Ginger Lynn Allen is one shrewd cookie. She's spun her notoriously popular but short-lived XXX career into a variety of film, TV and video appearances that's become a cottage industry unto itself. Now, Lingerie Gallery enters the direct-to-video domain with a snazzy look that's both sexy and tasteful; sophisticated yet playful.

Four wordless vignettes reveal such disparate topics as a Seven Year Itch/Marilyn Monroe scenario; a sensual night club torch singer; pagan fire dancing; and an all-female army induction. Considering the latter — with busty Julia Ann wiggling out of a bomber's jacket while documentary footage of the Big Red One unfolds behind her and Old Glory waves in the foreground, Gallery is less of a frontispiece for cute teddies, and more of an exercise in the craft of filmmaking, and even craftier exposure to the curvaceous forms of Ginger and her on-camera friends.

The hot little Spark To A Flame sequence adopts a Pygmalion thrust, as Gingers transformed from a gum-cracking floozy into a tantalizing torch singer, whose smoky topless piano number could give the Baker Boys second thoughts about a Michelle Pfeiffer sandwich. Savage Innocence is an artfully-lensed, heathen ritual of nude bow & arrow lessons; kind of like the road show of Cheyenne Autumn with bouncing tits in warpaint instead of Pocahontas skirts.

The common denominator between all the episodes is a shot-on-film look which uses a multiplicity of images as counterpoint to the main action, or simply to combine ogling male reaction shots with the striptease. To say this technique is used excessively is like knocking the World Trade Center for being too tall. Lingerie Gallery is a layered Napoleon pastry of imaginative and sultry images bound to arouse a softcore viewer. Also with Melissa, Raven, and Lori Jo Petty.