This article originally ran in the June 2018 issue of AVN magazine. Click here to see the digital edition. Pictured above from left, Eliza Jane, Honey Gold, Jill Kassidy and Scarlett Sage in Unleashed.
There’s no doubt that director Kay Brandt is flying high. After all, her hot sequel Adventures With the Baumgartners won Best Polyamory Movie at the 2018 AVN Awards, and she herself was nommed for Best Director – Feature and Best Screenplay (for Baumgartners, of course), and the movie landed a nod for Best Marketing Campaign – Individual Project. Plus, there were various nominations for the performers who appeared in Baumgartners. And that’s just this year.
“Babysitting the Baumgartners, which came out in August of 2016, has been a chart-topping movie for Shaw Broadcasting throughout Canada, and Sky Broadcasting in Germany, and it’s been the most watched movie for two years in a row on HotMovies; it has beat out thousands of other titles for two years,” Brandt noted with only a light touch of pride.
But, she admitted, adapting novels, even her own, into XXX movies is surprisingly difficult and entails a lot of effort.
“It’s the last great frontier in adult, in my opinion, because everything’s been done except for book adaptations, and they’re not easy to do,” Brandt explained. “They take a lot more work than just writing a script because you have to break down a novel and you have to be true to it, and it’s difficult because not only do I make the books from other authors into movies, but I’ve been making my own books into movies, and even that’s really challenging because I have to be my own worst critic and be able to cut through my books and say, ‘Okay, this stays, this happens, this stays, this happens.’ That’s tough.”
It may be hard work, but Brandt clearly enjoys it—and Adam & Eve Pictures likes the results a lot. She’s shooting several movies for the studio this year, including Unleashed, for which AVN got to enjoy an on-set visit.
“Unleashed is a nine-starlet picture,” Brandt said, “Nine starlets that were nominated for major awards are in this. It’s a showcase, but it’s a showcase amped up on acid. It’s got a lot more than just five scenes; it’s got a lot of glue holding the vignettes together that’s telling their story. We’re doing interviews, we’re doing montages in between the scenes. It’s a little bit of the girls’ own stories. I don’t want to get too personal. Other filmmakers do that, but this is more fun; this is more about them just being crazy and being empowered young women who are making a name for themselves in the business.”
Trouble is, even with shooting taking place just over two very long days, Brandt turned in so much good footage that the Powers That Be had to make a decision—and what they decided is to cut the original four-hour (!) movie down to two separate titles: Unleashed, and one consisting solely of interviews with the gals plus their solo scenes, to be titled Loving Myself.
Release dates have been firmed up for the two movies. Unleashed is available for pre-sales at this link, with a wide release on August 7. And Loving Myself will be out in September.
The ostensible plot of Unleashed, as described by Brandt: “Nine of the 2018 winners and nominated starlets gather together for a decadent ‘release party’ to celebrate each other as empowered women. Showing off their youthful exuberance, these naughty ladies explore their female fantasies and set their desires free with each other. Indulging in five erotic flavors of lesbian sex, including kinky fetish play, strap-ons, body massages and more, the starlets reveal their raw, sexual natures in beautiful ways.”
Those “empowered women,” by the way, are Scarlett Sage, Jill Kassidy, Whitney Wright, Honey Gold, Riley Nixon, Elena Koshka, Eden Sin, Eliza Jane and Moka Mora, with Edyn Blair not taking part in sex but performing a striptease for the others. We can say from seeing the action for the better part of a day that these women were having a ball on set!
For one thing, they all got along well with each other (or if there were any disagreements, they were well hidden), and each seemed to give her all in the solo scenes (usually accomplished on a red silk-covered chair in the middle of a bare stage, and usually without the aid of dildos or other toys); during a sort of “group grope” (don’t know how else to describe it, but it featured Honey, Moka, Jill, Riley, Scarlett and Eliza stroking and undressing each other while standing on a rose-petal-strewn floor mat against a translucent background); and also one very hot sex scene that took place around a small floor-lit stage with a stripper pole.
As far as the solo scenes go, the most impressive we saw was the well-tatted Honey Gold, who starts out in a black bra adorned with bouquets of fabric flowers, plus net pantyhose and thigh-high boots. Her only means of stimulation are her hands, but that’s not a problem: “I’m a chronic masturbator,” she told us. “I have to masturbate at least six times a day.”
Another impressive performance came from Moka Mora. Starting in a black bra and thong, Moka does her thing on a red couch, pleasuring herself mainly in doggie and missionary positions with a clear plastic realistic dildo—and wow, does she like to talk in her incredibly sexy high-pitched voice while she’s getting off!
That red couch is where Eliza, Honey, Scarlett and Jill, all dressed to party, sit while watching Edyn Blair go through her routine in a slinky, tiny purple bra and g-string—barely pausing her gyrations to allow the gals to stuff scads of dollar bills into her waistband. In fact, Edyn’s so appreciative that she gives Eliza a lapdance—but after a while, Edyn’s almost forgotten as the gals begin to explore each other. At first, after Scarlett undresses and Eliza pulls out her tits, they all cluster around Scarlett, pulling up her slinky black dress to reveal the nakedness underneath, but it isn’t long before there isn’t a stitch of clothing to be seen—but plenty of kisses to be had! The gals quickly pair off, with Honey facesitting on Eliza and Jill doing likewise on Scarlett, but Honey soon pulls Eliza down on the couch for some missionary muff-munching, while Scarlett gets Jill into doggie for the same—except Jill quickly finds Honey’s ass sticking up and begins to pleasure her as well. This round-robin lickfest soon moves to the stripper stage, as the gals circle the pole, each with her mouth on the pussy of the one in front of her before three of them form a sort of naked human pyramid, all the easier for Eliza to start licking labia from the bottom up. But in the end, it’s kisses all around before the fade-out.
If anything is clear from seeing all this action, it’s that porn fans will have a hard time deciding which movie—Unleashed or Loving Myself—they’ll like more. Perhaps happily for Kay Brandt and Adam & Eve, they’ll buy both to compare and compare and compare.
