Nick Millard (aka Phillips) has a very low batting average as filmmaker; in baseball terms he couldn't hit his weight. FIRE IN HER BED is one of his least palatable efforts.
Be forewarned, his video saviors in New Jersey, Seduction/After Hours Cinema, have a shill on the payroll whose booklet notes accompanying this film on DVD frankly lie to make it sound vaguely interesting. It is not.
What we have here is another of Nick's randomly assembled bits of silent footage, accompanied by an even more randomly chosen and applied music track, purporting to be an hour-long feature film. Whether it got booked at a few hard-up, marginal adult theaters in the '70s, or was shelved, is a moot point. As an artifact sitting through it four decades later, to quote NIGHT MOVES, "is like watching paint dry". That cheap shot was applied to Eric Rohmer by scripter Alan Sharp, but it applies here.
The attractive anonymous heroine billed as "Donna Rae" is flat-chested but with amazing nipple cones, a Nick fetish. Her story is carried in typically florid and irritating femme narration, waxing poetic and always annoying. Supposedly she is a musical superstar, but the closest we get to an actual recording session scene is a montage or two of the signs outside various L.A. recording studios.
Perhaps the worst scene in the picture is when a recording exec rushes out onto the sidewalk (cheap guerrilla filming, no sets or even permits required) to accost our heroine, with nonsensical dialog dubbed in and, as with the rest of the Silent Era movie, no lip movements at all. Even Fellini had his cast recite the alphabet or something to sort of match up with the post-synch, but Nick is above such rudimentary techniques.
Only Nick would have the temerity to shoot a silent movie about a recording star. Recall that in the first breakthrough talkie THE JAZZ SINGER Jolson is permitted to break into song and even have conversations with his mom in what is otherwise still a Silent Film. Not here - we have endless scenes of our star lolling around with her hippie-styled buddies as random guitar playing and chatter is dubbed on the soundtrack, never matching the action.
FIRE IN HER BED, a truly meaningless title that IMDb used to garble as "Fire Under Her Bed" which sounds like a Denis Leary project, is after all a porn film, so there are several desultory sex scenes. She makes love to a lookalike lesbian in a very tame sequence, providing full frontal nudity and little else. Even on a scale of Nick's dozens of lesbian movies, it is near the bottom in arousal value. And the doppelganger effect of "making love to yourself" due to the matched casting is pointless.
SPOILERS ALERT: Her boy friend, always pretend-playing his guitar, is a mustachioed drip, whose bored sex simulation with our heroine probably contributes to her problems. Nick tries to spice up the action with flashback/flash-forward shots of a hospital's emergency entrance (cheap!) with ambulance siren on the soundtrack, or police radio broadcasts heard, as if to signal her suicide or violent end. But actual conclusion is just as boring as the preceding hour of tedium, as she ups and leaves, symbolically discarding her guitar in its case at the side of the road. A hopeful smile from her and some absurd dancing around a tree complete the random slop that I guess Nick would call a screenplay.
One might think I'm being hard on Nick, but his pretentious approach earns such criticism. I have nothing against pornographers, or filmmakers in general, who aspire merely to entertain and even at the crude level of currently say a Michael Bay, have no loftier notions. But Nick insists on literally teasing his viewers with hints of great import and significance, while delivering zero. This bait & switch approach is irritating in the extreme.
At his best, namely in films like ROXANNA and L'AMOUR DE FEMME, Nick cast some of the most attractive West Coast sexy models of the day, outfitted them glamorously and delivered masturbation-quality lesbian sex.
In FIRE IN HER BED, the essentially R-rated footage is not erotic in the slightest, and cannot justify a crypto-underground movie. Nick claims a Nouvelle Vague inspiration for his direction, but he only copied the worst of the innovations of Godard & company, namely a jump-cuts, anything goes approach. He missed the whole point of the movement.
Even on the level of Nick's usual Freudian Slips (he of course is the "big star" in his own mind that the heroine here is portraying) approach, this non-movie is unenlightening anti-entertainment.
Be forewarned, his video saviors in New Jersey, Seduction/After Hours Cinema, have a shill on the payroll whose booklet notes accompanying this film on DVD frankly lie to make it sound vaguely interesting. It is not.
What we have here is another of Nick's randomly assembled bits of silent footage, accompanied by an even more randomly chosen and applied music track, purporting to be an hour-long feature film. Whether it got booked at a few hard-up, marginal adult theaters in the '70s, or was shelved, is a moot point. As an artifact sitting through it four decades later, to quote NIGHT MOVES, "is like watching paint dry". That cheap shot was applied to Eric Rohmer by scripter Alan Sharp, but it applies here.
The attractive anonymous heroine billed as "Donna Rae" is flat-chested but with amazing nipple cones, a Nick fetish. Her story is carried in typically florid and irritating femme narration, waxing poetic and always annoying. Supposedly she is a musical superstar, but the closest we get to an actual recording session scene is a montage or two of the signs outside various L.A. recording studios.
Perhaps the worst scene in the picture is when a recording exec rushes out onto the sidewalk (cheap guerrilla filming, no sets or even permits required) to accost our heroine, with nonsensical dialog dubbed in and, as with the rest of the Silent Era movie, no lip movements at all. Even Fellini had his cast recite the alphabet or something to sort of match up with the post-synch, but Nick is above such rudimentary techniques.
Only Nick would have the temerity to shoot a silent movie about a recording star. Recall that in the first breakthrough talkie THE JAZZ SINGER Jolson is permitted to break into song and even have conversations with his mom in what is otherwise still a Silent Film. Not here - we have endless scenes of our star lolling around with her hippie-styled buddies as random guitar playing and chatter is dubbed on the soundtrack, never matching the action.
FIRE IN HER BED, a truly meaningless title that IMDb used to garble as "Fire Under Her Bed" which sounds like a Denis Leary project, is after all a porn film, so there are several desultory sex scenes. She makes love to a lookalike lesbian in a very tame sequence, providing full frontal nudity and little else. Even on a scale of Nick's dozens of lesbian movies, it is near the bottom in arousal value. And the doppelganger effect of "making love to yourself" due to the matched casting is pointless.
SPOILERS ALERT: Her boy friend, always pretend-playing his guitar, is a mustachioed drip, whose bored sex simulation with our heroine probably contributes to her problems. Nick tries to spice up the action with flashback/flash-forward shots of a hospital's emergency entrance (cheap!) with ambulance siren on the soundtrack, or police radio broadcasts heard, as if to signal her suicide or violent end. But actual conclusion is just as boring as the preceding hour of tedium, as she ups and leaves, symbolically discarding her guitar in its case at the side of the road. A hopeful smile from her and some absurd dancing around a tree complete the random slop that I guess Nick would call a screenplay.
One might think I'm being hard on Nick, but his pretentious approach earns such criticism. I have nothing against pornographers, or filmmakers in general, who aspire merely to entertain and even at the crude level of currently say a Michael Bay, have no loftier notions. But Nick insists on literally teasing his viewers with hints of great import and significance, while delivering zero. This bait & switch approach is irritating in the extreme.
At his best, namely in films like ROXANNA and L'AMOUR DE FEMME, Nick cast some of the most attractive West Coast sexy models of the day, outfitted them glamorously and delivered masturbation-quality lesbian sex.
In FIRE IN HER BED, the essentially R-rated footage is not erotic in the slightest, and cannot justify a crypto-underground movie. Nick claims a Nouvelle Vague inspiration for his direction, but he only copied the worst of the innovations of Godard & company, namely a jump-cuts, anything goes approach. He missed the whole point of the movement.
Even on the level of Nick's usual Freudian Slips (he of course is the "big star" in his own mind that the heroine here is portraying) approach, this non-movie is unenlightening anti-entertainment.