Virtual Voyeur

Rating

Director

Richard Gabai

Screenplay

Patrick Phillips

Length

1h 24m

Starring

Susan Featherly, Jason Schnuit, Amber Newman, Shyra Deland, Brad Bartram, Arthur Roberts, Richard Gabai, Marc Gordon, A. Michael Baldwin

MPAA Rating

R

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
There are movies that make you think about their deep subjects and honest expressionism. Then there are movies like Virtual Voyeur, which only make you wonder why films like it are made.

Susan Featherly stars as Sharon, a Silicon Valley programmer who, with her collaborator Louis (Brad Bartram), develops a virtual reality system that allows its wearer to experience the joys of sex without any messy commitment issues or sexually transmitted diseases. In preparation for a debut at a financially collapsing Las Vegas casino, the team is required to expedite its research for the project and make it ready for final implementation as soon as possible.

During their final testing, Sharon straps Louis in to experience a special program of her design, which features her own naked body to titillate his senses. She leaves for but a moment and returns to find him having a seizure that eventually translates into a full coma. Attempting to oust Sharon from her production, company executives threaten to reveal her involvement in the mental collapse of her partner. The project backfires and she’s soon en route to Las Vegas where she’ll take on a new partner, Kevin (Jason Schnuit), who is secretly trying to take over her system for the casino for which he books stage acts. It’s during his pursuit that, in order to try to avoid any information leakage to the hospital, she tries to heal Louis’ condition without medicine, using the very device that thrust him into the coma in the first place.

Although blessed with what might be one of the better plots envisioned for a soft-core pornographic film, the audience for Virtual Voyeur soon finds that the story isn’t as interesting as it had first thought. Huge plot holes abound from scene to scene. We see the visions Louis has while the virtual reality helm is on his head and he sees a strange alien that initially sends him into fits, but is rescued by his partner. This unusual image is repeated in the image that renders Louis unconscious, but is never explained, even in the last frames of the film.

Other plot holes develop when one minute Sharon lies to her parent company’s financier and the next minute, we see the two communicating as if there was no lie and that the truth had been told the entire time. This type of conceit shows later when the story indicates that Louis has died in the hospital and then a later scene tells us he’s still alive.

It’s not just screenwriter Patrick Phillips’ fault, but also the fault of the untalented performers. Featherly is wooden, uninteresting and implausible while Schnuit and Bartram come across as vague impressions of sex-starved Neanderthals with no physical or emotional depth.

Director Richard Gabai, showing his own conceitedness, even appears in the film in a credited role. This vanity is neither needed nor warranted. Great directors have often appeared in their own films, but none should be as ashamed of their achievements as Gabai. This reprehensible wreck of a film is neither entertaining nor essential.

Why this movie was made is apparent – lonely men who need a sexual boost will pick up Virtual Voyeur for plenty of female nudity and lots of intercourse for their own pleasure. Viewing it certainly won’t provide any intellectual or emotional response to its audience.

Review Written

December 11, 2002