Name: Spectators
Genre: Adult
Duration: 1 h 18 min
Rating: 5.6
Cast: Kay Parker, Richard Pacheco, Gail Sterling

Anthony Spinelli remains among my all-time favorite porn directors, but this shot-on-video clunker is really terrible. It's bad beyond hope.

Premise is simple: married couple Kay Parker & Richard Pacheco are bored and latter has contrived to spice up their sex life by adding some other people almost randomly to the mix. That's the be all and end all of a very dull 78 minutes.

Acting by the usually reliable Pacheco is awful -his line readings are flat and occasionally with his own brand of Chris Walken pauses and abruptness. His role is that of a cad, and perhaps on purpose no sympathy at all is generated for him- You simply want him to go away and the video to end.

Spinelli creates a mood of seriousness which resembles the old live TV dramas (a device he has frequently injected into his films and videos) but in SPECTATORS it comes off as merely pretentious and pointless. The only payoffs we get are the absurd situations Pacheco concocts, basically mistreating Kay Parker over and over. Enough already.

After an opening scene of the two stars humping in bed, Pacheco starts asking Kay dumb questions about sex, closely resembling the idiotic clip-board of questions you hear over & over on BTS shorts now standard on videos (you know, the "how did you get into this business?, "what's the strangest place you ever had sex", etc. etc.). Eventually even he tires of this nonsense, announcing "I'm bored", a feeling I readily identified with.

Amongst the random participants are an uppity and basically non-role Herschel Savage with Helga Sven in tow; Jon Martin & pal as awkward rapists and a couple of young things. Both Kay and Richard are voyeurs during these encounters, hence the video's title. Spinelli may have been attempting a statement on the whole BDSM phenomenon, but I couldn't catch his drift. Kay ultimately leaves this total jerk, tired of his dumb games, and video ends with Pacheco in the window looking sad.

I recall how in the early 1980s (I was especially struck at the press screening of NOTHING TO HIDE) Pacheco seemed to be the Robert De Niro of porn, not just the vague facial resemblance but his spirited acting. His career soon spiraled into a series of crappy assignments like SPECTATORS, I guess paralleling how De Niro has ended up almost synonymous with "any script will do" latter-day history of signing on to horrible films.

Kay and Paul have become dissatisfied with their sex life, he moreso than she. At Paul's insistence, Kay agrees to bring others into their bed, but all Paul wants to do is watch Kay with the others, then have sex with her afterwards, one-on-one. After a series of couplings, triplings and otherings, Paul ties Kay up and gags her and forces her to watch other people going at it. This proves too much for Kay and she finally decides to leave Paul.

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