her seemingly genuine desire for girl-girl sex. Only fair because she's to do her best work on her partner's back. It's a three-way. While Sharon's bent over one girl, a third is working anal beads into both their asses. Nevertheless, Sharon works it for as much as she can, moaning and rubbing her body back and forth with real excitement. In many such scenes, inserting and extracting the beads is an act unto itself; here, when it comes time to extract them, the chick pulling them out simultaneously pumps each girl with a vibrator for additional stimulation. It's a reasonably good scene, though it is out of place and time on this disc.

What connection Sharon's scene has to the rest of the film is the strap-on dildo. Every scene but the last, truncated one features this toy. Technically, the title, though misleading, is accurate: Emerald does "strap it on" in the final, four-girl romp. In scene two, rather than using it herself, she instead takes it both ways from Mona Lisa. None of the strap-on sequences are among the film's best, but Emerald is one of those girls who needs a prop or two to enhance her performance. She is not, in other words, a particularly good practitioner of the art of pussy-eating, which, to her, means clit-licking and only clit-licking. That may (or may not) be good enough for her partners, but when I watch a girl eating pussy, I want to see her tongue deep in labial folds. If her partner's naturally wet, I want to know that she's getting a good taste of her.

Karma performs best in this regard, in her first scene with Skylar. She's working at it, too, because she forgoes eye contact to maintain her concentration. Eye contact in the real world might be a turn-on, but in adult films it's all but a necessity; it helps establish a rapport between the actresses and contributes to that sense of shared experience that heightens the eroticism of the scene. This film generally lacks any sympathetic connection between the girls. One position follows another without a commensurate increase in sexual excitement. It's not exactly sex by numbers, but it's not terribly stimulating either. The last scene is the silliest: it's four girls, two couples, each of whom mirrors the other's actions for the better part of the scene. At least you know you're not missing anything when the camera is focused on one or the other.

"Emerald Straps It On 3" is both short and sexually tepid. Yet the most telling thing that can be said of this contemporary film's three scenes is that they don't compare well to what is in all honesty an average scene from a film made 15-20 years ago.