Anthony Spinelli's latest work, The Face, is uncommon adult fare which, like some interplanetary pod in a Sci-Fi movie, grows more powerful, tentacled and biologically intricate with each succeeding moment it plays on the screen.

It's a prestigious actors' vehicle, and Spinelli, whose track record for awards and nominations in that craft is unparalleled, will certainly see at least three more notations added to the honor scrolls in the work of Jon Dough, Jonathan Morgan and Kelly Royce.

The Face, which has a very off-Broadway feel to it, is a simple story. Ostensibly, it's a tale of villains and victims. These are people who ruminate in the shadows of twilight and are cast in the Spinelli trademark bands of filtered Venetian glow. Dough plays a cynical, manipulative Hollywood director who works with hidden cards up his sleeve. He browbeats, cajoles, belittles and intimidates his actors not because he's a mean fellow, but because he knows that actors can be an indolent, unmanageable sort who require a set of compass directions to follow and dials to twist in order to reach inward for the extraordinary grace that is performance.

Dough has arbitrarily assigned punching bag status to Jonathan Morgan, an actor whom he feels has all the right stuff, only Morgan doesn't know it himself. Their first meeting is a blistering contretemps of sexual provocation. Dough interrogates Morgan as to whether he's ever had his cock sucked. Morgan looks at him like a bewildered rube who's just been snookered at three card Monte. Dough's pressure on Morgan is relentless in its circuitous inferences.

Dough: "Where you from?" Morgan; "Minnesota." Dough: "Faggot." Dough is making a point about action vs. reaction with this obscure diatribe, but Morgan hasn't learned it as yet, when, to his startled witness, Dough commands script girl Kaitlyn Ashley to suck Morgan's cock. This scene between Morgan and Ashley, as all the sex scenes in The Face, say as much about Spinelli in sexual renaissance as anything else. Once a practitioner of "polite" co-minglings, Spinelli has developed a nastier touch but also stays well focused on those little gratuities that play so beautifully on cable. He's even become a butt fancier as you'll see.

The stuff that is The Face is fun to watch but not nearly as morose as some of the described material might suggest. The opening scene finds Sarah-Jane Hamilton dolled up like a beret-wearing Parisian street strumpet. As we come to learn she's a "script doctor".

"Script mortician is more like it," Dough needles her as their brittle interchange sets the table for Sarah laying some generously heavy spitola on Dough's cock head. He fucks her venomously side-saddle in retribution and drenches her face with the nectar of the gods.

Dough's assistant, Kelly Royce, evolves in this script as Morgan's champion, often times coming down on Dough like Northridge earthquake detritus, "You destroyed that kid—he's only from Minnesota!" Again, the black humor. Dough's answer? He tells Royce he gets three million a picture to tell people where to stand, which, if one is to gather correctly, pretty much puts the directing-thing in glib perspective. Nothing can be as pleasant as a well-intentioned mercy fuck, and Royce bares her tush like Horence Nightingale for Morgan in an involving lovescape that culminates with a pop shot on her beezer.

Ah, yes. The Greek chorus. Screenwriter Mitch Spinelli's hands-down favorite machination. Selina, Jasper and Ashley appear one night in Dough's bedroom like Dracula's succubi, and Dough, whether through the miracle of editing or Korean ginseng, springs twice—once in an early geyser flourish on Jasper, and, again—well, let's just say he makes a valiant second attempt to spout seminal verse.

He's certainly famous for it, and Mitch Spinelli's latest contribution to the gratuitous-sex-scene-of-the-month-club involves Alex Sanders and Nikki Sinn who, as performers in a live sex show, bear as much relevance by their presence in The Face as Philip Marlowe in Macbeth. Generous foreplay presages a pretty decent sex scene, however, so viewers shouldn't feel manipulated with this Spinelliesque lagniappe.

One scene can imprint a picture or a career, as attested to by Jack Nicholson's psychotic bacon, lettuce and tomato foray in Five Easy Pieces. Morgan and Dough may proudly point to, perhaps, their finest moment in adult video when Dough goes after Morgan like an unleashed pitbull in the closing moments of The Face and Morgan reacts as instinctively as a man perilously close to putting a live bullet in a man without thinking twice about it.

As an actor Morgan's learned his lessons.

Give this release premier billing in your Spinelli section. It's a great one, with fine sex, and ideal for couples' viewing or fans who do enjoy a good erotic yarn.