Full Moon Video | Buy at Amazon | Review by Sinferno
In the early nineties "Virtual Reality" was the tech buzzword of the day. As the promise of technology and computer processing power began to double exponentially, Sci-fi writers,digital engineers and even mild mannered geek gamers everywhere, began to dream of the technology the new millennium would bring, a day where we interacted with the world inside a computer not with joysticks or external controls, but by being able to experience digital environments through not only through the senses of sight and sound, but by taste, touch and smell. Just as in the case of the flying cars that sci-fi movie makers have been promising us since 1950, virtual reality is still an embryonic concept, even almost a decade into the new millennium. Who among us didn't watch Star Trek the Next Generation in this era and fantasize about having a Holodeck of our own; a private, programmable arena where we could hold bloody arena battles to death against fictitious enemies where no one actually got hurt, and afterward gala celebratory orgies with drone women where we suffered no ill social consequence for our immoral behavior? If you had similar fantasies, and I can tell by your guilty grins and nodding heads out there that more than a few of you did, well let me say that VIRTUAL ENCOUNTERS is from this bygone day where virtual reality was THE license to dream and until Nintendo comes out with a new game called Wiifuck, this product might be the closest you get to Virtual Sex (short of humping your T.V.) at least for several more decades. So let's jack in, shall we?
VIRTUAL ENCOUNTERS is the story of Amy, a beautiful bored executive type who feels no passion toward her boyfriend. As the ultimate selfless (and ultimately a self-serving) present, he buys her a gift package from a place called Virtual Encounters where she can go and experience the innermost, private recesses of her own sexuality without judgment or pressure, even as she is casually talked, (seduced actually) in to all manner of coupling by the computer named "Rob" whose personality is smooth, every bit as sexually manipulative as the horny, all seeing, all-knowing computer from Demonseed yet whose voice sounds exactly like KITT on the new and recently canceled Knight Rider series (voiced by Val Kilmer). You know the voice? It always said things like: "Sensors detect a soft-core porn premise, Michael. I suggest you proceed with caution..."
Anyhow, once Amy shows up and gets plugged in to the machine with the requisite high tech helmet and blue, form fitting blue Lycra body suit she starts to visit different vignettes, each which represent a different part of her sexual drives. There's a strip club, a cave, and a romantic candlelit bedroom scene, but I am assuming that deep Freudian dream analysis would be wasted here so I am not going to go into great details. The one thing that does become obvious as she visits scene after scene of sex in strange fantastical places is just how much Amy is beginning to enjoy herself. At first she is merely content to silently watch other people have relations, but soon enough as Amy explores deeper into the realm of her own fantasies she herself becomes the star of the show, engaging in scenes, embracing different sexualities, even as experienced through different bodies. Yes that's right, in three consecutive scenes she shifts from playing the erotic dancer at a club, to a lesbian making out with her girlfriend in a concrete water fountain, to a cave guy, having sex with a hot cave girl. Each one of these scenes is portrayed by a series of different actors, one of which Amy "becomes" at the beginning of the scene. You know this, because she looks down at her hands (or her penis where applicable) as if seeing them for the first time, all the while Rob the computer justifies the bizarre otherworldly change in player saying something like "You always fantasized about being dominant/subservient/represented by another actress in your own sexual fantasies so here you go." By the time the film focuses on her and another women involved in a final S+M routine with full bondage restraints, I finally think I know what the problem is regarding Amy's frigidity, she is a lesbian! But nevertheless, at the close of the movie, Amy gets so worked up she drives straight to work then has sex with her beau right on her desktop the moment he walks in and even afterward as she and her lover lay nestled together in an impromptu afterglow, she picks up her phone and invites her sexy secretary (who she had been flirting with for the duration of the film) to come her office for a minute...Damn. Someone's going for the high score.
And that is pretty much the crux of the film. The name VIRTUAL ENCOUNTERS is a ponderous, pretentious name for an movie full of simulated sex, perhaps as much of an oxymoron as the classification "soft porn" itself. But if you are a fan of soft-core, or you are like most women, there is much here to put the tingle in your input port. The different scenes are so thematic that you won't care that they don't make a whole lot of sense, and being the fact that Amy can warp into different sex scenes featuring entirely different actresses without so much as a brief and usual ponderous character exposition, this film does promise a lot of bang for your buck, especially since it runs about an hour and a half. Knowing the budget, content and intellectual limitations of these sorts of films, my only gripe is I wish it would have had a villain character to cause some sort of conflict, a sense of danger. For example if the male computer "Rob" itself would have short circuited, became obsessed; went all Tron MCP on Amy the minute it saw her naked, it would have been a better film. Moreover, some special effects would have been nice to show the transition of Amy into different characters, but because this film is from 1996 I am willing to forgive this as morphing technology was neither available or affordable to most studios at this time. While this sexy sci-fi look into the future was neither about virtual reality or actual human encounters, it does go to show how much personal computers have become a part of our every facet of our daily life in 2009. Amy is just the first person to use technology itself as a vibrator. In this capacity Virtual's unrated antics are both a false silicon promise of a technosexual future that never fully loaded plus a gigabyte of silicone boobs to boot.
| Yucko/Neato Factor: It plays like a computer dating service as envisioned by William Gibson and sponsored by Ecstasy. Filled with sensual, immersive scenes of thematic sexuality. I give it a three, but I will add a finger if you are either a woman or an shy, antisocial, technophile geek who has never actually dated one. But beware, as this is NOT an actual virtual reality product it may cause carpal tunnel, especially among the aforementioned users. |
 |
| Production Values: The settings are varied, the women are perfect looking. So-many-breasts... I-can't concentrate-about-holes-in-futuristic-world-vision... |
|
| Realism: If this is what computers actually could do in the new millennium I wouldn't have the time (or strength) to write this review. |
 |
| Value for Price: For $9.98 I would rather own this flawed vision of an alternate technological reality than most of the MATRIX films on Blu-ray. |
 |
| Plot: The plot of VIRTUAL ENCOUNTERS is that "once you lose your virtue, you have more encounters". Actually it isn't, but compared to the actual storyline of the movie that really doesn't exist to begin with, that witty lie is better than anything else that could be said about it. |
|
