Gay Video Review	Gay Video Reviews Archive

High Desert
Rating: 3 Stars
Produced by Drew Warner. Directed by Nancy Nathan. Videography by Richard Zen, John Simms, and Brian Stone. Edited by Tango Blues Entertainment. Starring Dean Phoenix, Dylan Reece, Jack Ryan, Troy Michaels, Nick Young, Jeremy Tucker, Austin Masters, and Betty Grub.
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Shot on the periphery of Joshua Tree National Park, about 30 miles from Palm Springs, High Desert at its best has visual qualities in common with John Rutherford's Absolute: Arid, and makes effective use of one of the Falcon production's Australian stars, Dylan Reece. This is the directorial debut of lesbian writer/photographer Nancy Nathan, whose credits include a stint at The Advocate. One of the few women to venture behind the camera in gay adult video, Nathan applies a romantic sensibility to the material. The five sex sequences in High Desert are short on intensity, but have sensuous, gentle qualities rare in gay porn. Some passages are quietly, surprisingly hot.

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The plotless action is a succession of shifting sexual partnerships among men encamped in the desert. Dean Phoenix and Jack Ryan make love in front of their tent; Jeremy Tucker, Nick Young, and Troy Michaels investigate one another's possibilities in the back of a pickup truck; Marc Anthony tops Dylan Reece in the shadow of a giant boulder. Nick Young, who deserved more prominent billing, seems transported into sexual Valhalla as Reece sucks his cock and Ryan rubs against him like a cat in heat. The final segment, in which white-trash hunk Austin Masters catches Young peering into his trailer and summarily fucks him, is marred by awkward staging and an off-the-wall last-minute appearance by a personage called Betty Grub as Masters's significant other.