Michelle was away in Florida this weekend visiting her brother. Since I had the house to myself, I gravitated towards my usual “stay up very late” schedule, something I do naturally but which only really happens when I have the house to myself because I can make as much noise as I want without worrying about waking anybody up.

I was flicking idly through the TV channels around 1am, when I saw that City TV was showing an “adults only” movie (I know this because, upon looking it up in the TV guide, that’s the category under which they’d listed it) – this one brilliantly titled “Deviant Obsession”.

I was intrigued to see how what kind of fare this would provide, and to determine how much leeway public stations might have, so I watched about 15 minutes of it. Let’s just say that, aside from satisfying my intellectual curiosity, it was a total waste of my time. Frankly, I really don’t know at exactly what audience it might have been targeted.

The acting was terrible, and any kind of explicit sexuality was either never filmed or edited out. (Most likely it was never filmed, because a cursory search on this movie doesn’t mention anything about there being a more hardcore version available, with the one broadcast being just the “sanitized” version. Unlike some adult movies that have a legitimate hardcore version as well as a tamed down version that’s shown in hotels.) So, essentially the only thing that you’re exposed to is a lot of naked breasts, gymnastics that at least appear to be indicative of something actually happening, and a good amount of fake moaning. Apparently even female genitalia is out, at least in the bits I saw, which is quite ridiculous if you think about it. Even some mainstream movies, in non-sexual scenes, will show this very thing. Surely, I would think, if it’s fair game for regular movies that it should be no problem at all for movies billed as being “adult only”.

Is there really any point? I’m not sure what would keep somebody’s attention on this sort of thing. In mainstream movies you get to enjoy plots that draw you in and acting performances that make you want to watch just because of the dialog and emotions that are displayed; erotica offers this, along with some glimpses of nudity and sexuality; while hardcore pornography, despite it almost always lacking in any kind of redeeming intellectual exercise (there are a few exceptions but they are very rare), at least does an excellent job of satisfying the carnal desire of anybody who would be watching it for that reason.

So – who’s going to watch something like this that fails utterly on every count? I can’t think of any category of interest / desire that could be even close to satisfactorily resolved by this kind of movie fare. Why are these movies even made? What’s even more “disturbing” is, in my brief surfing around for reviews of this particular movie, the fact that I found any reviews at all – let alone the (to my mind) number of them out there for this one. I only hope that these reviewers were paid to watch and review, rather than that they’d done so out of any actual interest…