Running Time: 80 min

Cast: Missy, Chloe, Dakota, Katie Gold, Mila, Johnni Black, Tony Tedeschi, Marc Davis, and Julian

Director: Michael Zen

Extras: Behind the Scenes Featurette (approx. 10 min), biographies, previews, web link, multiple angles, and photo gallery

Audio / Video Quality: Very good. There are some very different scenes in Taboo 18 that seem like they would be very difficult to film and the transfer does justice to the camera work. The audio syncs quite well to the video and also does justice to a job that does not appear to easy to do.

The Plot: Tony Tedeschi plays a mortician who's wife (Chloe) has died in a car accident. A friend of hers (Missy) comes to pay her respects and takes her shoes with her. Tony follows her home and is drawn into a web of taboo fetishes that occur around Missy's house, gradually learning that the wife he thought was so innocent was at the center of it all.

Review: I wasn't exactly sure what to expect when I started watching Taboo 18. Just the name made me slightly uneasy, but I felt that Michael Zen's direction combined with the writing of himself and Raven Touchstone (who also teamed up to write Satyr) would make it worthwhile. It was, but not as much as I would have hoped.

Taboo 18 opened quite strongly. There was a slight feeling of mystery, and the flashback to Missy first meeting Chloe is quite good. It takes place in a show store, where Chloe seduces Missy as she tries to sell her a pair of shoes. Needless to say, this was one hot scene! It almost starts as a shoe fetish or foot worship scene, but instead ends up a typical, although very well done, lesbian scene. From there, we see different fetish scenes as Tony journeys through Missy's house. First he watches Julian fucking Johnni Black in what almost seems like a mirrored dentist's office. Missy catches him watching and handcuffs him in a room where he watches Michael J. Cox and Katie Gold as sex dolls. They add to the plot by telling Tony that the shoes she was wearing were given to her by Appalonia and that he should come with them to find out more about Appalonia. He then sees a group honoring Appalonia - Mila in leather going at it with Marc Davis (which was extremely rare for Mila. I was actually somewhat impressed with her performance), and Julian, who I think was to be kind of cross - dressing going at it with Dakota dressed in leather like a dominatrix. I was slightly confused with this scene since Dakota started as a servant and ended up as the dominatrix. Afterwards, Missy finds Tony and tells him that Chloe was Appalonia and that she would have fulfilled his every fantasy. He pays his last respects to Chloe, accepting who she really was and mourning his lack of communication with his wife. Luckily for him, Missy volunteers to 'stand in' for Chloe and fulfill all his fantasies.

The behind the scenes featurette is also pretty good. It doesn't really go into the behind the scenes stuff too much, but it's only ten minutes long. Mostly, the featurette interviews the stars and shows them screwing around a little. If nothing else, it shows some humanity in the stars and gives you a little taste of them as real people.

On the negative side, the 'multiple angles' are a joke. Metro decided to use the same style multiple angles that Vivid uses that we all know and love so well. At least they kept most of the scenes somewhat together. I think there was about a 30 second offset between the scenes. Even worse, rather than use the chapters to highlight the scenes with multiple angles, Metro has the feature on throughout the entire movie. So the little multi-angle icon stays in the corner of the screen the entire movie! That got old after the first five minutes or so and really interfered with my enjoying the movie.

There is also a continuity error in the scene with Mila and Mark Davis and Dakota and Julian. In one scene we see Julian is pumping away on Dakota, and in the next is Mark fucking Mila, but we see Julian eating Dakota out. It also seemed like the closeup on Julian was reused several times. Despite those couple things, the scene was at least done well enough that it didn't completely ruin it for me.

Finally, I was really disappointed with the final scene between Tony and Missy. Here Missy agrees to make Tony's fantasies come true, and all he can come up with is doing it in a tub. It seems like kind of a waste of talent. Missy is one of the most animalistic actresses out there today, and the scene seems really tame. Most of it is Tony fingering her under water, and I would have at least expected an anal scene from Missy, which is also not there.

Overall, Taboo 18 is pretty good. Technically, it's excellent. The camera work is great and far from easy. It's also pretty well written. I just don't think that anything in it was that Taboo. Vivid's Extreme Sex series went much further into kinky fetishes and did it much better. The scene with Dakota and Julian and Mila and Mark Davis was as close as Taboo came to anything from the Extreme Sex series. Perhaps after seeing the Extreme Sex series a year or two ago, the fetishes in Taboo 18 don't seem as taboo as they would at first, but mostly it seemed like Michael Zen really thought some of these fetishes were taboo, and was afraid to go into them much.