This fairly generic fetish porn from Brit director Kendo has solved for me the riddle of the maestro's career: it shows the fetish/gonzo roots from whence he sprung, and helps explain the emotional emptiness and distancing of most of his more stylish recent work.
I've seen several of Mr. K's videos made over a decade ago, of which "White Knights & Pink Maidens" (which I'm currently adding to IMDb) is the most interesting. He was toiling in the shadow of the great kink actress- director Tanya Hyde, with mundane results.
So his scores of bigger-budget efforts for labels like daring! media, Private and Marc Dorcel are more mainstream in content, but stuck in the rut of his training: fetish, fetish, more fetish. The emphasis on penetrations, often extreme ones at that, also seems incompatible for a "couples/romance" genre director in which the latter-day MILFS and/or jail-bait specialist makes his livelihood (see: his many Dorcel features).
Back in this 2004 opus which gives its title to his label "Erotic Flesh Productions", Kendo sets up couples or threesomes that bear his trademarks: fetish-clad women admired but coolly, diffidently by seemingly "couldn't care less" men, who deign to hump them as if some lord of the manor granting a tenant lady some privilege. Bored and aloof sums up the mood of a Kendo classic, be it made just after the millennium or today, and that is the chief stumbling block for me to become involved with them. The recent ones I've enjoyed, notably Kendo's Merry Christmas, triumph due to a sneaky eroticism and that cooler-than-thou irony.
The five segments here benefit from avoiding the avant-garde editing style of K's later work, with the sex presented in 5 straight-forward segments. The women are dressed in latex and large dildos (one doubled over for maximum stretching power) are employed to Hyde-like impress the viewer with a "how did she take all that?" gonzo reaction. Some of the fetish content is oddball, as in nurses' red-cross laden uniforms made of latex, but the British tendency toward kink is ever-present. Alicia Rhodes, one of Tanya Hyde's best performers, stands out here too, while the male participants go uncredited.
Final segment features one aloof gent who only handles his two women at a bar with black gloves carefully donned, and his stance in dark glasses suitably takes the place of the director's POV. This signature segment benefits from cheery lounge music playing, creating the same effect so wonderfully achieved a decade later on the SyFy Channel's TV series "Helix". In a way, these British dungeon BDSM/fetish videos often conjure up a similar mood to Gothic SF epics so the coincidence makes sense. Or to put it another way, if Ridley Scott had failed in his TV commercials and later large-scale movies careers, he could easily have made a living cranking out BDSM porn.
I've seen several of Mr. K's videos made over a decade ago, of which "White Knights & Pink Maidens" (which I'm currently adding to IMDb) is the most interesting. He was toiling in the shadow of the great kink actress- director Tanya Hyde, with mundane results.
So his scores of bigger-budget efforts for labels like daring! media, Private and Marc Dorcel are more mainstream in content, but stuck in the rut of his training: fetish, fetish, more fetish. The emphasis on penetrations, often extreme ones at that, also seems incompatible for a "couples/romance" genre director in which the latter-day MILFS and/or jail-bait specialist makes his livelihood (see: his many Dorcel features).
Back in this 2004 opus which gives its title to his label "Erotic Flesh Productions", Kendo sets up couples or threesomes that bear his trademarks: fetish-clad women admired but coolly, diffidently by seemingly "couldn't care less" men, who deign to hump them as if some lord of the manor granting a tenant lady some privilege. Bored and aloof sums up the mood of a Kendo classic, be it made just after the millennium or today, and that is the chief stumbling block for me to become involved with them. The recent ones I've enjoyed, notably Kendo's Merry Christmas, triumph due to a sneaky eroticism and that cooler-than-thou irony.
The five segments here benefit from avoiding the avant-garde editing style of K's later work, with the sex presented in 5 straight-forward segments. The women are dressed in latex and large dildos (one doubled over for maximum stretching power) are employed to Hyde-like impress the viewer with a "how did she take all that?" gonzo reaction. Some of the fetish content is oddball, as in nurses' red-cross laden uniforms made of latex, but the British tendency toward kink is ever-present. Alicia Rhodes, one of Tanya Hyde's best performers, stands out here too, while the male participants go uncredited.
Final segment features one aloof gent who only handles his two women at a bar with black gloves carefully donned, and his stance in dark glasses suitably takes the place of the director's POV. This signature segment benefits from cheery lounge music playing, creating the same effect so wonderfully achieved a decade later on the SyFy Channel's TV series "Helix". In a way, these British dungeon BDSM/fetish videos often conjure up a similar mood to Gothic SF epics so the coincidence makes sense. Or to put it another way, if Ridley Scott had failed in his TV commercials and later large-scale movies careers, he could easily have made a living cranking out BDSM porn.