Studio: Vivid
Director: B. Skow
Cast: Lux Kassidy, Missy Monroe, Chloe Dior, Samantha Ryan, Sara Stone, Kurt Lockwood, Nick Manning, Gram Ponant

Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot

"Droppin' loads! Right in your mouth! Bang!" - Nick Manning, 2006

By way of introducing its newest contract star, Lux Kassidy, Vivid chose to make a reality-style movie within a movie that often played like an extended Behind the Scenes documentary.

This allowed Nick Manning to parody himself, Kurt Lockwood to be a ham, and Sara Stone to break my heart.

Lux Kassidy had never performed in a porn scene before, so her tryst with Samantha Ryan was fraught with significance. Luckily the scene was called "Deconstructing A Classic" and Kassidy and Ryan were trading Sapphic moves for pizza. The pizza guy was Kurt Lockwood.

"I was the Helicopter champion of 1984," Lockwood says, twirling himself around so the girls would kiss each other.

Lux's Life is like that. Framed as the behind the scenes segment of a movie by pretentious director Anderson Pop, viewers are treated to all sorts of porn star tropes, like Lockwood as the pizza guy and Nick Manning as Asshole Male Talent.

Manning drags around an assistant, played by Sara Stone, and forces her to carry bags. He treats her horribly and fires her as the cameras roll. This allows the roving BTS cameraman to exploit her vulnerability and talk her into a blowjob.

Stone has childbearing hips and a load-bearing chest.

I am sorry if I sound vulgar, but that is how I feel.

She left the industry soon after this movie was made and I am heartbroken.

One of the selling points of any DVD, but almost a requirement for porn DVDs, is a behind the scenes segment. These are often the most enjoyable parts of movies for me, because we're allowed a better look at what makes these performers attractive to human beings before the stars are shoehorned into the tease-strip-blowjob-popshot formula. In this movie that line is blurred but, luckily, the fake behind the scenes is very clever.

Gram Ponante makes a cameo as America's Beloved Porn Journalist in a scene between Missy Monroe (who is still in porn, Thank God) and Christian.

"I like food," Monroe says. "I like the way it tastes."

"Well I've got something for you to eat right here, er, Baby," replies Christian.

Those were my lines. Watching them being realized was like watching a baby being born despite the presence of six or seven types of birth control.

Through it all there is Lux Kassidy. Named for Kirsten Dunst's character in The Virgin Suicides, Lux benefits from the casual style and is allowed to set herself apart from a movie (and a contract girl roster) full of blondes.

Her first and second scenes (ever) go so well that it makes me think going down on porn girls is easy. But as a Girls-Only performer, Lux feels the specter of expectation all around her, so it is no surprise that the very last word in Lux's Life is "anal".

Buy it.

Studio: VCA
Director: Axel Braun
Cast: Daisy Marie, Sativa Rose, Annie Cruz, Melissa Martinez, Jesse Castro

Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot

I was transported with joy when I saw this DVD had arrived, but also cautious and pensive. The danger of living in Porn Valley is succumbing to the belief that the limits of Los Angeles County are the limits of the world.

"I never had Latina Day Workers while living in Bogue Chitto," I thought. But then I reassured myself with the knowledge that shoving something down the throat of the culture is the only way to further Art.

Well allright. So the whole idea of Latina dayworkers gets thrown out the window immediately from the first scene. I envisioned financial blackmail, barely-disguised racial tensions, and revelations of the secret knowledge that all Hispanics possess.

Instead Steven French talks (not really) his way into Annie Cruz' house and she doesn't do too much to talk him out of it. I am typing as the scene plays in the background. They say director Axel Braun can make women squirt with his Lloyd's of London-insured hands - but he cannot make us feel.

They fuck on a velour couch. "I used to have a couch like that," I thought.

In the Behind the Scenes segment, Cruz (the dirtiest girl in porn, I believe) admits that she tips her own Latina dayworker 33 percent.

The next scene gets a little closer to what wage slave-minded viewers crave. Tiny Daisy is picked up on the side of the road by a man (Marco) who resembles the Devil. They speak Spanish the entire time. I have no idea what they're saying. This felt truer to me. One moment they're in his SUV and, with no transition, the next his dick is in her mouth. America will fall in love with Daisy if it hasn't already.

Next scene, same car, different driver. Jesse Castro is picked up outside the coffee shop with the same line that got Daisy to Axel's house.

The only scene true to the shocking depictions of class chauvinism comes when Scott Nails assumes that Melissa Martinez is an orange picker, when in fact she supervises them. But in that she gets into his (the same) SUV anyway, who is really to blame?

"Those don't look like orange trees," she says.

"Well, I've got a banana tree," he says.

The best scene is the last one.

(cue same car)

"Hey Girl, are you a day worker?" asks Jay of Sativa Rose.

"Yes,"she answers, and gets into Axel's car. They drive to a house and start fucking almost immediately. The money shot winds up on her breasts.

We were very excited around the office about this movie, which turned out to be less amusing than we thought. That was our fault, I guess, although each scene is solid and does exactly what a porn scene should, which is a tribute to Braun.

But the movie is not a tribute to the title, which promises more but just delivers a standard porn flick of VCA proportions.

This value-added set also contains a full-length "classic" Rocco Siffredi DVD that I did not watch, but the combination of the two, especially since one of the two contains Sativa Rose, is worth the price.

Studio: Pink Visual
Director: Alan Smithee
Cast: Lexi Love, Crystal, Daryll Hanah, Annie Body

Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot

Porn's practitioners of professional squirting are few.

"She told me she squirts," one director told me on the set of his squirting movie. "But she doesn't."

In Pink Visual's Squirt Hunter 3, just like Michael Stipe says, everybody squirts.

There is no opening sequence in this movie which, like many of Pink Visual's titles, is culled from shot-for-the-Internet material. Instead, we get right into an interview with Lexi Love, who tells us that she found out recently of her squirting powers, when she thought she'd lost bladder control on a male scene partner.

"But not everyone can make me do it," she said, so she'd brought along someone special for the scene. This unidentified man remained, with varying degrees of success, for the other three scenes.

The banter between Love and this scene's director is, while not forced, useless. He stammers, he makes bad jokes, he acts like someone other than Love is the star of the scene. The role of the camera in movies like this is to be a surrogate for the viewer, and this guy makes the viewers sound like drooling idiots.

Before the pairing even starts, Love's scene partner tells the director to shut up.

But even when the scene is under way, the director will not be quiet. That is why this perfectly serviceable porn scene with the hardworking Lexi Love should be played with the sound down and, let's say, The KLF's "Justified And Ancient" album playing in the background.

Next comes Crystal. Crystal, if I may be bold, seems like perfect girlfriend material. But she does not look like a porn star (she looks, in fact, like Juliette Lewis). She might be the best friend of a porn star who the porn star might try out new positions with, and who, of the two, enjoys sex more, but she appears to freak out her partner.

Crystal squeals, Crystal screams, Crystal squirts. But her partner cannnot stay hard. If it weren't for the general whateverness of the two other guys in the room (her partner and the firector), this scene would be painful. Instead it just seems weak.

Daryll Hanah, a bit more mature perhaps, has a better go of it with the same guy. She squirts 18 times. The director howls all the way through.

Finally, Annie Body redeems the entire show. A one-woman redheaded reason to forgive renaissance faires, Ms. Body, 37, looks like the ghost of a porn star from the free spirited waitress era of movies shot on film and paid for by Organized Crime. She squirts more on her own than with her partner, and her Wife of Bath look and attitude made the scene transcend the cheap room it was shot in.

There is room for all sorts of porn, at all sorts of budgets, in the little area at the corner of our closets and/or buried under the tire swing. But that does not mean the low-cost productions need to have the director supplying the dialogue.

Buy it.