Dream Machine

The hundreds of Penthouse feature videos, usually made by Kelly Holland and Cash Markman, are cookie cutter filmmaking, fairly uninteresting and oh so routine. Bud Lee and his talented writer George Kaplan provide something different, and surprisingly rewarding (especially if, like me, you're plowing through dozens of these tiresome efforts with little to show for it).

This is a fantasy whose structure is oddly similar to Brad Armstrong's 2013 big- budget clunker "Underworld". Picture-perfect beauty Krisi Simms is unconscious, and from a small stylized room (in her imagination - in reality she' s stuck in a hospital bed) dreams up the sexual escapades depicted in six vignettes. In Brad's version it was Jessica Drake unconscious in the hospital with similar, though highly expensive, sexual set pieces conjured up.

Like other Penthouses, the vignette structure is what matters, but Lee & Kaplan manage to invest some ongoing interest in Simms' fate. Taking notes, I was just about to write down "predictable" when reaching the final scene but instead they provide an ambiguous finish which caught me off guard and was thought- provoking, not the norm for either porn or mainstream films of this genre.

Simms is so obscure an actress that IMDb has garbled her credits covering soft and hard core assignments under both the Simms name and "Liz Katz", who sounds like she should be working with Michael Sheen on Showtime. Simms remains an enigma here, physically right for the role but restricted in her performance by the character's arc: either lying unconscious or humping (or masturbating). The supporting cast is fine but this is not your typical "spotlight" video where a parade of beauties vies for attention -it's more of a story-driven, moody piece.