Brilliantlove

"They don't make British soft porn movies like they used to", a great-uncle might utter after watching Brilliantlove. "Nowadays youngsters have to include a real story, good actors with attractive bodies and some jolly nice sets, location work and lighting. Still don't get to see enough action, of course".

Outside the UK, the low-budget second feature from Ashley Horner (R, above) was called The Orgasm Diaries, a truer indicator of the slim plot written by Sean Conway, an even less-experienced short-film writer-director. It's primarily a series of sexual acts and full-frontal exposures performed in north-east England by horny young Manchester, a photographer, and his passionate girlfriend, Noon, who's a taxidermist.

She keeps dead creatures in her father's refrigerator, and welcomes the birds a nomadic cat lays in tribute at the roll-up door of their live-in garage. Randy Manchester tends to get inebriated, which is when he cavorts through a field of flowers and tells a tape recorder to tell Noon that he wants her every sexy thought recorded for his pleasure. He's already recording her sexual motions and gasps on his small camera, and these photos end up in the eager hands of an art dealer who transforms Manchester into a well-paid provider of fancy gallery porno.

The lead actors were called on to perform or simulate masturbation, urination, ejaculation and the usual non-visibly penetratory coitus. To their credit, Liam Browne (L, above, with one previous TV acting role) and complete newcomer Nancy Trotter Landry are believable as lovers. She has a future as a Cherie Blair lookalike. The ending of their breakthrough movie experience is far less convincing, a make-believe melodrama in which Manchester doesn't succeed in accidentally killing himself with a plastic bag during a candlelit masturbation scene.

"My only surprise was the lack of an end-credit warning note about the plastic bag technique", my great-uncle might have mused. "They did note that no animals were injured, so the dead birds must have been simulated too."