Eros Portal

Cherry Chapman of Cinema Erotique really does try hard of make interesting elevated porn films, and she’d probably rather that we called it erotica and maybe we should. They do have varied themes and they do put a lot of work into sets, scripts (which they term “dramatic erotic”), and production values. The women are pretty and there is enough hard-core fucking and masturbation to satify most porn hunters. The site design is kind of dated and cheesy (and it can load slow so be patient), and they seem to think that saying “un film de” rather than “a video by” makes them sound better, but that’s not really what you care about right? So we’ll overlook the dated site and honor them for trying hard to make decent porn — or erotic — films.

But that’s also the rub — they try too hard. Making a good film is very difficult but the hardest thing for most speilberg wannbe’s is to recognize that they aren’t speilberg or even another arrogant washed-up no-talent film maker we could name. Even if they have the vision, they don’t have the money, the staff, or the talent. The people they work with are hired to fuck decoratively on camera, not speak lines or act, and they do the latter two very badly as rule.

So having high production values backfires if they are high enough to move you out of porn land but not into real film land. Look at the screen cap below to see what I mean:

That’s an elaborate set by internet porn standards — and hey! there’s a costume too! — but it’s kind of embarrassing, like a pornographic second-rate high school play. That shot is from a film about sexual fantasies that, among other thing, features a girl christ figure with a porn-starlet landing strip. For me that sort of ruins the ride, right there, but it does get worse. They actually did some blue-screen effects in this movie! My advice — don’t go there. Nothing looks worse than doing a sophiscated effect badly, and while I admire their brass in atempting it, these are done really badly. Ouch! (Go here to see the trailer.)

They also have upcoming feature called The Claw (also the name of an icon of uber-cheesy 50’s sci-fi horrow flicks) featuring a really goofy rubber claw hand (and some trees on fire) about which they say: “Horror meets erotica in this thriller full of suspense, erotism and high pitch sreams [sic]… The Claw is coming!” (Yeah, right — and I’m going. Ouch^2.)

For another cheesy example with side of fries, see The Prisoner, and for something with less cheese, there is Models.

Mainstream porn makers figured out in the early 80s that confusing film-making and porn-making was a bad idea and started making porn that was just about sex without any pretentions to acting, plot, or art. When they let the actors try to act, they mainly made porn that you had watch with the sound turned off and the fast-forward button at the ready. Unfortunately that’s where Cinema Erotique still is.

Now, to be fair, you might like The Claw or their other offerings, and the videos do have a certain goofy, campy charm. But my feeling is they take themselves way too seriosuly at Cinema Erotique and probably would not appreciate being looked on as cheesy, campy, or goofy. Oh well….

If you want to see an example of how to make a good short video with some genuine erotic tension and actual art to it, check out Prelude by X-muse. It may have its flaws but it shows how three people and one camera and a beach and a very good eye can really work together to create something inspired. The video works because it works with the constraints of the video makers; they didn’t try to do things they could not and they used what they had very nicely to come up with a very sweet 5 minutes of fun, thought-provoking, sexy video.

We wish Cinema Erotique would take some pointers from X-muse because with the resources they have, they could then make something very good. But as Dirty Harry said, “You gotta know your limitations.”

The folks at SapphicErotica say that their site is widely regarded as the leading Teen Lesbian site on the Web today and they are probably right. It may not be the best, but is certainly is the leading site. There was a time when it seemed like you could not get away from them while looking for porn on the internet (which of course is sort of like looking for sand on a beach).

But SapphicErotica is actually pretty good porn — well lit and crystal clear and the girls are very pretty. They do fuck and suck and finger and there is a lot of ass licking. Everyone generally seems to be having a good time, but this is porn for straight guys, make no mistake. Here is a sample of how they promote themselves: Three hot teens tongue twats in bed. Apparently their opinion of straight guys is no higher than P.T Barnum’s, or they don’t know any better themselves.

Ok, some of the girls are genuinely bi and there might be an actual lesbian in the crowd, but these are pretty girls fucking for pay, not for each other. As porn, it’s good if a tad formulaic and slightly tacky. Of course, you might think that’s a good thing as you always know what (and who) is going down.

So if you want to watch real lesbians fuck and cum, CyberDyke is one of the very few places you will see that. Go to SapphicErotica if you want to see pretty girls fucking and giving a good facsimile of cumming. Or go to both; variety is a good thing!

Below are few more samples of what you will see at SapphicErotica. The cheesy promo line are theirs and tell you pretty all you need to know about the site:

Beautiful brunettes tongue and fist

Horny cowgirls finger tight butts

Three horny cuties deeply finger

Ron Harris has been around a long time — and that is an understatement. He was a top fashion photographer in New York for over 40 years, working with Elle, Vogue and Cosmopolitan and many other magazines. In the early 80s, he created the Aerobicise videos and he’s a been a regular with Playboy TV. More recently, he turned his attention to making porn — he calls it art, but in fact it is both — and his website has been running for almost 14 years now. That makes him an Internet dinosaur, but we certainly hope he does not go extinct!

Ron Harris delivers what a lot of sites claim they deliver: very beautiful, very hot women doing very naughtly things — things you will never see in Playboy! These aren’t the kind of women you expect to strip down, spread out and masturbate with enthusiasm, but that is in fact what they do. And there are a lot of them.

Ron does not always post zillions of photos for each set, but the photos he does post show care and consideration — unlike someone we could name (and did). And his videos are very good quality also — full HD and crystal clear. (We would not be surprised if Richard Avery and Brigham Field don’t have severe cases of Ron-Harris envy.)

So if you like technically awesome, high-gloss porn of beautiful women who don’t all look malnourished, we think you’ll like Ron Harris. Check out these samples to see if you agree.

Taylor Tilden Photo Gallery
Taylor Tilden Video

Kara Duhe Photo Gallery
Kara Duhe Video

Since we recently bitched about Juliland, we felt we should plug I Feel Myself again. They are everything an Adult site should be and more. It’s not all bad news out there.

Explicite-Art.com is about the best site for fun, sometimes goofy, Euro-porn there is. There is a ton and more of content there and they pride themselves on the more extreme stuff like fist fucking. There is a plently of girl/girl fucking; lots of boy-girls fucking; lots of ass fucking and double penetration, and a considerable amount of fucking in some outstanding outdoor scenery. The technical quality is very good, the girls are mostly cute, and the whole operations seems pretty light-hearted and fun.

The only drawback we see is that there is something of a circus feel to the whole thing of the “Let’s see if THIS will fit” variety that we don’t find especially sexy, but you can’t have everything. They are generous with their samples and unlike some sites, they will not leave you feeling like “That was it?” when you exit the member’s area.

Euro-porn is not like Ameri-porn so it may not be your cup of tea. But we think they are worth a look.

We visit (and join – purely for professional reasons of course) good sites, some not-so-good sites, a few that annoy us, and occassionally one that makes us feel kinda ripped off. Juliland, Richard Avery’s site, is unfortunately one of the latter.

Richard Avery is a decent photographer who works with good models and has interesting ideas. Juliland is a slick, well-designed site. But what you see in the free area is — well, we can’t say it not what you get because it’s pretty much all you get. The member’s area is sparse the point of one big WTF???

It’s not just that Juliland’s webmaster or Richard Avery — whoever is in charge — only puts up 15 to 20 photos in a set. After, one of our favorite sites, X-muse.net, usually puts up about 20 featured images in a set, but to us there is a big difference: X-muse puts up what they feel are the best images, be that 20 or 16 or 35, and then they post additional images (about 50 or so on average) in case you don’t agree with their selection. More importantly however, they put up a decent selection, not a few images that look like they were just dumped from the camera in the order they were shot and posted, so that half or more are bascially the same image with minor variations.

Don’t believe us? Click to see the rest of this post below. We posted thumbnails of a two full sets to demonstrate what we mean. The second set — of Dita Von Tease — is another beef of ours with his site. In their promo material Richrd Avery makes a fairly big deal of having Dita on Juliland; what he conceals from people is that of the two sets he has, she is entirely clothed in one set and topless in only a few shots in the other.

Now we do not insist that every photo of every model feature nudity, but Juliland is a pretty hardcore site and he sells it as such in his free area so by using Dita to promote his site, he’s clearly intends to raise expectations he knows he will not fulfill. Yes, we know that Dita does not do hardcore as rule (a rule she broke for Andrew Blake) but to feature clothed shots of her on a pay site and then brag about it is deceptive.

If Juliland did what X-muse.net does (and we wish more sites did): show you the thumbnails from each set, you would know what you are getting into. But of course that would give the game away.

Now, to be fair, Juliland does have a reasonably sized video collection and the quality of the videos is overall not bad technically. If you consider Juliland to be a video site with a few boring repetitive photos thrown in as an afterthought, then the site isn’t as bad as I make it out to be. The videos are also rather boring and repetitive IMHO and the sound tracks are kind of obnoxious, but your mileage may vary.

So, no we aren’t going to link to Juliland. If you are curious, by all means check it out and join if you are a fan of Richard Avery or like small repetitive photo sets and boring videos shot with good technical quality.

Otherwise, we suggest that you stay away from juliland.com.
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We haven’t mentioned I Feel Myself much lately — this is a shame. IFM, if you don’t know it, is a ground-breaking video site that we have been huge fans of still it opened. We like IFM so much, we aren’t even going to talk about it, except to say that if you ever visit Down-Under, don’t be surprised to encounter very pretty girls with a video camera masturbating in city parks, public buildings, shops, the beach, under trees, and even in their own beds (or a friends — Good on ya, mate!)

Here are a few screen caps from IFM’s recent high-def videos, but don’t just look at them — go see the site!

The folks over at X-muse, we are happy to report, have scored Scar. That’s right, Scar the uber-lovely, goth uber-goddess is going to be an X-muse. We’ve met Scar and we can report that she is everything her legions of worshipers think she is — fun, smart, engaging, and devastatingly sexy.

If you did not know this already, we can only ask: “WTF??? Where have you been?”

BTW: X-muse is still offering discounted memberships – tell ‘em we sent you, and they’ll be extra nice. So get a great deal on a membership and a great look at Scar when she debuts and then sit back and be happy.

Very happy.

I admit that I have a bit of a soft spot for FTV Girls. They’ve been around for quite some time now and while they’re schtick can get a bit monotonous, as porn sites go, they are pretty good. They do deliver what they say they will and their website layout is clean, nice and not insulting to your intelligence. The models are pretty, genuine, and appear to be having a good time. They may not be girl-next-door unless you live in a different neighborhood than we do (like Prague), and all of them aren’t exactly video virgins these days, they aren’t run-of-the-mill LA porn starlets and wannabe’s either. Most of them are genuinely engaging and the kind of girl you at first expect to get naked, and start spreading out and doing some very naughty things (more on that later).

The quality of the photos is good though not ground-breaking — they are a porn site after all — and technically their videos are excellent. FTV Girls has always been in the forefront to video delivery technology and they see to it you get the best video your system and connection can handle. They do their best to provide a product of superior quality and the generally succeed. And we give them points for caring about quality in the first place.

All that is great, but what you are probably champing at the bit to know is — what exactly goes on? The short answer is: insertion — lots of insertion. The girl often shove in large dildos, very large dildos, and fists. The FTV crew has a few monster toys that really don’t serve too much purpose except to make the girls giggle.

Now, large-object insertion sites tend to be boring, unless that is your thing. They usually have this circus freak show atmosphere that gets old after awhile. FTV Girls suffers from that a bit, but no too much. There are enough real orgasms and real fucking going on to give the site some spontanetity and fun (of other than the “look what I can fit!” kind).

So we rate them an A for effort and a strong B+ for content. But go see what you think of FTV Girls.

Some times we do get to deliver good news. Today’s good news is that Richard Murrian is relaunched his site. And he’s added more variety and edge in his work, so we are doubly happy.

Welcome back, Richard — we missed you. If you don’t know his work, check out the samples below.

GAMMA VELORUM featuring KRISTY

THE GIFT featuring DASHA

ARCTURUS SHINES featuring ELINA

VESPER featuring SUSANA

Sometimes you run into a great photographer whose website just doesn’t cut it. Often this happens when the website has been around for a long time, the photographer does not run it himself, and errors accumulate over time.

Kenmarcus.com is a classic example of this. Ken’s site has a large amount of content on it, going way back to it’s launch almost 10 years ago, and the quality is generally good. We have to give him a pass for the small images that were posted in the early years of this decade — after all, they weren’t considered small then.

But we don’t give him a pass for the general state of his member’s area, which is badly designed and suffers from neglect. There are broken links everywhere, especially the videos, few of which play and fewer of which download correctly. The navigation is rudimentary and full of annoyances, like links that take you back to page 1 of a 6-page gallery, and there is too much junk that is provided by 3rd-party schlock porn providers. Ken does great work — he really doesn’t need to pad his site with generic porn.

Finally, he uses DHDMedia as his billing provider, and they suck. Their customer service is not responsive and if you are a webmaster, just forget joining the affiliate program – no one we know have ever gotten a check (and last we checked, they didn’t provide real stats either to see if you were even getting credit for sending clicks.) To be fair, they have gotten a little better in recent years — they do send email when you cancel now, and they do make it somewhat easier to cancel then they did, but this means they haven’t quite reached the bare minimum of what might be considered acceptable customer service.

So overall, stay clear, or if you decide to join, be aware that not everything you see it what you get. It’s too bad Ken’s webmasters — whoever they are — don’t care for either his work or his members; the whole operation is a throwback to the bad old days when adult sites took your money than basically told you to go to hell; they had your $29.95, so go ahead and cancel, assuming you could find the link.

But we still like Ken and his work. Maybe someday he’ll get someone to clean up his site and give his fans what they really deserve. At least, we can hope he does.