Eden

Like its Biblical counterpart, Eden is lush and gorgeous, filled with natural beauty, astonishing scenery, and beautiful creatures. The ambitious project was shot in Hawaii and employs all kinds of modern gadgetry that make it sound and look fantastic -- HD cameras, 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround Sound, full-motion menus and whatnot -- and takes up two discs of space; DVD buyers get bloopers, outtakes, making-of featurettes, behind-the-scenes footage, auditions, and interviews and such.

Eden exists in a half-world between an all-sex feature like Island Fever and a full-on feature extravaganza like Pirates. It starts out with a robust premise -- that a half-dozen strangers have come to Eden, a Fantasy Island-type resort, to live out some kind of fantasy that they can't have on whatever mainland they're from. There's a rich businessman, an actress, a billionaire's widow, and a few others, all of whom have presumably paid a great deal of money to come to Eden for whatever it is they want.

Once on the island, they have crazy sex with each other and the staff (Evan Stone as a great-white-hunter type security man, Evan Valentine as the hot Asian maid, and Jean Val Jean as a guy who rides horses and has sex with the guests), and that's it. Bits of plot are hinted at, including a couple of orphaned references to the east side of the island, which is apparently very dangerous and forbidden to everyone. The movie ends with a scene in which Tommy Gunn discovers the Valley of Skulls and is then chased and most likely eaten by a dinosaur (one of a couple of really impressive moments of CGI, the other being a genuinely exciting shark chase).

The outtakes and featurettes hint at more plot, but none ever materializes; relationships between characters appear fully developed, without any time being taken to explain them. Natives are spoken of, although the only one we ever see is pretty clearly just Evan Stone in some war paint (his chin is unmistakable). It's like whoever was in charge of the whole thing just gave up halfway through, and Eden is caught, like Francis Dolarhyde, between being and becoming (except that Eden probably won't kill anybody). Neither unapologetic all-sex nor socially redeeming feature, Eden is kept on its feet by great sex and great scenery, finally petering out with a little tiny bang like the one Wile E. Coyote makes when he hits the ground at the bottom of the canyon.

Eden has plenty going for it, it's a gorgeous movie, like almost any movie shot in Hawaii -- it seems like it might be impossible to fuck up a movie shot in Hawaii, and porn directors have been doing it for twenty years or so now. It always works, because Hawaii is pretty, and people look good fucking there, especially if they are good-looking people to start with. You could probably sell a porn movie starring Janet Reno if you shot it in Hawaii; having Carmen Luvana, Bree Olson and Jean Val Jean in it is almost overkill. Aside from the issue that always arises when you shoot porn on a beach -- namely, that the ocean is really loud, and there's usually wind slamming across it and kicking the microphones around -- the outdoor scenes couldn't be better; if Eden suffers a little in comparison to other, less ambitious “paradise” movies by its overreaching, it makes up the ground by leaving in the natural sound, without resorting to muzak.

Nine of the ten sex scenes take place outdoors, too, four on beaches, and the sounds of sex and nature trump music every time. The female cast is uniformly hot, although Carmen Luvana's enhanced big tits are a little out of place in the midst of all the natural beauty, and Olson and Luvana are both spectacular; Evan Stone, one of porn's best comic actors, plays his role pretty straight, but he's still funny once in a while. Jerry and Jean Val Jean are just spearcarriers, pretty much, but Tommy Gunn gets to chew the scenery as a muscle-flexing hothead.

Eden is entirely worth watching if you're coming in for the sex and the scenery. Watch it on your big-screen plasma TV and delight in the next best thing to being in Hawaii (or Carmen Luvana).

Like its Biblical counterpart, Eden is lush and gorgeous, filled with natural beauty, astonishing scenery, and beautiful creatures. The ambitious project was shot in Hawaii and employs all kinds of modern gadgetry that make it sound and look fantastic. Watch it on your big-screen plasma TV and delight in the next best thing to being in Hawaii (or Carmen Luvana).... Read the Full Review!