If an Ariel Hart script went to a masquerade party it would be dressed as the 300 Spartans. Why's that? Because there'd be 299 others there that look just like it.

Hart instigates another one of her ritualistic angst-riddled tete-a-tetes between people who are as damned up emotionally as lower colons on a mozzarella diet. Steven St. Croix and Ashlyn Gere get to play a couple of dirty-talk addicts who appear to have escaped from the novel Vox, author Nicholson Baker's fictional treatise about phone sex.

After a career of disembodied, long-distance intercourse, St. Croix and Gere finally meet for the first time and have sex. Gere comes dressed for the occasion wearing a lingerie outfit that looks like it could have been designed by Siegfried and Roy. However their trifling encounter doesn't match the expectations of unrequited lust established by the premise; and a subsequent threesome which works St. Croix's fiancee Christina Angel unconvincingly into the so-so kitchen-table-top chemistry winds up being a welter of overwrought facial grimaces — as though everyone were trying to rid themselves of said infarcted mozzarella.

An outdoor side-by-side couples' pairing features doggie maneuvers with Alex Sanders and Veronica Sanders (Sage); and Jonathan Morgan with Tabatha Cash. This scene weans a more nurturing appreciation to the viewer but is as intrinsically relevant to matters at hand as Steven Seagal's ponytail is to an oil products embargo.

Gere flits in and out of this action (well-lensed, to be sure), like Bobby Fischer taking on a table full of neophyte chessman, but the film's primal intensity is best served by the chemistry between Veronica Sanders and Tabatha Cash who wind up in their own little girl-girl world and seem to be having a good time in it.

Ashlyn graces the lovely boxcover wearing a bob wig. Maybe she doesn't want to be recognized.