Seeing Christina has confirmed what I have long suspected - that it's more fun to read about Jewel Shepard and her films. This Christina is introduced by one character as the "playgirl of the Western World". Kidnapped by a gang of lesbian terrorists known as the 10th of November group, she escapes their clutches only to be held ransom by a suave smuggler named Alain. The film is hugely padded with Shepard's couplings with various men and women. Whomever the audience is for this film, it's not me. Not only does the European cast sound badly dubbed in English, but Shepard does as well. If you miss big hair and bad disco music, you might want to take a peak at Christina. The film opens with Shepard dancing topless, and closes with her dancing nude, in what appears to be the same disco set. For me, all that was missing was for Shepard to lip synch to the Andrea True Connection.

Love Circles is dubiously even less erotic or entertaining. No one who reads this web site would confuse Love Circles with La Ronde. The film jumps from character to character, going around the world from Paris to other exotic locales before ending up in the same Parisian disco. The height of wit in Love Circles is when a man is bedded by a pair of Hong Kong twins, and is befuddled by the butterfly tattoo that seems to switch cheeks. Somewhere Arthur Schnitzler is cursing himself for not thinking of that first. Christina benefits from a modicum of imagination with a filmmaker who has an eye for the symbolic aspects of architecture. Either way, without setting the bar very high, both films make me miss the nuttiness of Jesus Franco's Venus in Furs, in its very unique way Harry Alan Towers' towering achievement.