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Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Caballero had several Andrew Blake classics in its catalog, including Night Trips, Night Trips II, Secrets, and House of Dreams. But Caballero went out of business a few years back. Comes the DVD era and David Entertainment licenses the rights to those films and releases them, all but this one, on DVD. David then, apparently, goes belly up. Caballero rises Phoenix-like from the ashes and decides there’s money to be made by releasing selections from its library on DVD. Night Trips II was a logical place to start. (Strangely enough, however, Caballero also released new versions of NTI and Secrets, which had already been released by David).

I had hoped David would release NTII on DVD, because it is just about my favorite porn flick of all time. I actually prefer it to NTI, because it has Racquel Darrien (at age 21) plus I was never a big Tori Welles fan (she’s too agressively slatternly for my taste.)

Since this film has been out for ten years, you should all know the plot. Just for review, however, the plot revolves around something called the "Mindscan Foundation," where the doctors can hook you up to electrodes and see your erotic dreams on the TV monitor (yeah, right, whatever). Mindscan is sort of an outpatient clinic for the sexually obsessed.

Paula Price is the sexually obsessed young lady in this feature. She must be well to do, because she lives in a mansion and drives a Porsche. Randy Spears is the doctor, and Cheri Taylor (there’s a blast from the past) is his nurse. She’s such a bad actress that its worth the price of the disk to hear her try to stammer out the line, "There’s no diminishing of her sexual desire!" There are several masturbation scenes and lesbian romps, a Paula Price/Eric Price coupling, a Taylor/Spears coupling, a three way with Randy West and, best of all, a scene with 21 year old Racquel Darrien and boyfriend Derrick Lane. That last copulation is about the most gorgeous sex scene ever filmed. (By the way, there just isn’t enough of Darrien on DVD. DVD Empire lists only about ten titles).

The film is still the beautiful achievement it always was. Nice jazz sound track, too. Unfortunately, this is only a mediocre transfer to DVD. The biggest problem is that the chapter stops skip a couple of seconds of the movie. On my Toshiba player, they created 2 to 3 seconds of blank screen; on my computer DVD drive, they just skipped the footage and went on. Fortunately, there are only five chapter stops.

The next problem is that the bit rate is just too slow to give as good an image quality as DVD is capable of. It’s also very difficult to transfer these old Andrew Blake films to DVD, because he used a soft focus technique. On tape, the soft focus just looks blurry, on a DVD wihtout an extremely high bit rate, it tends to look grainy and pixelated. Nevertheless, it is amazing how even a mediocre DVD transfer looks better than a videotape. I compared the DVD to the tape by using the TV’s PIP function and the DVD picture was usually markedly better. The last scene, however, developed some horizontal color streaking, and its image quality actually fell below that of the tape. The sound was about the same, with the DVD sound only very slightly improved.

I recommend this disk for hardcore fans of Andrew Blake (like me) and Racquel Darrien fans (like everyone). It’s also suitable for couples (and has no anal scenes). Raincoaters who don’t like Blake should skip it (indeed, they won’t be reading this review).

Now if only VCA would give the royal VCA treatment to an Andrew Blake Film in the VCA library called "Desire" (released by Penthouse as "The Art of Desire"), I would be a happy man. That film has Darrien and Savanna (Please forward this review to Russ Hampshire).

As for Caballero, If they’re going to continue to release their library of old films in the DVD format, and rumor has it that "8 to 4" and "Amanda by Night" are scheduled for release, they’d better work out the technical glitches and do first rate DVD transfers. Otherwise, no one’s going to want to upgrade.

Review – Night Trips II (Paula Price, Erica Boyer, Lauren Hall, Racquel Darrian, Andrew Blake)