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Seven Deadly Sins: Gluttony
Rating: 4 Stars
Produced by Dan Cross. Written, photographed, and directed by Wash West. Edited by Andrew Rosen. Music by Bowling Green and Rod Whiskey. Starring Eric Hanson, Tanner Hayes, Rod Barry, Anthony Cox, Troy Michaels, Tony Pacino, Anthony DeAngelo, Diego Stefano, and (in non-sexual roles) Mickey Skee, Thor Stephans, Johnny Johnston, Reina Rica, and Chi Chi LaRue.
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In The Picture of Dorian Gray, an actress named Sybil Vane falls fatally in love with the title character. In this addition to All Worlds Video's Seven Deadly Sins cycle, a film student named Cyril Vane (Tanner Hayes) becomes obsessed with an early pornstar called Dorian (Eric Hanson), a shadowy figure with large, unappeasable appetites. Masquerading as The Porno Picture of Dorian Gray, Vane's thesis film, Wash West's Gluttony is a one-of-a-kind convergence of Oscar Wilde and Wakefield Poole.

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Vane tells how Dorian's poses in a found '60s beefcake mag entranced him as a boy. We're shown portions of Original Sin, an archaic piece of super-8 erotica in which Dorian and Diego Stefano (as Adam and Steve?), bounce around the Garden of Eden in period g-strings. We're told that the film's inclusion of hard-core sex is "revolutionary for the period." (What's really revolutionary for the period is the use of condoms.) Like much of Wash West's best work, the sequence segues quickly from funny to hot.

We also see excerpts from Muscle Car, a homoerotic hommage to Russ Meyer that Dorian directed in the '70s, and Lick It Up, a '90s food-porn video that marks Dorian's return to directing after a hiatus as a chef. A glimpse of Dorian in Lick It Up, where he accidentally appears in a mirror, reveals that the porn legend's looks have remained unchanged for 35 years.

The key to this mystery is contained in Narcissus Rising, Dorian's hard-core film debut; Dorian has the only copy of its single reel. When Vane and Dorian finally connect, they watch the film and have sex. Hanson and Hayes work together with an intensity that makes the 90-minute buildup to their encounter seem earned. Gluttony's denouement is reserved for Redemption, a forthcoming omnibus wrap-up of the series, but its climactic moments, seen here, won't surprise viewers familiar with Wilde.

Elaborately shot on film and videotape, Gluttony combines talking-heads interviews, mock reenactments, fake documentary footage, film parodies, and four bouts of blistering sex. It all adds up to a sly critique of the rules of attraction. Wash West is a porn virtuoso.