Studio: Digital Playground
Director: Robby D.
Cast: Sophia Santi, Sativa Rose, Charlotte Stokely, Jessi Summers, Roxy Deville, Faith, Jayna Oso, Jenna Presley, Kaiya Lynn, the spirit of Jesse Jane

I can imagine the pitch for "Deeper" at Digital Playground's sprawling Van Nuys compound.

"Now don't freak out, but the last scene may or may not contain necrophilia."

(pause)

"Adella, would you call Security?"

---

Digital Playground makes great efforts to stay on the cutting edge of newer technology, becoming early adopters of the DVD and, when HD came around, making sure the porn world knew that they made the switch. They were iPod-friendly faster than their peers and they have made the decision to go Blu-Ray when that becomes widely available.

Some may find it disturbing, then, that director Robby D. opens the movie with a shot of Sativa Rose pleasuring herself on the floor, her head jerking around Ring-style. Just because you can use techniques popularized by mainstream movies (the CG skeletons in Pirates, for example), doesn't mean it's effective.

But for me, I was all like: "Hot Ghost."

Santi appears in the next scene. A man is pressed against a pane of glass. She treats the glass like she should be treating him (Santi is still being eased into a full-on pornstress role and does not have genital contact with another man in this movie).

The rest of the scenes follow a theme of voyeurism. Robby D., who comes off as your best friend in the wackier Jack's Playground movies (and who seems to be helming, with the more couples'-friendly Celeste, about a thousand movies a month for Digital Playground), gets darker than he does deeper, starting with an elegant couple engaging in foreplay amid shots of their dinner (some kind of tuber?) and the recessed face of what appears to be a stalker.

While the film is style-heavy it doesn't interfere too much with the substance of the movie, which still features languid shots of moody, high-strung vixens. And a strangely-fetishized dinner.

Well, make that a strangely-fetishized dinner and an inappropriately-fetishized Jesse Jane. A man uses a portrait of Jesse Jane as a marital aid in his scene with Kaiya Lynn. Someone had mentioned this scene to me as having some Jesse product placement in it, but this was ridiculous. Seriously. It was ridiculous. At one point the portrait of Jesse Jane was literally between the couple, and it was the portrait that reaped the fruit of their strivings, as it were.

I believe that was the first threesome I've ever seen with a picture as the third party. Other than my six-foot cutout of Chewbacca, but Chewie's more of a person.

The scene with the least baggage is one between exceptionally-white Utah native Charlotte Stokely and Scott Nails, who appears throughout this movie and is becoming one of the hardest working men in show business.

Deeper is also the first gonzo film that has a resolution. We revisit Santi and her glass-frustrated friend in the penultimate scene. In a sequence of loving shots of Santi's face underneath the glass, the man finally let's go atop it. It's not so arty that it's distracting. In fact, it's riveting. (I'm not sure I could take a movie full of it, though, because Catherine would have to file an injunction.)

Deeper ends anti-climactically, literally. A man comes across (but not too much) a prone lower half of a woman (Sativa Rose again - no wonder she looked otherworldly before) under a coverlet. He avails himself of what is visible. The audience is happy to learn via a few leg twitches that his scene partner is, in fact, alive. (Insert ex-wife joke here.)

I hate to use crass language in describing a porn movie, but he delivers the smallest load I've ever witnessed. No wonder he couldn't summon much up, though; she was just lying there.

Ultimately, Robby D.'s twisted sense of humor and fun come out in the last scenes. It's enjoyable to watch the movie moving toward a conclusion through several thoughtfully-orchestrated sequences that deliver where they should. It's also nice to know the director is keeping himself interested.

Studio: Hustler
Director: Will Rider
Cast: Britney Rears, Sunny Lane, Jenaveve Jolie, Nadia Styles, Eva Angelina, Hillary Scott, Shy Love, Kapri Styles, Nyomi Marcela, Nikki Hilton

As the treachery of Hyman Roth and Michael Corleone's fall from innocence were central to the plot of Godfather Part II, questions concerning who really sings Britney Rears' songs are the foundation of this sequel, which many believe exceeds the high standards set by its predecessor. Never take sides against your dancers, Britney.

"It dudn't get any crazier dan dis!" observes a starstruck narrator, introducing scenes from the decadent life of Britney Rears, embattled porn pop tart.

In this installment, Rears is being accused of lip-synching; the press is giving her a hard time about her philandering lazy-ass husband, Kevin; and her dancers hate her. Even her management team cannot spare her a kind word. And in the trappings of a standard Hustler movie, with a required amount of sex scenes, groupings, and positions therein, director Will Rider has managed to deliver a movie that comments on both the adult industry and the greater entertainment industry it seeks to emulate.

A bank of microphones at a Rears press conference include representatives of adult trade publications AVN and XBiz, neither of which owns microphones or its own digital camera. This is a means of courting some of the few outlets available within the adult industry to single out one of the thousand porn movies released every month. Where was the GramPonante.com microphone???

Through zoom-laden interview segments and meaningless sex in Porn Valley mansionlettes, Britney Rears' life—and yours by extension—is revealed to be an empty joyride with The Void at the end. That Rears' own lip-synching is never resolved is indicative of the responsibility-free lives the damned lead.

Indeed, Rears herself is a secondary player in her own story, with longer scenes reserved for the likes of Jenaveve Jolie and Eva Angelina. This can be expected in a life totally out of her own control.

The only throughline in her existence, other than despair and blowjobs, is the blue tarp she and Shy Love use to fuck Scott Nails at her press conference (in front of the media elite, no less); it is the same one she uses at her mountainside mansion.

When her last breath escapes her lips at the end of Britney Rears 3 (word is there will be a different Britney), it will undoubtedly carry the words "Blue Tarp."

(The above was my original final line when I submitted this review to Fleshbot, but my editor added the following:

"Kind of like the end of 'Citizen Kane', except, like, not."

I am confident my urbane readers would have known that already, regardless of whether "Blue Tarp" was a dumb joke or not.)

Studio: Suze Randall/PurePlay Media
Director: Big Bad Onxxx
Cast: Autumn Bliss, Mya Luana, Gigi, Sandra Shine, Samantha Ryan, Celeste, Jasmine, Kurt Lockwood, Scott Nails

Veteran adult photographer Suze Randall produced this movie about an erotic hotel (proprietrix: Autumn Bliss) in which "fantasies hold sway and forbidden desires become sensual realities". Yes, it's that kind of movie.

A little while ago I passed gracefully out of a particular freewheeling and tolerant demographic and lately have been noticing certain prejudices creep in. Of the two (the other concerns the decisions I make about people who park badly), the more extreme is the one I've formulated around Couples' Films and the people who buy them.

Suze Randall hired a guy named Big Bad Onxxx (of course) to direct this very well-lit movie, featuring sets that weren't just thrown together and lingerie that looked like the most expensive stuff one could buy off the rack of certain underpants-outlet establishments. The women were pretty and their makeup was porn-flawless.

This is true of many couples' movies. An additional characteristic is that the sound is awful. The director Celeste at Digital Playground avoids this by making all her glossy movies nothing but music videos in which no one says anything. This masks a multitude of ills, the biggest one being that many porn performers are sexy right up until they open their mouths to speak (opening their mouths for anything else extends the sexy a little longer).

The capable and sassy performer Autumn Bliss is our narrator through several boy/girl, girl/girl, and solo girl vignettes taking place in different parts of a loft. In the first scene Bliss looks poutingly at the camera and taps herself tentatively with a feathered paddle. A knock is heard from somewhere behind the camera.

"Come in," she says, and from a set of curtains opposite where the knock came from a robed man enters and they get into it.

Was he supposed to have knocked on the curtains? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter in spades.

The performers in this movie are so conditioned to the structure, the pout, the walk, the phoned-in groaning, that they cease to seem real. They would do better as a series of exquisitely shot still images. This feeling was broken up briefly in a scene with Kurt Lockwood in which the much-mailgned performer dresses and acts like the young Robert Evans in the latter's "Coke makes what I say interesting" phase.

Only Mya Luana seems to transcend the staginess of the production, flashing an engaging smile now and then.

What made this movie worth it for me was the behind the scenes footage. Everyone is so much more alive and likeable when laughing at themselves, the crew, or sitting around the set.

For most porn movies that are shot to fulfill a quota rather than a need, it is the behind the scenes footage of the interesting people who do this for a living that redeems everything.

Studio: VCA
Director: Ron Royster
Cast: Lacie Heart, Mika Tan, Justine Joli, Jade Starr, Ashley Steel, Leah Luv, Marie Luv, James Deen

With a Mexican surf rock theme song topping a soundtrack of MySpace bands, a loosely connected comic book plot about an evil organization (L.I.M.P.) bent on controlling Earth’s women, and a trippy series of scenes with game performers like Lacie Hart, Mika Tan and Justine Joli, Atomic Vixens: Escape from the Valley of the Sluts (whatever that means) is the perfect porn confection to bring together that hard-to-please cholo, lipstick lesbian, and Vatican emissary crowd in one non-threatening embrace.

Filmed in Erotivision, less a technology than a philosophy summarized by director Ron Royster’s earnest wish to “just want to eat pizza with pretty girls, man,” Vixens is a Pretty Girl-heavy evolution of American International Pictures like Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine that delivers where the good doctor did not; the bikinis come off and the go-go girls go-go for each other.

Each scene in Vixens is introduced with a comic book storyboard that is a helpful way of setting apart what might normally be formulaic sex scenes from their counterparts in similar-budget movies. What makes “Vixens” an instant party classic (I, personally, no longer attend these parties, but still) is the glee with which tarted-up space-babe Mika Tan does a full Bond-girl scrim dance (and screams “I taste like dog!” in Tagalog during her scene with Jade Starr) or extra-bendy Justine Joli performs a solo scene in which she rips her lime-colored tights and bites her own toe.

Another way Vixens digresses from formula is the paucity of scenes with guys. James Deen seems to appear as an afterthought, a last-minute attempt to hit certain marketing points. Not needing to share the restroom with anyone, he delivers an equally-hammy performance to the ladies. Royster seems less concerned with giving screen time to the fellas in this movie than creating a male-gaze Sapphic Wonderland. And he succeeds.

This movie is chock-full of pretty girls doing sassy, non-threatening things. As such it appeals to the widest cross-section of porn’s current audience for video-based product: couples and the emerging “alt” market (I can’t bring myself to use the word “alt” without quotes just yet, the same way I write “President”). It creates its own niche.

Watching Vixens, I thought that people who enjoy technicolor Elvis movies, the original Pink Panther‘s ski lodge party scene, tiki culture, and especially old Playboys would really dig it.

In Octavio Arizala’s guest-directed scene, a pairing of soon-to-be-Vivid Girl Lacie Heart (Vixens was shot in November ‘05, and Heart signed with Vivid early this year) and Ashley Steel, the two play fembots in an Esquivelian spaceship. We don’t really know why they’re there or what they are doing, but it looks nice. Heart screams “Give me head” in Latin.

Disc Two features extended photo galleries as well as a ponderous but engaging behind-the-scenes documentary and manifesto by Cat Purcell, aka Cat Pee. With an arresting Upper Peninsula Michigan accent, Purcell combines backstage footage of the shooting of the movie in downtown Los Angeles and at Hollywood’s hipster transient hotel, the Vibe, with her theories about what makes good lesbian erotica (“if any girl tapped my clit for fifteen minutes like you see in ‘lesbian’ porn movies, I’d kick her in the head,” she snarls) as well as musings from her own body of knowledge culled from her then-three weeks’ experience with the adult industry.

To be fair, one can learn all about the vicissitudes and heartbreak of the adult industry in a short time but, like hobbits, it can still surprise you after a hundred years. Particularly vexing is Purcell’s adamant fluffer denial. There are fluffers; they are just rare, like angels.

While this bit of juvenilia should probably have been put on the extras of Purcell’s upcoming Alpha 15 movie, including as it does footage of Purcell as a standup comedian in Kansas City and a scene with Ron Jeremy as Jesus welcoming her into the porn community (!), this documentary is nothing if not earnest, and is a welcome departure from cynical and phoned-in BTS footage one might see everywhere else.

My favorite snippet is of Royster describing 11th-hour douche purchases at a Hollywood Rite Aid. “We were giggling like junior high kids,” he said.

The two-disc set arrives in a swanky DVD box with an inner sleeve reminiscent of, yes, a record album. This practice started with VCA’s tentpole release of Eon McKai’s Neu Wave Hookers earlier this year and shows no signs of abating.