Surrender Cinema’s first major competitor in the genre softcore home video space made its debut in 2000 by going back to a style that 1990s softcore had almost entirely neglected: the parody. Seduction Cinema released The Erotic Witch Project in February of 2000, less than a year after the wide theatrical release of The Blair Witch Project in July of 1999. The Erotic Witch Project 2: Book of Seduction was released in May 2000, and by the end of 2001 the company produced and/or distributed over a dozen genre softcore features and shorts on home video including a third “Erotic Witch” movie, Witchbabe: The Erotic Witch Project 3 (2001). The stage seemed to be set for major competition between Seduction Cinema and Surrender Cinema, but Surrender all but ceased production by the end of 2001. Surrender released one film in 2000 (The Exotic Time Machine 2: Forbidden Encounters), produced two more in 2002 (Castle Eros and Madame Hollywood), and has not produced any new films since.
While Surrender wound down production to focus on distribution — nearly all of their films are still available to this day on DVD through Full Moon’s web site — Seduction Cinema’s success with The Erotic Witch Project established them as the new dominant name in softcore genre cinema production. The increasing popular interest in science fiction and other “nerdy” intellectual…
