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 Studio: Wicked
Director: Jonathan Morgan
Cast: Stormy Daniels, Brianna Love, Cassie Young, Delilah Strong, Katie Morgan, Kelly Kline, Nicole Sheridan, Sunny Lane, Eric Masterson, Evan Stone, Mr. Pete, Randy Spears, Voodoo
Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot
A couple is visited by ghosts of relationships past in order to deal with their current boy/girl woes.
It's tough being Jen (Stormy Daniels), so starved for a relationship that she can't have meaningless sex with a guy without telling him she loves him. And it's tough for Dave (Voodoo), who, when Stormy tells him she loves him, runs out of the room.
Wicked's latest couples' flick, written by Daniels and directed by Jonathan Morgan, aims to deliver the elusive mainstream movie - but with sex - that other studios aspire to. The mood is light and the sex is positive. But can the story sustain it?
Out in the hallway, Dave bumps into ex-girlfriend Roxy (Sunny Lane), who guesses Jen's problem right off the bat.
"How can you love someone who obviously doesn't love herself? She's so insecure, she sticks bags of poisonous water into her chest to get men like you to justify her womanhood."
Daniels' script is festooned with fun lines like this, and sometimes the performers pull them off and sometimes they don't.
"I was just trying to find myself," Roxy says of a previous infidelity.
"In someone else's vagina?" asks Voodoo.
Jen and Dave are visited by several of their exes in the course of the movie, and the flashbacks depict what made them exes in the first place. Randy Spears, Delilah Strong, Nicole Sheridan, and Evan Stone cameo as particularly oily characters.
If the movie has great ambition but doesn't live up to it, is it still better than a movie that doesn't even bother with a story? Hard to tell, but the effort makes The One a winner. After all, there are boatloads of Hollywood movies featuring actors who can't wrap their mouths around their dialogue but who don't compensate by wrapping them around anything else.
My only problem with the movie is that it is lit murkily. Very few scenes take place in the daylight for such a sunny film.
The movie ends happily, with both principals realizing that it should be easy to say "I love you" to a porn star.
 Labels: dvd, reviews, stormy daniels, wicked
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 Studio: Naughty America
Director: Brett Brando
Cast: Sasha Grey, Satine Phoenix, Pinky Lee, Dana DeArmond, Adrianna Nicole, Lorelei Lee, Tommy Pistol
Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot
This movie features my personal Power Station, Cream, and Damn Yankees of porn, a tasty cast in a series of scenes that progress literally from dark to light (or at least from brunettes to blondes) as well as back in time.
Director Brett Brando put together a sequence of vignettes with setups that are just a little more complex than other gonzo movies, each playing to the strengths and whimsies of the people performing them. I can't think of a recent movie that was better cast with people I like, or that seemed to target my personal tastes as well.
Further, the progression of scenes was particularly thoughtful, as we will see.
Sasha Grey is a mopey teen. She wakes up in her makeup in a squalid Hollywood apartment. Her dialogue sounds like a bad MySpace page. "Sunset Strip?" she grouses. "More like Sunset Drip."
At this point I was ready to fast forward, because there was nothing to suggest this wasn't another of the breed of self-important Sylvia Plath porn scenes that was only funny unintentionally.
But then a biker enters in a cloud of dry ice and fucks her "hungry pussy".
The sex itself was just what we would expect from the precociously dirty Sasha Grey, who knows the lingo and delivers it poutily, as is the current fashion. But the scene is just slightly wacky, and it is that intent that makes it fun to watch.
The first scene is also the darkest of the movie.
Next comes Satine Phoenix as a restaurant manager who is having trouble with the help. Before she can fire her insubordinate employee, however, he tells her that what she really needs is to be fucked.
Even though we know this to be universally true, from diners to the Vatican to the International Space Station, it still seems a little uncomfortable to hear it, like a hoary porn trope that is part of the shorthand but still off-putting and past its welcome. That changes when Phoenix pulls her handyman over the bar and takes control of the scene.
The third scene is the most surreal and, when I take advantage of my Constitutional right to create an adult awards show, I will nominate Pinky Lee as Best Actress for her portrayal of a showgirl who fucks someone else's fan. The scene is silly and bittersweet, and Lee actually tap dances.
Then Dana DeArmond intercepts the man who has been surreptitiously leaving mash notes at her door.
"I know you!" she says sweetly. "You're my boyfriend!" Indeed it is her boyfriend Daniel, and their chemistry is apparent. Both act like they feel lucky.
Finally, Adrianna Nicole and Lorelei Lee, two punky blondes who can get up to some real graphic nastiness in other movies, are seen here braiding each other's hair in a superbly kitschy pink bedroom when both realize they are dating the same guy.
They spring a trap for Tommy Pistol, who plays a Brooklyn doofus.
It's not as if this movie was directed to the hilt, or stage managed to the nth degree. It is instead often wonderfully sloppy and improvisational, and the players seem to be having a great time. This in turn makes me happy, because I like it when people enjoy their jobs. Because so much porn can seem negative, or not the zesty enterprise I think it should be, I realize that I am exactly the target audience for this sort of fun, bubbly movie.
"You cad," Lorelei Lee ad libs.
"Did you call me a cow?" asks Pistol, and Lee laughs out of character.
The three end in a menage a trois-cum-pillow fight, free of "Come fuck my hungry pussy" and super-serious lines of that ilk. The movie makes you wonder what the sixth scene might have been had there been time for one. Naughty Flipside is the feel-good movie of the summer!
(Also, if the guy from Prospero's Books had been in it, it would be the Gielgud movie of the summer.)
Labels: adrianna nicole, dana dearmond, dvd, lorelei lee, naughty america, reviews, sasha grey, satine phoenix
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Seymore Butts' The Ass Farmer
 Studio: Seymore Butts
Director: Seymore Butts
Cast: Vanilla Skye, Honey DeJour, Veronica Jett, Veronica Rayne, Jordan Blue, Havana Ginger, Kelly Wells, Tom Byron, Herschel Savage
Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot
There's very few porn houses we know outside of the Playboy Mansion. Seymore Butts' is one of them. Located on the Valley side of the Sepulveda Blvd. hill, it was the setting for much of Showtime's "Family Businesss".
In The Ass Farmer most of the house is used, the camera being operated by Butts himself (he is retired from performing) in a manner both more familiar and less obtrusive than other directors who interact with their performers.
In The Ass Farmer the house is host to several pairings and triplings, all ass-scented for both the male and female performers.
Butts' metier is the ass, so this group of newcomers and veterans spends a lot of time there. Butts is a 90's-era director, therefore we are not subjected to clinical studies of the nether area, but we are privy to several spontaneous burts of emotion from performers who might not normally get their asses catered to so comprehensively.
It's important to remember, though, that at no point in the movie do we see a farm. Why this movie wasn't called The Ass Housekeeper is beyond me.
Notable scenes include a three-way between Herschel Savage, Veronica Jett, and Veronica Rayne and the finale between orthodontically fabulous Honey DeJour and Tom Byron. DeJour turns Byron inside out.
Labels: dvd, herschel savage, honey dejour, seymore butts, tom byron, veronica jett, veronica rayne
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 Studio: Viv Thomas
Director: Viv Thomas, Lewis Thomas
Cast: Ella, Jo, Eve Angel, Jamie, Vera, Sandra Shine, Lolita, Lisa, Delores, Anoushka, Peaches, Sandy, Henrietta, Sophie Moone, Gina B.
Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot
When I was a freshman in high school, our history teacher was passing out examination books. About halfway through his pile, the colors changed from blue to pink. A kid named Dennis said, "Mr. (X), I don't want a pink one," to which Mr. (X) replied, "Dennis, some day you'll find that you want a pink one all the time."
I had no idea what this meant, but knew it had to be dirty. I was not surprised to find out that Mr. (X) got fired the next year from a school system where no one ever got fired, even the teachers who still hit us.
Still, he was right.
That is what I think of when I see the word "Pink", and I wonder if my freshman history teacher would appreciate this three-disc-plus-one compendium of Portugal-based Viv Thomas' Sapphic adventures.
Disc One, "The Innocence of Lesbian Love", concerns Jo, an impressionable student boarding in a Budapest rooming house. She is greeted icily by the housemistress' daughter, Ella. Her mother apologizes. "I'm sorry. That was my daughter."
Not knowing a lot of the players makes watching this collection intriguing. We know we are not watching the European version of a Pink Visual video; everyone is toned and feminine. In fact, there are no men whatsoever in these four videos.
The performers speak English about as well as most of their Porn Valley counterparts, and it is fun to watch porn that was made in places other than the 20 or so overexposed Porn Valley rental McMansions.
It turns out that there is nothing innocent about this boarding house. Both mother and daughter are on the make from Day One. If the daughter isn't exhorting newcomers to brush her hair (wink), mom is insisting on drawing hot baths for her guests, looking over her shoulder tartily all the while.
The housemother really is a predatrix. Under the auspices of conducting a medical examination of a student who thinks she might have contracted "diseases" from a boyfriend, Mom bags another one. The movie doesn't really go anywhere, but who cares? It achieves what I wanted "Suspiria" to accomplish, but with no blood. And in terms of vivid portraits of inappropriate authority figures, it was just like being back in high school.
Thinking of booking passage to Hungary? Don't bother. "We don't like boys," Mom says.
Disc Two contains "The Loss of Innocence". Now Jo is living in Portugal and Katie, one of the boarders from Disc One, comes to visit. Beyond that it is difficult to tell who-all means what to whom, although there is a hot mom (Anoushka) who resembles Anjelica Huston's "Grifters" character in her Monte Carlo period.
"Ella!" Anoushka cries (Ella is there for some reason). "You're my daughter's friend!"
"Step-daughter," says the kittenish Ella.
Taken by itself, the first disc has just enough plot to sustain a porn movie. It seems odd producers felt the need to revisit these characters, as if consumers were clamoring to find out what happened to Jo. Her and Katie's characters could have been renamed and the movie would have seemed more coherent. Most porn movies collapse under the weight of their own plot; a sequel's worth of plot is ridiculous (I can't wait to see Pirates 2).
But the sex is great. Anoushka is a tasty vamp, and Ella seems to be the ingenue fatale in this one.
Disc Three features "A Lesbian Odyssey". Mom - the boardinghouse mistress - from Disc One now runs an inn with Ella. It's Like "The Gilmore Girls" but less frustrating. People come and go. A redhead appears. Jo doesn't. Maybe there were contract issues and she wanted a producer's credit and script approval, like Vin Diesel.
In that "Lesbian Odyssey" doesn't seem like a sequel, and in that the performers speak Magyar with English subtitles, it is a more effective movie.
But the fourth disc ties it all togeher like Jeff Lebowski's rug. There are prequels and interstitials that rewarded the 45 minutes of fast forwarding I did with the previous three discs, documenting Ella's first Hungarian love as well as a wonderful kissing scene and a lot of unedited footage.
This series has no truck-driving lesbians, no living-in-a-cabin lesbians, no state-worker-on-disability lesbians, no Janet Reno lesbians, not even any Ally Sheedy or Jennifer Beals lesbians. But I guess that is like requiring Madeleine Albright straight girls in my heterosexual porn.
Labels: lesbian, reviews, viv thomas
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Memoirs of a Madame
 Studio: Sinsation
Director: Dee and Shy Love
Cast: Shy Love, Lindsey Meadows, Brad Hardy, Vanessa Lane, Scott Styles, Cassie Young, Mikey Butders
Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot
"I don't want to fuck fat old guys anymore," says Trixe, "I want to fuck rich fat old guys."
Since watching "The Mission" on HBO the other night, I have been fascinated with hookers and their hierarchies.
Granted, "The Mission" was about a Jesuit order in 18th century Paraguay, but the missionary followers of Ignatius Loyola share a great deal with Madame Shy, operator of a high class escort agency who just wants to get out, and Trixe, a two-dollar whore fixin' on replacing her.
What they share is Difficult Choices.
Sinsation Pictures releases artfully-shot couples' films with scripts and performers who are attractive in a way particular to hardcore couples' films rather than softcore couples' films. I came to this conclusion after seeing two people in a late-nite Cinemax movie who I'd just seen in a one-act play in Los Angeles. Does that mean that hardcore performers can't act? No, it just means that I wouldn't believe Shy Love as Nora in "The Plough And the Stars".
Anyway, the movie begins with Trixe (Meadows) in two scenes of play-acting. First she works out with her john in a seedy motel room. A slap-bass soundtrack reminiscent of a Stephen J. Cannell montage sequence plays over their dialogue, full of dirty porn-standard patter that somehow sounds like taunting:
"You like me Baby?"
"Yeah I like you. Am I the biggest you ever had?"
"Yeah Baby, you're the biggest. Am I warm and wet enough for you?"
"Yeah Baby."
Through my own exhaustive research with cheap hookers, I have found that none were as slight as Trixe, and not a single one wore fishnets. After the deed is done, Trixe looks in the mirror and practices curbside pickup lines, finishing with:
"Hey, how about you pay me a lot of money to fuck you in your mother's car and pretend you're not a loser?"
The scene switches to Madame Shy, embodying both Mr. Rourke and most of the characters Danny Glover has played: she's in a white suit and she feels like she's getting too old for this. She is looking for a replacement as a Madame.
In a tribute to softcore "bordello" movies, Shy's manner is imperious and her words are clipped. "Leave us!" she snaps to her attendants as a favored customer enters. I don't know, I have a feeling that the adult industry plays at prostitution in the way that performers of Asian extraction play at being schoolgirls. I'm sure Heidi Fleiss never said "Leave us!"
Introduced to Madame Shy, Trixe rises fast in the organization. But the other girls are jealous about being passed over by a newcomer. This also happened to Chief Justice John Roberts. Trixe breaks their spirit and builds them back up in her image by getting fucked with a strap-on.
Technical aspects of Sinsation Pictures' products are still not first rate. The soundtrack is of the type that can be purchased along with certain editing programs, and at one point it is sped up ridiculously fast to accommodate the ending of one scene and the beginning of another. And we still hear the echos common to a movie set poorly insulated from the warehouse around it.
But they are trying hard, and directors Love and Dee lend their own performing experience to staging excellent sex scenes. And the movie ends better than "The Mission" does.
Labels: dvd, lindsey meadows, reviews, Shy Love, sinsation
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Black Worm
 Studio: Pulpo
Director: Andres Tabogo
Cast: Lorena Sanchez, Alektra Blue, Mikayla, Van Damage, Justice Young, Tony DeSergio
Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot
There is a black worm, a gusano negro, in the bottom of certain bottles of tequila. "The worm is there to keep things pure," says small-time crime lord Capo as he explains why an acquaintance must die. "And I am that worm."
Black Worm is an ambitious project from a new porn company, Pulpo, raised on Telemundo and Robert Rodriguez movies. And Lorena Sanchez out-Hayek's Salma Hayek.
A caper movie involving hot female bodyguards, switched briefcases, dramatic monologues, and even more Lorena Sanchez, Black Worm is a solid and artful late-nite cable movie that could nevertheless use a little tightening; it has long stretches where no sex happens at all and the story and - sadly - the acting often don't compensate.
Lorena Sanchez is Carla, the moll of El Capo. El Capo undervalues her, but she has low self esteem anyway. He sends her on a job to seduce El Oso and switch his briefcase full of money with one full of shirts. She does, but she is caught. Then she finds out who her real friends are.
This movie has a lot of heat around it now; it is unlike anything produced in Porn Valley in years. There's some animation (better than Pirates!), a subtle, effective soundtrack, and Colombian neckties. It also has a bit of whimsy a la Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And Lorena Sanchez.
But these things are counterweighted by a story that is a little dense and a narrative that could take less time than it does; we know that the information is too long in coming out when the cameras start circling the room.
But above all this is Lorena Sanchez. Black Worm rises and falls on her, and she gets the job done.
Labels: lorena sanchez, pulpo
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Porn Valley
 Studio: Wicked
Director: Michael Raven
Cast: Kaylani Lei, Carmel Moore, Gianna Lynn, Monica Mayhem, Riley Evans
Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot
Thinking first that Wicked Pictures had commissioned a tribute movie about this site, I was eager to tear the package open and find out how to get my royalties. Then the elegantly art-diirected cover, featuring a clothed Kaylani Lei, made me recognize this film for what it was: a couples' movie.
"Since I have destroyed all who have ever loved me," I reasoned, "perhaps I should watch this. You know, for tips."
The movie begins with Kaylani Lei's voiceover. "In my 26 years I had seeen maybe three pornographic movies," she says. "And I was scared of it." She talks about Brazilian waxes and carnal moans, all the trappings of the porn ouevre. The audience is deposited without explanation into a blue-tinged sex scene.
We are watching a scene from the pornography that is destroying our narrator's relationship. She watches in disgust as her boyfriend of five years drinks it in. A Wicked DVD box sits on the table.
She explains that, since moving to L.A. from Louisiana (it is hard to believe Kaylani Lei as a Louisiana girl, but harder still to believe she's from Cape Cod, which she is), her boyfriend has subscribed to a casual sex website. She confronts him. He admits he is a sex addict. The relationship is over. Way to support your partner in his time of need, Kaylani.
"Fucking sex addict," she tells her girlfriend. She wonders aloud if pornography, like the kind that possessed her husband, was like marijuana, "a gateway drug to more harsher things." Her friend advises her to date.
She does, and gets into an online relationship with a man who seems compatible, charming, and intelligent. He also directs porn movies. She meets him anyway. He explains that some people use casting couches, but not him. Then, in a flashback to a routine starlet interview, he explains yet again that there will never be another Jenna. The starlet thanks him amid a jangle of bracelets.
She probes him during dinner. It is like a softball infomercial interview. Are drugs orevalent in the porn industry? No more than in Hollywood. Do you think having sex for money is psychologically damaging? I'm all for sexual expression, not repression, baby.
The film thus far is a little dark, not in tone but in hue. It is slightly hard to see. But the movie avoids other inexplicable couples' porn tropes by not being unnecessarily serious. There are laughs and there is some wonderful acting by Barrett Blade (the pornographer) and Lei.
Director Michael Raven takes his time with the scenes, and it is worth mentioning the screenwriter, Jennifer Allison. It seems that Porn Valley can't but be the story of her own journey to Los Angeles. If not, hers was a fortuitous meeting with Wicked, because this script made it onto the screen without being mangled by a hack director or porn performers unused to acting.
Now and then the movie does feel like an ad for the Porn Valley Chamber of Commerce. As Lei meets Blade's friends, she muses, "These people were witty, friendly, polite... Just normal people." She realizes that it is not porn that is the problem with relationships, it is deception. Time and again Blade proves his integrity to her.
The movie ends happily, a porn-positive flick if I've ever seen one. I was wondering, as Lei and Blade consummate their relationship, if he would pull out and come on her chest or if the movie would dare to be different. Raven compromises, but you'll have to watch it to find out how.
Labels: kaylani lei, reviews, wicked
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 Studio: Pornfidelity.com
Director: Kelly Madison
Cast: Kelly Madison, Ryan Madison, Penny Flame, Monica Sweetheart, Mindy Main, Felony, Sharon Wild
Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot
Kelly Madison, the charmingly predatory big-busted Orange County wife, and her slightly younger husband, Ryan, star in this eighth installment of the series that features Kelly luring porn talent home for she and her husband to romp on. He is a lucky bastard and I hate him.
But it's impossible to not like this couple or this movie, which tries just a litttle harder to make the standard gonzo setups more credible, and in a way this is a throwback to the less aggressive porn of the late '80s, in which the participants look happy to be there while not skimping on the camera angles necessary to get the job done.
In the first scene, the Madisons are joined by Penny Flame in a poker game that goes all Ryan's way.
What is notable about the dynamic between the couple and the way they choose to deport themselves is that Ryan generally lets things happen to him but doesn't, er, shrink from the responsibility. He knows his wife is running the show but everything she asks him to do is good.
The little extra effort the couple adds to their home movies pays off with scenes like the one in which Kelly meets the tasty Mindy Main outside of an O.C. library.
Main is so disappointed that the library is closed the day before her big exam.
KELLY: What do you study?
MINDY: Anatomy
KELLY: You are?
Madison, in an outrageous rabbit-fur coat (well, it looks like a rabbit) promptly invites Mindy back to her house, where she demonstrates on her husband, point by point, how blood gets to the shaft of the penis.
MINDY: Oh my gosh! I see!
Madison is brassy, older, and just a little bigger than the birdlike porn-standard Main. It is pleasant to watch The Madisons devour her.
RYAN: "Where do you find these girls?"
KELLY: "Oh, I don't know."
The couple (meaning Kelly) finds ways to attract the likes of Felony, Sharon Wild, and Monica Sweetheart back to their place, and enjoy every minute of it. Unlike movies geared toward couples, Pornfidelity 8 is a great couple movie.
Labels: Felony, Kelly Madison, Mindy Main, Monica Sweetheart, Penny Flame, Ryan Madison, Sharon Wild
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 Studio: Hustler
Director: Dave Road
Cast: Brittney Skye, Becca Bratt, Chloe April, Georgia South, Mande, Paula
Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot
"Public sex is great; everybody should try it." - Becca Bratt
I hadn't heard of this series before seeing it, and was surprised. It borrows so heavily from (and improves on) the "Real World/Road Rules" playbook that I'm surprised Bunim/Murray hasn't closed down in shame after collapsing under the weight of its own nuisance lawsuits.
Adventure Sex follows a group of RV-driving Mass Communication grads as they attempt to have sex with pornstars and passersby in public places that might include national landmarks.
Where the movie improves on the "Real World" style is, of course, in the sex. When the "Real World" lands an attractive cast member all we want is to see him/her have sex anyway, so "Adventure Sex" delivers. Further, the casting seems similar: young, pop-aware, and very likely to regret this later.
Where the movie fails is in its reliance on the same kind of editing dominating MTV reality shows; self-conscious, too cool for school stuff. But that is from someone who hates "The Real World". If you love it, you will adore Adventure Sex.
This episode primarily features Becca Bratt, who is ready to go and up for anything. We see her giving a tentative blowjob at the University of Texas-Austin clock tower as well as getting bent over on the Grassy Knoll. She even gets it on at the Alamo.
None of these events are filmic coups. We are deprived of real money shot moments because the crew had to film behind the Alamo or had to wait until dark to film in the vicinity of where Charles Whitman once stood.
But the great pleasure of this movie is watching the team drive around. They roll joints in the bottom of frisbees and have their girlfriends lure game bar girls into the RV. It is far less creepy than "Girls Gone Wild" and, save for the useless commentary (of Charles Whitman, the sniper on the UT clock tower; "That motherfucker was insane. Almost as insane as me"), we really root for the group.
The group meets Brittney Skye on Bourbon Street and, as with the rest of the movie, there is an aborted scene on a (pre-Katrina) French Quarter balcony that quickly adjourns to a hotel room.
It's great to see porn shot outside of Porn Valley with people who look like they're having a good time. The movie also strives to be a travelogue for the Ritalin generation and mostly succeeds. Why this DVD took almost three years to hit the market probably has a lot to do with the fact that this production looks mostly self-financed; there's no money in RV porn.
Labels: becca bratt, brittney skye, dvd, hustler
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Studio: Wicked
