Studio: JM Productions
Director: Ashley Blue
Cast: Ashley Blue, Taryn Thomas, Tiger, Naudia Nyce, Tiffany Rayne, Sasha Knox, Tory Lane

Imagine the rarefied world little Apple and Moses Coldtrow will grow up in. If they are lucky, they will be shielded by wealth and fame to the degree that they will not experience the danger such names might visit on them in a Bogue Chitto schoolyard. Most of us do not live in that world, and imagine having such names a little shocking.and impractical. It is the same for people on the outside of the porn snowglobe looking in, particularly for those who try to parse the output of a company called JM Productions.

JM Productions, founded by Jeff Mike Steward, delivers extreme content like the Gag Factor and American Bukkake series. As a high-output producer of such material, JM is often lumped together with companies like Extreme and Max Hardcore. I can't speak for the budgets or camera styles of these companies, but JM Productions (and a client they distribute, Chatsworth Pictures), continually offer grim humor along with the cum-swapping and asshole-stretching.

Ashley Blue is like the first friend your mom met after the divorce—the one who doesn't like kids. She's a hot party girl with a small-breasted pornette's no-nonsense and wry take on life. Her series Attention Whores features Blue's interviews with the women who will be appearing in a sex scene later. Each plays an exaggerated version of herself, an "attention whore" porn starlet.

Lower-budget porn movies, because they are shot in a day or two and are released at most a few months later, can be relied upon to be very topical. They are also intimate (often too intimate) portraits of the performers, especially in Behind the Scenes (BTS) sequences, which in JM and Chatsworth Pictures productions provide an excellent insider's snapshot of the loves and losses of today's Porn Valley.

Blue snarkily interviews the likes of Tiger, Taryn Thomas, Naudia Nyce (Blue: "You've got the Belladonna thing going." Nyce: "Shuttup"), and Tory Lane, each of whom gamely tries to outstrip Blue in Attention Whorishness. That the gallows humor of these shows is funny because its true makes the sex an afterthought, although it is great to blah blah Tory's blah blah Blue blah blah Sasha Knox blah. It would have been a great sex movie had no one talked, but they did, and for me the talking was much more interesting.

Tiger's enlisting the camera crew to shave her perineal area (BTS) was horrifying. Her encountering a stalker who was also one of the male talent was Business As Usual. "Porn guys are possessive and immature," came an offstage voice, at which point Tiger explained how she beats enemies with bats. A cumshot across Tiffany Rayne's philtrum interrupted her monologue. "I was talking," she said. It wasn't an act, really.

Ashley Blue, interviewing an equally cynical Sasha Knox, who had just explained she was an emo girl, asked "so is this a platform for you to jump off from your porn career into mainstream success?" The jokes were not even winks to thew audience as much as they were to industry regulars, who go from zero to Jaded within a few hours of entering the industry.

Standout performers are Taryn Thomas and Nyce (onscreen) and Tiger (backstage). Blue is, as always, trenchant. If Apple and Moses ever watch one of these movies, their heads might explode.

Studio: Adam & Eve
Director: Ernest Greene
Cast: Hartley, Mika Tan, Anna Mills, Angela Stone, Trent Solauri

Until Nina Hartley threw her two cents in, I used to look no further than Bill Moyers' exhaustive 10-part documentary on the subject when I sought to understand female ejaculation. With trusty sidekick Mika Tan filling in for Joseph Campbell, Hartley explains the psychological, biological, and commercial reasons for squirting, reassuring her audience several times that it's not just pee.

I don't know if she owes anyone money, but aside from that possibility it is impossible not to like Nina Hartley. She is warm, kind, amiable, and knows her stuff. She also demonstrates on live, naked porn stars how to make a woman ejaculate.

Hartley's various How To series for Adam & Eve are long on the theory but don't skimp on the application. She explained the ins and outs of female ejaculation, admitting that she herself has never done it. "Ejaculation is something females can experience easily, occasionally, or never," she says a little ruefully, noting that the distance between the G-spot and the urethra can be a deciding factor in whether or not a woman can pull it off, as it were.

Hartley demonstrated on the always-game Mika Tan (and later on Anna Mills, much more graphically and with a vertical speculum) just where everything was, providing an engaging lecture with plenty of visual aids.

That women can have harmless retrograde ejaculations that send fluid back toward the bladder; that female ejaculation requires both the pelvis and the G-spot to work in concert; and that ejaculation is not necessarily orgasm were all news to my viewing partner. I of course nodded "Yes, yes obviously" to each factoid because I'm, like, so an expert on the topic.

Now and then the banter between Hartley and her subjects was only a little better than awards-show patter. In the film's only honest-to-God porn scene, Angela Stone and Trent Solauri have the following dialogue before she demonstrates a squirt brought on the old-fashioned way:

Solauri: Am I too early?

(beat)

Stone: You're right on time.

(pause)

Solauri: Should I have brought my galoshes?

(silence)

Stone: Very funny.

In Mills and Stone, Hartley and partner/director Ernest Greene have found two women for whom ejaculation is easy. Hartley repeats that not every woman has that ability, thus easing the minds of people confused by the porn world's recent interest in squirting as a result of gushing virtuousos like Cytherea and Tiana Lynn.

Hartley says that one can't be demure and ladylike while soaking the sheets, so why bother worrying? The movie is just as much about the mechanics of squirting as it is about relieving oneself of the pressure to do so.

Watching Mills ejaculate, as Tan remarked, "under laboratory conditions" and Stone squirt "in the field" with Solauri is much more of a revelation after Hartley has explained the procedure.

I have watched instructional videos for everything from Microsoft Access to Microsoft Visio, and Nina Hartley's Guide to Female Ejaculation is by far the best one. And will no doubt prove to be the most useful.

Studio: Hustler
Director: Jack the Zipper
Cast: Kimberly Kane, Audrey Hollander, Jassie, Smokie Flame, Felix Vicious, Otto Bauer

I know the movie was made in 2004 and released in 2005, but I just finished watching Jack the Zipper's Squealer an hour ago and, unlike many porn films, I still remember it.

Fellas, if you're the type to dream of a farmhouse full of consensually bruisable porn girls and you yourself don't have a face, this film is for you.

While Squealer is not a light-but-poignant arthouse romp like, say, Millions or Muriel's Wedding, don't believe detractors who say it is not a couples' film. The significant other who cuddles up to you to watch this Grapes of Wrath-meets-Deliverance-meets-Charlotte's Web-meets-Audrey Hollander's mouth is a keeper. In fact, you could probably keep 'er tied up in your basement.

This movie never stops being spookily and artfully shot, but it also doesn't collapse under those things (like Michael Ninn's Catherine did), despite an abrupt change of gears at the beginning of the movie in which several setup shots of a bleak farmhouse and its sepia envrons give way to sex that doesn't abate throughout the movie. Zipper adheres to the porn necessity of enough lindering shots of performers' precious real estate to justify minite-by-minute VOD sales.

In a weekend in the country not unlike a version of The Big Chill I might enjoy, the first scene starts with a bang. Several women writhe on a rug, only to be interrupted most entitledly by male talent who are only shot below the collar. As the movie continues it becomes clear that the target demographic is straight males and the women who love to service them in extreme environments: In other words, it doesn't matter that we don't see men's faces.

Each pale woman gets dirtier and more bruised as the action progresses to a barn, boathouse, and swamp around the property. Hustler's legal department has of late erred on the side of restraint in light of recent anti-porn rumblings in the government, but Squealer pushes many envelopes pertaining to bondage and rough sex, particularly in a scene in which Hollander's head is eased to a table set with a nearby arrangement of steak knives.

With the sounds of sex coming from a dub track and the occasional performer looking directly at the camera with full porn vogueing, this movie occasionally taps a hole in an otherwise complete picture of the creepy house in the woods where strange things happen. Strange, beautiful, dirty things.

The movie gets more and more graphic, but never blatant and gimmicky. Zipper's style of art-directed wall-to-wall sex movie is rare, so it will be interesting to see how he fits into Hustler's new "Hardline" extreme sex imprint.

In the meantime, Squealer is an intense little movie.

Studio: VCA
Director: Joanna Angel
Cast: Angel, Kylee Kross, Sabrina Sparx, Pinkie Lee, Pixie Pearl, Dana DeArmond, Charlotte Stokely, Tommy Pistol, Mr. Marcus, James Deen

With Mr. Marcus as President, decidedly un-Porn Valley shots of New York in the snow, two classic Rancid songs on the soundtrack, and Joanna Angel doing all the things she does best (mainly being disarming), Joanna's Angels 2: Alt Throttle can only prolong the Joanna bubble for her fans and confound those who still don't get it.

Many people can't get past the phenomenon of Joanna Angel and, by extension, the alt scene, whatever that is, in order to watch and enjoy what Angel herself calls " a silly movie."

People looking for flaws need search no further than the title sequence, in which the name of the movie is misspelled. Dropped lines, creeping shadows all over the set, and a sense that the movie is being performed for a roomful of sympathetic friends is pervasive. But that's not the point: Angel and company are performing to bigger and bigger roomfuls of sympathetic friends who are happy to watch Angel do her thing as a mixtape of the people and stuff she finds cool.

JA2 concerns the kidnapping of the President's daughter (Dana DeArmond, a millennial pinup if one was ever invented) by Charlotte Stokely, Angel's jealous blonde rival who wants to blackmail the President into destroying all things Alt. Complicating matters are James Deen's breakup with Angel for her tattoos and alt-y ways ("I hope you have fun with your normal girlfriend!" she cries) and Tommy Pistol's betrayal at the hands of Pixie Pearl, prompting a low-speed car-stunt sequence.

JA2 is a screwball comedy ideally, but sometimes the lines—and there are a lot of them—get tossed away by the cast. This would matter more if Angel didn't put together a fine crew of standbys and temporary residents of her Williamsburg loft, including sassy firecrackers Sabrina Sparx and Kylee Kross. DeArmond, who played Traci Lords in Eon McKai's Neu Wave Hookers, is just a little bit breathtaking when she is de-programmed of Stokely's agenda by being made to come by Pistol and Sparx.

People who keep track of this sort of thing will note that, hot on the heels of Angel's first interracial scene with Marcus on the set of House of Ass, she called him back to join in an interracial double-penetration of her vital areas with James Deen. "He's a sweetie," Angel said of Marcus.

In porn, as in life, a sense that people are having a great time goes a long way to getting you on their side. This feeling is palpable in Joanna's Angels 2. I don't know of any other production boasting "mainstream" crossover appeal that could manage to land not one but two songs that might otherwise net thousands of dollars in licensing for a Cameron Crowe movie or similar, but Angel did it. Who do you have to blow for a deal like that?

It is also fun to watch Angel and her friends just being goofy. It gives hope to goofy people everywhere.