Bi Friends

When I first looked at the box for Bi Friends, something seemed strange. The overly dark and washed-out pictures on the back hinted that the video itself might suffer from the same affliction, but I thought nothing of it. Until I began to watch... but more on that in a second.

Bi Friends is split into four scenes. The first is a threesome between Sharon Kane, hunky Alec Powers and director/writer/producer Crystal Crawford. The big surprise (which won't be much of one to the perceptive) is that Crystal is a transsexual, whose penis is soon revealed and given the tongue treatment. The oral lovin' is spread around plentifully before Alec and Sharon fuck (with Crystal lending a helping hand every so often). The confusing thing about this scene is that at the very end, Crystal suddenly disappears and it finishes as a straight sex scene between Alec and Sharon. Hmmm...

Next up is a solo masturbation scene with Rip Stone. Rip is a very muscular stud with a nice cock and big hairy balls. So watching him pleasure himself is a good nine minute diversion (although hearing some background noise would've been better!). At one point he rubs his cock over his own ass crack?nice.

After Rip's solo, Tim Boyde and Si Thompson get it on in a gay sex scene. There's some excellent deep throating here where each guy gets his mouth all the way around each other's dicks. They fuck, but unfortunately the camera misses the cumshot at the end (instead you get a pan shot of before and after), but it's still one of the better scenes content-wise.

Lastly comes a 35-minute scene between Blade Thompson and Sharon Kane. This is where it really goes downhill. At least three bits of this scene are shown twice?including one shot where Blade's condom slips off and he has to slide it back on. It's exactly the same shot. I found at least two other duplicated shots too. There's a hint at the beginning of the scene that this will be a threesome with Rip Stone, but alas, that never happens.

This disc has a lot of problems. The first thing I noticed when I popped was the video quality. It's like it was filmed with a camcorder from the mid-'90s?the video is soft and grainy. The other problem is the lighting?everything is so washed out that it looks like whoever's filming is wearing one of those miner's helmets with the lights attached to the front. Even worse, about two dozen times during the video (or more, I lost count) a weird distorted pattern of colored noise flashes on the screen for a single frame. This happened at the same spot every time on my standalone and DVD-ROM player.

The video isn't quite as shameful as the audio. Background music comes entirely from the left speaker, with other sound/dialogue coming from the right. But 90% of the time, the right speaker is completely silent because when they aren't talking there is no sound! No moaning, no sounds of skin slapping together?just silence. The other audio problem is that the music skips! The video is running along fine, and the music sounds as if the CD player providing the tunes is having skipping problems and there are occasionally jarring beeps of distortion - again, on two different players.

Instead of chapters, whoever put this DVD together thought it would be better to divide everything up into "titles" on the disc. That means that you can't skip forwards or backwards between scenes because each scene is on a separate title and is one chapter long. If you want to go back to something you have to stop the disc and select the scene from the chapter select menu. I think because of this, the disc caused my Sony DVP S300 to suddenly freeze and stop between three of the four scenes (and after the blowjob and cumshot extras). I tried it on the DVD-ROM drive in my computer and it skipped at scene changes, but didn't freeze. So your results may vary depending on what player you're using.

The main menu has no sound, it's just a short clip from the flick with text over it. Special features are just a collection of blow job and cumshot clips from the film itself, previews of some other flicks and a plug for their web site. Generally speaking, I like to check out the previews on DVDs just in case there are other titles I don't know about that look good, but not on this disc. The previews section is filled with trailers for pee, fatty, and granny sex vids that made me gag and immediately hit STOP (but not before being horribly scarred for life!). The small video thumbnails give no warning of their content. I have no idea how anyone could find those videos erotic in any way - they're certainly not for me.

If it wasn't for the video, audio and disc problems, this would be an average release. The sex isn't great, but it's not bad. The camerawork is passable, the editing and video quality leave a lot of be desired and there's no audio (just music), but the actors are doing a good job putting on a show. Unless you don't care about quality in your porno, skip this one.