Max’s  videotapes are romantic renderings of classic B&D, which belie how severe the situations they depict are.  They’re shot at his expansive and isolated estate in the Ardennes.  His biggest recent hits, Bondage Fantasies and The Escape Artist/The Bondage Model, feature his English discovery, Holly, and her bloke boyfriend.  Holly works as a go-go dancer in England and also designs flyers for discothèques.  She’s very much the prototypical London bird, someone who looks like she fell out of the mid-1960s Blow Up era, down to the white thigh high boots and miniskirts she often sports.  She’s a stick figure with long blonde hair and a sharp nose, a Sweet Gwendolyn gumby doll that gets willingly bent and twisted into a myriad of contortions.  The aesthetic and popular success of these videotapes is inseparable from Holly’s photogenic looks, British accent, and personality in which S&M is a natural reflex.

               Bondage Fantasies opens with Holly strapped to a hospital bed.  Her boyfriend plays the psychiatrist who asks her about her fantasies.  They peruse a copy of John Willie’s Sweet Gwendolyn drawings and Holly plays out different illustrations that appeal to her most.  Throughout the 70 minutes of the tape, the intrepid Holly explores a number of B&D scenarios.  She gets securely tied to a tree with rope in an outdoor touch usually seen in classics like Olga’s House of Shame.  Wearing thigh high black leather spiked boots, black miniskirt, and white corset, Holly is chained by the neck, shackled arm and leg, and tied to a rack in a dungeon with an stone wall.  She’s paraded around in two forms of prison garb, one a red jumpsuit and the other a humiliating traditional black and white striped affair complete with matching cap. 

The final sequence displays Max’s unique sense of humor.  Holly is bound into one of Martin’s creations, a metal shrew’s fiddle.  It’s a device that originated in the middle ages to discipline unruly wives, a yoke which restrains her hands and neck.  She hopes the device will prevent her from eating chocolate.  However, she’s able to put on shoes, munch on some sweets and complain over the phone to Martin that the restraints just aren’t restrictive enough.  The constant intercutting between pictorial fantasy images and acted out reality gives Bondage Fantasies a dreamy quality.

                The Escape Artist/The Bondage Model is Max’s most accomplished look at the ties that bind Holly and her boyfriend.  The boyfriend displays a combination of awe and delight that he’s found a capable playmate.  Holly enthusiastically acts out a variety of bondage situations with a giddy, playful glee.  The initial sequence features Holly in a denim miniskirt in the sunny outdoors.  Her boyfriend ties her hands up with some seriously knotted rope, and she wriggles out of it Houdini-style.   Her next escape attempt isn’t as successful, though, and she’s left hogtied for hours to a picnic table.  The sore red marks she massages after this ordeal are quite real, but a little discomfort doesn’t phase her.

The next vignette finds Holly walking in her thigh high white go-go boots down the long, desolate road to Max’s estate.  Her boyfriend pulls up in a van bearing a large package containing Martin’s equipment.  She gets tied up with a host of cuffs and leg irons in a barren room.  Her boyfriend teasingly leaves her a key out of reach and she’s left pleading in her Brit accent “please untie me… please untie me….”

                Max’s humorous conclusion to the tape is the segment entitled "The Bondage Model".  Holly poses for photos modeling Martin’s equipment as her boyfriend snaps away.  He gets distracted by his cell phone and leaves her with her hands and feet in a metal pillory contraption.  The tape ends with this existential jape.

                The Escape Artist builds on itself with a quiet erotic intensity.  What distinguishes this videotape from its sea of competitors is its mixture of romantic lyricism and voyeurism.  It puts you in the position of peeking on a couple for who B&D is very much a normal part of their lives.  The bucolic outdoor settings are both pretty and unique, and the interiors are appropriately spare.  The relaxing ambient music draws you into the scene.  Max’s videocam work is so accomplished, his use of available light demonstrating a skilled still photographer’s eye, that the tape achieves a rarity nowadays in that it’s virtually indistinguishable from actual film. 

-Bill Landis, Sleazoid Express