The Lover’s Gude on PAL Laserdisc

• Cat. No: MLG 001
• Cert: 18
• Running time: 63 minutes
• Sides: 2 (CAV)
• Year: 1991
• Pressing: UK, 1996
• Chaptered: YES
• Sound: Stereo
• Fullscreen
• Price: £29.99
  

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  Director:

  Simon Ludgate

  ‘Starring’:

  Dr. Andrew Stanway
  various men and women in assorted states of dress, undress and arousal

Never having seen this when it was out on VHS, I must confess I was at least mildly curious about it. It doesn’t need a genius to work out it’s an attempt to marry (no pun intended) hard core porn footage with the sex education genre. Closer to the truth is, it’s a great way to make a cheap buck (and has already done so on videotape).

Opening intro (Chapter 2) has the fully clothed (I suppose we should be grateful) Dr. Andrew Stanway who apparently wrote the text (but then, if we believe the back cover blurb rather than the credits, he also directed the film – so who knows?) droning on boringly to camera to make the whole thing respectable (with source footage so poor you can’t even read the book spines on the shelf behind him).

Then, as the proceedings run through their allotted sections – with such tacky titles as Arousal – Male, Arousal – Female, Overcoming Shyness – we are treated (or rather subjected) to a series of tableaux involving lone masturbators of either sex going at it and couples performing extremely explicit acts with one another. (Yes folks, this disc contains erect penises in vast numbers).

But unlike great moments in the cinema, explicit or otherwise, where various elements of the filmmaker’s and dramatist’s art can combine into something truly erotic, the overall effect here is unintentionally silly and – perhaps because of the overly clinical voice-overs – occasionally hilarious. We would stress “occasionally”, however, over and above “hilarious”.

The couples are uniformly model shapes and sizes (tough if you happen to be short, big, or anything else other than ‘average’) and their homes’ interiors generally look far too much like a home furnishings showroom to lend any gravity to their acts.

Images look like they were shot on videotape not film, with rather basic lighting, making it hard to justify an LD version. Still, if you are the sort of person(s) liable (a truly frightening concept, this) to wear holes in the VHS version of The Lover’s Guide with constant freeze framing, then this CAV disc is obviously for you. Otherwise, as the first release for a new PAL LD label, it’s a pretty poor start.