Title: High Strung Women Studio: Andrew Blake Director: Andrew Blake Cast: Faith Leon, Paola Rey, Elena Rivera, Justine, Aria Giovanni, Courtney Page, Adriana Sage, Dahlia Grey, Cytherea, Melisande, Georgia Jones, Sasha Grey, Claire Adams, Emily Marilyn, Genres:: Bondage Condoms: No Reviewer: R.W. Hulme

Rating:

Rope bondage is one of the most elegant and erotic fetishes going – a kink that looks deceptively simple, but is actually fiendishly complex.

With High Strung Women, high-class pornographer Andrew Blake puts together a slew of scenes centered on his rope bondage fetish. One after the other, willing women submit themselves to rope bondage and whatever else their helplessness entails.

As is typical with Andrew Blake’s work, every scene on this DVD is gleaming with pornographic polish. It’s high-art meets hard-core, with artistic flourishes that resemble a fashion video, but fucking, fingering and fondling that won’t leave porn aficionados feeling short-changed.

There’s a variety of sex featured throughout the video, but for the most part it’s girl-on-girl action, or scenes that feel vaguely voyeuristic. One standout scenario sees a cameraman (perhaps Blake himself) filming himself and a young woman in the mirror of a shabby hotel room. She fingers and fucks herself with an elegant glass dildo, before sucking his straining cock and getting fucked roughly from behind.

Fans of more mainstream pornography – in which every scene ends with a specific and unambiguous climax (most frequently a face full of sperm) – might not like the way one scene quickly crops to another. It also tends to steer closer to ‘art’ than ‘porn,’ with some scenes being visually sumptuous, but not overtly erotic. Yet for those who are a little more open-minded, High Strung Women winds up being a true feast for the senses.

As is typical for Andrew Blake’s DVDs, the whole package is put together slickly and stylishly. There are trailers on the DVD itself, plus a handful of ‘behind the scenes’ features which show that the production of each visually stunning vignette was a lot more complex and complicated than the smoothly edited end-result might have you believe.

High Strung Women is ultimately a great purchase for rope bondage fans or aficionados of Andrew Blake’s work. As with other Blake productions, porn collectors might like to add it to their shelf simply for the chance to see another star ‘before she was famous’ – in this case, wildly popular crossover artist Sasha Grey.