Although 10½ Weeks explores similar terrain as the Hollywood film 9½ Weeks, the obsessive sexual affair of two people desperately searching for real love without knowing how to find it, it's ironic that the adult video 10½ Weeks does not "cross the line that Hollywood couldn't" as the advertising suggests.

And although 10½ Weeks requires even more willing suspension of disbelief than its counterpart, 9½ Weeks gets away with a lot more thematically than the porn version. It's as if it's okay for Hollywood to get kinky, but erotic films cannot.

It would be unfair to compare a mainstream movie and a sex video, but even so, 10½ Weeks generates much more eroticism than its Hollywood counterpart. Jerry Butler plays the Mickey Rourke character quite well and Barbara Dare seems to have studied Kim Basinger's role, because she comes off as quite believable. After a strong beginning, highlighted by a long, hot (if not completely superfluous) sex scene between Keisha and John Leslie, we get a good 45 minutes of Butler and Dare doing their thing, mostly in bed or in San Francisco locations.

Butler wearing a mirror on his head or taking Polaroids of Dare during sex is as kinky as 10½ Weeks gets. The Dare/Butler sex scenes are fairly erotic although the plot development needs some work. Director Robert McCallum does a fine job of mixing exterior shots of the big city with his interior scenes, with good videography and editing. However, I get the feeling that if McCallum had shot this on film five years ago, without Big Brother's jaded eye watching over him and today's other adult filmmakers, it would have been a hotter, more stunning picture. It now serves simply as pretty decent erotica for the homefront.