Studio: VCA Pictures/BurningAngel.com
Director: Joanna Angel
Cast: Joanna Angel, Sabrina Sparx, Kylee Kross, Pinky Lee, Katrina Kraven, Sleazy Pete, James Deen, Tommy Pistol

Duties at Ponante Towers for Skank du Jour rival anything gossiped about happening in the integrity-free cells of alleged porn star “agent” Regan Senter, and finding myself in the position currently (among oh, so many wanton, physically improbable and fulminatory others), it befalls me to humbly ask that you not be taken aback, dear reader, by this Guest Review from Yet Another Meow in the Gram Cattery.

Especially as regards a work as important as Joanna Angel’s. Understand that, had our mothers raised us a bit differently, or had we come up in the world 20 years later than we did, Joanna Angel is, in an ideal universe, what would have become of all of the gomis* .

Possesor of canny fashion, music and PR sense, the Arquettish (Rosanna, not Patricia; Desperately Seeking Susan, not Searching for Debra Winger) Angel is the It-Girl of N.Y. skin, and here parlays the formidable BurningAngel.com canon into decent, recent-style adult fare that VCA Pictures (under the auspices of LFP) seems to be holding the banner for.

Plot: serviceable, wherein Joanna’s Angels (Angel, Sabrina Sparx, Kylee Kross) take on nemesis Katrina Kraven in her bid to L.A.-ize the Big Apple, wielding cute & hammy “hipster” Tommy Pistol. (Angel’s talent really seems to lie in providing her viewers with game, kooky woodsmen equal to, say, Evan Stone in the funny department, but blessedly alt rock in appearance, as opposed to the typical manicured pornstud.) (They fuck good, too.)

Sex scenes are long, with multiple chapter stops, a brilliant method for giving a viewer more bang for the buck; sadly, this turns out to be necessary, as there’s a lot of unmoving footage, such as a D.P. sequence where James Deen and Angel maintain a Newark-worthy holding pattern while Pistol plugs away dutifully. Yawn. Girl/girl/girl at the top of the show likewise fails to hold heat. Too bad, because Joanna, Sparx, and Kross are just so great to look at. Additionally, outside-the-scene distractions are numerous, and the filmmakers regrettably commit the ultimate beginner’s faux pas (mainstream and porno): a surplus of blah, blah, blah.

Big ups to Darien Train for showy smart editing and Straius Music’s fabulous fucking soundtrack (with Music Supervisor Dave Freeman) - these elements raise the “watchable” bar. Fans of BurningAngel.com will like the look, sound & feel, but there’s only so much leverage to be bought by the lovably grungy close-ups of post-punkettes in sexual distress, viscera pooling at the corners of their mouths and eyes. Getting there’s supposed to be at least half the fun, and it’s, uh, not.

Best of show: brief bouts of intensity during the first Angel/Deen pairing; but head-n-shoulders above all else is the finale fuck w/professional Katrina Kraven, who shows Angel and Deen what makes a veteran. To their credit, they rise to her level.

Just like you, we can’t wait to see more, better.

xox
Eugenie Brown
*girls of my ilk

Studio: Team Tyler
Director: Wankus
Cast: Tyler Faith, Daphne Rosen, Katie Morgan, Mika Tan, Cherokee, Kinzie Kenner, Michelle Lay, Lexie Lamour, Wankus, Tommy Gunn, and, for some reason, the president of the Los Angeles Sparks

Porn DVD technology goes through certain phases, so some consumers will remember a time, before the inevitable backlash, when a full twenty minutes of DVD time would be taken up with 900-number ads and websites unrelated to the movie advertised on the boxcover. There is one ad for a German Goo Girls sex line (the distributor of UnFAITHful Secrets, Black Widow Media, also distributes the Goo Girls in the United States) but this film falls prey to another porn staple, which is the Short Loop.

The Loop is the sequence of the DVD menu where viewers can choose a scene or bonus material. In the case of UnFAITHful Secrets, the loop is ten seconds long. We see Tyler being serviced, reverse-cowgirl style, by Tommy Gunn, and a cutaway to Wankus checking his watch. Those two scenes rotate endlessly with the background music that goes like this:

"Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!"

And so on. I only know this because the phone rang just as I was starting the movie, and I watched this hypnotic sequence about 90,000 times. I am going to sing this song at PSK one night. But as one who has never directed a porn movie before, my note is this: don't show a guy checking his watch at the beginning of a porn movie.

UnFAITHful Secrets is about men and women deceiving each other in the adult industry. It is shot in a distinctly 80's style, with high color, minimal effects, stock transitions, and often poor sound quality. I came to believe through the film, which is really a nice handbook about couples' relationships in the porn business, that this works (well, aside from the sound quality). As a movie about the adult industry, the style reflects the video era that made porn the major consumer product it is.

In the first scene, Mika Tan is a trophy wife who won't give up her ass to her husband, Dick Nasty. Saying she's heading out to a day spa with her friends, she leaves that scene and goes immediately to a porn set where she is the female talent. The male talent is Jack Lawrence. (I didn't know this at first, but then I saw that his shirt read "Jack Lawrence".) Mika goes in for a blowjob the way my mechanic changes my oil - on her back and from below. This is a fantastic technique. Fellas, advise your significant others to be like Mika Tan when it comes to their fellating duties; this method allows for full view of the real estate. Meanwhile, her husband gets it on with his secretary, played by Daphne Rosen.

"Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!"

Scene Two features Wankus and Tyler. Tyler does a quick solo scene in the shower, showing exactly why she is the Pride of Saugus but also why she is an enemy of grouting. She leaves the curtain open and the water goes everywhere. In the next room, she comforts Wankus, playing himself, with the news that she's "only doing girls" and that if he's feeling frisky, she might bring one home from the set. She then goes off to be impaled by Tommy Gunn. Cut to Wankus asleep in front of the television.

"Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!"

KSEXRadio.com gets a nice bit of product placement in the next scene, as Stephen St. Croix hosts a show featuring Michelle Lay, Lexi Lamour, and Kinzie Kenner, who explains that her fiancee thinks she's a makeup artist. The three women on the couch do that which makes KSEX a national treasure: they get naked for little or no compensation and reveal that neither guests nor hosts wear underpants.

"Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!"

Katie Morgan is a naive model in the next scene. She walks into a talent agency with hopes of doing photo shoots or rock videos, but is easily seduced by weasely manager Randy Spears into adult videos, despite her initial half-hearted protests that her husband wouldn't allow it. I am ashamed to say that I lead a starlet down this path just last week, except it was much worse: she was my temporary mail carrier.

"Should I just leave packages on your porch, Mr. Ponante, or should I go out back?" she asked.
"Would you like to do adult videos?" I replied.
"Yes," she said.

"Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!/Unfaithful secrets, Unfaithful secrets!"

The slick landmadel Cherokee is entirely naked throughout the final scene, playing a duplicitous stripper, if you can believe that. Though her white boy gangbanger wannabe boyfriend is sitting by the stage, Cherokee tempts the D.J. (Chris Cannon) into her dressing room, where he needs little convincing to engage in a morally-unsound adulterous tryst with her. Myself, I would pay to watch Cherokee blind rabbits in a cosmetics lab, but the idea of a strip club D.J. getting any is pure fantasy.

This movie plays to all my biases because I like women who look like they've had lunch today. I also like that it looks like it was shot in 1987, the year I was born, with Richard Marx doing the music. What's most important, though, is that each of these scenes looks like it could have been taken from real life which, as you know, appeals to me as a serious journalist.