New World Pictures turns voyeur through TALKING WALLS, an eighties direct-to-video flick on Blu-ray from Scorpion Releasing.

Student Paul (Stephen Shellen, THE STEPFATHER) wants to decode they mystery of human intimacy for his sociology thesis. Although Professor Hirsch (Barry Primus, AUTOPSY) insists that human intimacy cannot be shown, Paul believes it can with his video equipment, and he has the perfect opportunity to see what happens "behind closed doors" in his job as a video technician for the "Total Media Hotel," a no-tell-motel with rooms that cater to every sort of fetish augmented by video screens. Sawing through the walls and floors of his room, he installs two-way mirrors into the surrounding rooms and videotapes the action of The Car Room, The Sheep Room, The Shoe Room, and others, watching the guests at their most "intimate" but feeling like something is missing, a feeling compounded by his own encounter with classmate/sex therapy major Luna (Karen Leigh Hopkins, THE RUNNING MAN) who is endeavoring to end premature ejaculation for world peace. When his professor further insists that intimacy cannot be quantified, Paul tries to utilize thermographic cameras to look for the link between what people say they want and the physical responses of their bodies. Taking his camera to the road, he meets French art student Jeanne (Marie Laurin, CREATURE) who initially entertains his video camera voyeurism but resents being "studied" rather than desired; and it may just be that jealousy and obsession are Paul's path to understanding human intimacy.

Based on a novel by Mike McGrady, co-author of Linda Lovelace's controversial biography "Ordeal" and one of the pseudonymous authors behind the multi-authored pulp paperback NAKED CAME THE STRANGER (adapted into an X-rated film by Radley Metzger), TALKING WALLS is a dreary drama that is nowhere near as salacious as its premise suggests. The main character is rather unlikable, not only seeming quite thick about not grasping the difference between love and sex – particularly motel sex – but also seeing a quid pro quo relationship where he seems to be taking financial advantage of his boss (whose relationship with his wife he holds up as the model of intimacy without realizing that perhaps their motel empire is superfluous to their domestic bliss). Shellen has a lengthy resume as a character actor so it is presumably the fault of the direction that his performance is as over-the-top and unfocused as that of Laurin (indeed most of the performances are poor including more seasoned actor Primus). At some points earlier on, one wonders whether the character is supposed to be having a psychotic break, and the film might have been more palatable had he turned psychotic and dangerous, but it is instead supposed to be a sensitive love story about a character who learns to live life rather than merely observe it. The structure is so choppy that one is unsure whether the film is cut with Paul's incessant narration trying to fill in the holes or if it is just a stylistic effect of the film's video age milieu. The scoring of Richard Glasser (NIGHT EYES) includes songs that range from the grating (the title song "Talking Walls") to the juvenile ("It's better in the back seat than nothing at all"). Sybil Danning (CHAINED HEAT) shares credit on the poster artwork with Shellen, but her "Bathing Beauty" character is as likely to be missed in the blink of an eye as Sally Kirkland (DOUBLE THREAT) as a hooker or hotel guests played by Don Calfa (RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD), Peter Liapis (GHOULIES), comedian Martry Brill, and Hunter von Leer (HALLOWEEN II) as a Jerry Falwell-loving conservative. The film was director Stephen Verona's only feature in the eighties after a trio of works in the seventies including the co-directed THE LORDS OF FLATBUSH, PIPE DREAMS (with Gladys Knight), and BOARDWALK.