Just as mainstream porn has a demarcation between all-sex videos and storyline features, the uncharted world of fetish videos has both outré storyline shows and unfortunately a plethora of dull, "nothing happens" videos like "The Harmony Riding Academy". Its footage, as well as its preservation on DVD, is a waste.
IMDb lists a running time of 99 minutes, which is frankly impossible, as a cursory examination of the listings shows these exercises usually run in the 30 to 45 minute range. Reason for that is their lack of content -only Warhol could reasonably have stretched the act of gazing at basically a still life to normal feature-length range.
Karma caught up with the perpetrator, the lumpy, unattractive maestro Jack Banner, who apparently made a living exploiting women in bondage poses before a double suicide ended his existence. This video features a brief "bonus scene" starring Natali, who I could not confirm was the Natali Demore who died as Banner's fellow suicide - I'll leave that to an expert.
Camera-work is credited to one "Greta von Scorn", though IMDb upgraded her (uncredited) to share the director's chair, a most dubious honor.
Concept is poor: a series of girls, their footage spread out in multiple segments in a vain attempt to hide the boredom factor of uninterrupted takes, dressed in riding habits often with nifty cap, but going nowhere. They are all trussed up tied to chairs or benches or the ceiling in bondage, for Banner or his Southern-fried cracker of an assistant (uncredited cretin) to abuse -calling them names, spanking them and otherwise killing running time in what would be termed bondage lite. This is pornography but so wimpy and uninteresting that IMDb euphemistically categorizes it by default as "Adventure" genre, a misnomer of immense proportions. The only adventure for the viewer is frequent glances at one's timepiece to see if the 64 minutes has run its course.
The catalog title displayed on screen is "EQ-1", acronym for "equestrienne bondage", another dumb euphemism. In more mainstream (and goof-ball too) porn there is a recurring theme of horsey sex, whether it be chicks sampling huge horse cocks in Italian gross-out XXX exercises, or just the cute horses/hay/stable backdrops of features ranging from Score Group to France's Marc Dorcel. Banner merely has a cheap set where the girls are strung-up, looking more like a gym than a dungeon, and no exteriors, horses or anything resembling action is included.
It's strictly fetish -the sexy tight pants, high leather boots, tight tight white blouses yearning to pop open, gags or a bit between to the teeth, and of course mainly the carefully tied ropes. Banner and cretin refer to the girls as "fillies" and clearly the underlying theme is that they are being trained and "broken" just like domesticated horseflesh. It made me wonder about Zero Tolerance's current mainstream lesbian porn label Filly Films and what that is all about.
Julie Simone is the most famous of the models, looking pretty and aloof as she goes through her paces (see, Banner even has me thinking like a perv), while some of the other models (notably Jewell Marceau) fit the busty bill that is part & parcel of this particular fetish. Only one has her blouse really opened to reveal décolletage, and Banner willfully cheats the viewers of even simple topless footage, making this video PG-13 porn. Cheating the audience is likely part of the fun - heck they're probably masochists anyway!
In my current brief (thank God!) survey of the huge iceberg (numbering in the thousands) of mysterious bondage titles listed in IMDb, I've come to tentative conclusions which need to be tested by some hardier soul than I - not a sycophant but at least an enthusiast. I grew up in an era when masturbation was generally stimulated by porn photos (in mags or photo sets) and stroke-books, while the majority of folks (that means you!) currently reading my reviews probably grew up in the Adult movie and video era which followed. This fetish cinema and now video niche is evidently merely a preservation of those still-lifes that can stimulate one's imagination depending upon one's fetish(es), and bear little relationship to "moving pictures".
The static nature of "The Harmony Riding Academy" is extreme, but even in its more energetic brethren, where one can presumably enjoy the minimalist but constant wriggling of the poor damsel in distress, a denial and avoidance of what cinema can offer, opposing any progress in the medium made since the early Silent Era (which this junk closely resembles) amounts to a massive case of arrested-development. Just as IMDb has an Adult genre category for films featuring sexual penetration and ejaculation, these Harmony Concepts fetish items could be classified as Juvenile.
IMDb lists a running time of 99 minutes, which is frankly impossible, as a cursory examination of the listings shows these exercises usually run in the 30 to 45 minute range. Reason for that is their lack of content -only Warhol could reasonably have stretched the act of gazing at basically a still life to normal feature-length range.
Karma caught up with the perpetrator, the lumpy, unattractive maestro Jack Banner, who apparently made a living exploiting women in bondage poses before a double suicide ended his existence. This video features a brief "bonus scene" starring Natali, who I could not confirm was the Natali Demore who died as Banner's fellow suicide - I'll leave that to an expert.
Camera-work is credited to one "Greta von Scorn", though IMDb upgraded her (uncredited) to share the director's chair, a most dubious honor.
Concept is poor: a series of girls, their footage spread out in multiple segments in a vain attempt to hide the boredom factor of uninterrupted takes, dressed in riding habits often with nifty cap, but going nowhere. They are all trussed up tied to chairs or benches or the ceiling in bondage, for Banner or his Southern-fried cracker of an assistant (uncredited cretin) to abuse -calling them names, spanking them and otherwise killing running time in what would be termed bondage lite. This is pornography but so wimpy and uninteresting that IMDb euphemistically categorizes it by default as "Adventure" genre, a misnomer of immense proportions. The only adventure for the viewer is frequent glances at one's timepiece to see if the 64 minutes has run its course.
The catalog title displayed on screen is "EQ-1", acronym for "equestrienne bondage", another dumb euphemism. In more mainstream (and goof-ball too) porn there is a recurring theme of horsey sex, whether it be chicks sampling huge horse cocks in Italian gross-out XXX exercises, or just the cute horses/hay/stable backdrops of features ranging from Score Group to France's Marc Dorcel. Banner merely has a cheap set where the girls are strung-up, looking more like a gym than a dungeon, and no exteriors, horses or anything resembling action is included.
It's strictly fetish -the sexy tight pants, high leather boots, tight tight white blouses yearning to pop open, gags or a bit between to the teeth, and of course mainly the carefully tied ropes. Banner and cretin refer to the girls as "fillies" and clearly the underlying theme is that they are being trained and "broken" just like domesticated horseflesh. It made me wonder about Zero Tolerance's current mainstream lesbian porn label Filly Films and what that is all about.
Julie Simone is the most famous of the models, looking pretty and aloof as she goes through her paces (see, Banner even has me thinking like a perv), while some of the other models (notably Jewell Marceau) fit the busty bill that is part & parcel of this particular fetish. Only one has her blouse really opened to reveal décolletage, and Banner willfully cheats the viewers of even simple topless footage, making this video PG-13 porn. Cheating the audience is likely part of the fun - heck they're probably masochists anyway!
In my current brief (thank God!) survey of the huge iceberg (numbering in the thousands) of mysterious bondage titles listed in IMDb, I've come to tentative conclusions which need to be tested by some hardier soul than I - not a sycophant but at least an enthusiast. I grew up in an era when masturbation was generally stimulated by porn photos (in mags or photo sets) and stroke-books, while the majority of folks (that means you!) currently reading my reviews probably grew up in the Adult movie and video era which followed. This fetish cinema and now video niche is evidently merely a preservation of those still-lifes that can stimulate one's imagination depending upon one's fetish(es), and bear little relationship to "moving pictures".
The static nature of "The Harmony Riding Academy" is extreme, but even in its more energetic brethren, where one can presumably enjoy the minimalist but constant wriggling of the poor damsel in distress, a denial and avoidance of what cinema can offer, opposing any progress in the medium made since the early Silent Era (which this junk closely resembles) amounts to a massive case of arrested-development. Just as IMDb has an Adult genre category for films featuring sexual penetration and ejaculation, these Harmony Concepts fetish items could be classified as Juvenile.