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Reviewed by: Josh Lehman

07 Feb 2007

Island Fever 3

What happens when you combine the beautiful islands of Tahiti and Bora Bora with the likes of Tera Patrick, Jesse Jane, Devon and a cavalcade of adult stars? Island Fever 3, the third in the series by master auteur Joone, featuring breathtaking camera work by Robby D., makes its glorious debut in the format it belongs on, blue laser HD-DVD.

Island Fever 3 is closer to a music video in how its done, as it is not plot-driven and certainly not gonzo in theme. Different vignettes are lavishly strung together by the gorgeous landscape, making this one a hit with the ladies as well as the gentlemen.

Devon has long been considered one of the most beautiful women in the adult industry, and had been a staple of Digital Playground’s biggest releases. Jesse Jane is the new “gold standard” starlet of XXX, and IF3’s opening scene has these two girls together in a spectacular girl/girl sequence that features scenery almost as magnificent as these two girls. Adult film superstar Evan Stone, the hardest-working man in porn, begins our second big sequence, this time again with the lovely Devon.

Tera Patrick makes her final Digital Playground appearance before starting TeraVision, and goes out with quite the literal bang here in a stupendous scene with Barrett Blade. Tera is one of the most elegant and unique beauties ever to be featured in adult films, and IF3 marks her most beautiful film to date. Tera herself tried to recapture this same look and feel with Teradise Island, but fell dramatically short of the bar DP and Joone set with the Island Fever series. Evan Stone and Eric Masterson are quite the lucky guys in this movie, and their scenes flip back and forth between each of our starlets, none better than the hot sequence with Jesse Jane and Evan beachside.

Robby D. really shows why he is one of the most talented cinematographers in the adult field, and certainly we can see why his Handheld Pictures division of Digital Playground is now making quite the name for itself with such hits as the Control series. Joone, as he has shown more recently with IF4 and Pirates, really is heads-above the competition as a director, re-inventing himself in almost every film. A mark of a good director is someone who has more than one forte, and Joone is showing that unlike some of his flashier competition such as Andrew Blake, his films are not destined to repeat their predecessors, as he is constantly evolving.

The new Digital Playground two-disc set of Island Fever 3 contains both the standard widescreen DVD as well as the new blue-laser HD-DVD of the transfer. The first edition of IF3 came with a WMV-9HD version of IF3, and the new disc is encoded with VC-1 at 720P. A lot has been made about why these first titles are 720P, and there are two common sense reasons they are 720P: 1) Most studios were shooting in the HDV format, and 720P is better for anything with any kind of fast-moving video than the 1080I HDV. New cameras such as Sony’s HVR-V1U, which records to hard drive and can shoot up to 1080P/60 for video or 1080P/24 for film, and does it under ten thousand dollars, making this the new “go to” camera for production houses that can afford to spend $100,000 on a high-end pro cam 2) The WMV HD discs that originally were in the first set were already mastered at 720P, and thus the easiest lateral move to the new blue laser HD-DVD VC-1 transfer.

The new transfer at 720P for Island Fever 3 is simply breath taking, and rivals the very best HD transfers available on either HD-DVD or Blu-ray. As we have seen in the past several years of some of the best HD material on Discovery HD, and HDNet’s Bikini Destination, tropical sunlit locations always make for the best HD, and Island Fever 3 lends itself to this perfectly being shot in well-lit locations in Tahiti and Bora Bora. The DVD looked outstanding, as did the WMV transfer, but the new VC-1 transfer smokes both, dramatically. No compression artifacting at all, and not a drop of macro blocking or noise. Pirates did suffer some compression issues common with HDV video because of the darker and smokier sequences, but IF3 wisely stays away from those sequences, and really looks wonderful. It is unfortunate such a title can’t be shown on demo loops at Home Theater and Electronics stores since it is an adult title, as this really shows how beautiful an HD transfer can be. Pimples and stretch marks? Yeah, you can see ‘em, but who cares? These are all people, and no one is perfect. It just makes them more human.

The audio is also moderately improved from the DVD with the new Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 track at 640kbps as opposed to the dramatically more compressed track found on the previous DVD. The score resonates beautifully across the front sound stage, and the surrounds are used effectively to reproduce elements of the score and certain ambient F/X. This is not a film like Pirates that really has explosions, so the LFE track is only in effect to emphasize the music.

The HD-DVD does not contain a pop-up menu like normal HD-DVDs, but does have a static menu like normal DVDs. Is this new transfer worth trading up from the DVD or WMV version? Most definitely. IF3 and the upcoming HD-DVD of IF4 are surely to be two of the best-looking HD adult titles we see any time soon, and Digital Playground has really set the bar high enough where the other studios have their work cut out for them. A must-have!