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 Studio: Adam & Eve and Zero Tolerance
Director: James Avalon
Cast: Bree Olson, Kayden Kross, Sunny Lane, Ava Rose, Penny Flame, Alektra Blue, Tommy Gunn, Teagan, Courtney Cummz, Eva Angelina
Portions of this review also appeared on Fleshbot
Why Roller Dollz (which I have seen) is as good as, if not better than, Pirates 2, (which I have not seen):
1. The stakes aren't as high. While Roller Dollz is a bigger-than-usual production, comprising two DVDs and employing the financial, creative, and boobular resources of two porn companies (Adam & Eve and Zero Tolerance) it, like most other porn movies, was written, produced, and released in less than three months whereas Pirates 2 has been advertised for more than two years and is reputed to cost upwards of $500,000, most of which will go to special effects shots. In the end, both are just porn movies. Worse, there is no way that the effects on Pirates 2 will look half as good as the effects fans expect from the least Hollywood escapist movie, nor will the acting or script be above reproach. When a porn movie positions itself to be like a mainstream movie, it invites comparison. Roller Dollz doesn't say it is anything other than a porn movie, and therefore more than meets my expectations.
2. It's got Sunny Lane in it.
A movie about the lives and loves of rival roller derby gangs, Roller Dollz delivers the flesh spectacularly, on wheels no less. Bree Olson, Kayden Kross, Ava Rose, Courtney Cummz, Penny Flame, Teagan, Eva Angelina, Alektra Blue, and Lane look great when shimmying out of their pads and blades, and just as often leave them on.
Don't get me wrong - there is a plot, but I would be doing you a disservice as well as a disservice to the memory of a delightful sex film by trying to describe it. It's unimportant. And it doesn't get in the way of the reason anyone would watch this movie in the first place, which I think in this unfortunate age of vying for porn awards shows remarkable restraint.
All the big stars (Kross and Olson in particular) look lovely and are given lots of screen time, but it is Lane who reminds us that there is a reason she has stayed famous in the adult business for longer than the average starlet's career expectancy.
With plenty of outside shots of millennial Malibu and the joy of watching eight girls in a rollergangbang on a Glendale parquet floor, RollerDollz will drain your ball bearings.
See my RollerDollz on-set gallery here.
See also: Ava Rose: It's what's for dinner; Bree Olson's future planning; Kayden Kross representing the luchadores
Watch RollerDollz Now
Buy Rollerdollz NowLabels: "adam and eve", Alektra Blue, Ava Rose, Bree Olson, Courtney Cummz, Eva Angelina, Kayden Kross, Penny Flame, Sunny Lane, Teagan, Tommy Gunn, zero tolerance
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 Studio: Hustler
Director:
Cast: Priva, Lana Violet, Alec Knight, Joey Brass, Lana Violet, Lily Li, Marco Banderas, Mia Lelani, Sean Michaels, Steve Taylor, Tia Ling
Orientation
by Gram Ponante.com contributor Eddie Adams
The next time you don't really feel like going to work, tell them you've come down with a bad case of Asian Fever.
If they get all nosey and up in your shit, explain to them that the symptoms of your mysterious ailment include sexually hostile and deprecatory views of the Far East, shaped by hundreds of years of European imperialism.
If those invasive pricks demand more info, tell them you just can't help these nagging outsider interpretations you're having of Eastern cultures, and the only "cure," it seems, is to watch some propaganda which posits that the Orient is constructed as a negative inversion (i.e. a proverbial vagina to your proverbial cock) of Western culture.
You'll have either just gotten yourself not only fired from your job, but "fired" from the city where you live as well, or a kick ass day off to watch the thirty-sixth installment of Hustler's long-running, culturally-tinged sexual power grab, Asian Fever.
All small talk aside, the girls in the flick are pretty attractive and they don't even seem to mind being co-opted into an awesome orientalist fantasy for the sexual gratification of white, male shut-in colonialists. And if you're quiet enough during Tia Ling's scene, you can actually hear Joseph Conrad sprouting a stiffy from the grave.
Labels: Alec Knight, asian, eddie adams, hustler, Joey Brass, Lana Violet, Lily Li, Marco Banderas, Mia Lelani, Sean Michaels, Steve Taylor, Tia Ling
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 Studio: Cal Vista
Director: Philip Mond
Cast: Sasha Vinni, Gina Lamarca, Anna Romero, Grace Harlowe, Brooke Lane, Lene Hefner, Helena, Nikie St. Giles, Antonio Valentino, Kevin James, Drew Reese, Devin, and Jon
"You've got the scent, you've got the scent - the scent of love." - Not ABC
Portions of this review also appeared on Fleshbot
Like you, I was intrigued by the reissue of Philip Mond's classic 1990's porn Zazel - The Scent of Love because I wanted to see what vaginas looked like the year my cat was born. And when I saw the scene with the tiger I felt singularly validated in my curiosity.
Filmed in 1995 and first released in 1997, Zazel has been reissued in 2-disc collector's set that throws current couples' porns into harsh relief; it really is a slow burn movie that, by the end, demands that viewing couples go fuck now.
Fragrance designer Zazel (the gorgeous Sasha Vinni) sits sketching by her koi pond when she gets The Call: She has been approved to create her own eponymous perfume! Awesome!
 We soon see why Zazel is right for the job. "The scent of love?" she thinks. "What can it be? Where can it be found?"
The rest of the movie follows Zazel through her own journey of discovery in the realms of sex and scent. Painted nymphs appear as her muses. She realizes her perfume must have "the breath of heaven; the taste of sin."
 Don't get me wrong: Zazel shares with today's tolerated trophy porn auteurs the tendency to talk out its ass.
"Does the scent of love come from the heavens? The Earth? The wild orchid? The water lilly?"
"Angels from heaven descend into Pluto's realm and divulge their secrets with intoxicating rapture."
"Shiva: Goddess of Creation" (luckily Hindus don't undertake jihads.) But it is also beautifully shot and staged. No performer involved in realizing Mond's (and Zazel's) vision is anything short of beautiful (most are fleshy and toned Penthouse models of its pre-bankruptcy period) and each set piece is so creatively erotic that calling it porn - by today's standards - seems insufficient.
One example finds Zazel examining the vulva-like qualities of the picture of a flower in a book. Another does for tiger paint what the "Rio" video never could.
 It is safe to play this movie with the sound off as long as you keep in mind that "Zazel is doing work-related research." We never see the fruits of her R&D on the shelves, but then again, Hell-derived intoxicating rapture in a bottle is probably wicked expensive.
Labels: classic, metro, philip mond, sasha vinni
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 Studio: Digital Playground
Director: Robby D.
Cast: Stoya, James Deen, Annette Schwarz, Tommy Gunn, Memphis Monroe, Hannah West
Stoya has padding in all the right places, but perhaps her near-translucent skin made me think "Deeper? How deep can you get into Stoya without being behind her?"
But director Robby D.'s gonzo title that boasts two interludes between Stoya and James Deen as well as scenes featuring Hannah West, Tommy Gunn, Memphis Monroe, and Annette Schwarz do get satisfyingly deeper into their subjects by doing nothing more than offering bits of personality and "business."
Pre-makeup sex, Stoya bites the head off a rose. Tommy Gunn explains to his buddy that he hasn't found the mute button on "new wife" Memphis Monroe. And there's one more thing that I would like to see in porn movies: the dismount. In Deeper 11 it is provided by Annette Schwarz.
 Male performers tell me that they are like assistant directors in porn scenes; they are often called on to position the women in the most flattering light. But Robby D. (at least I'm going to give him credit for this) in Schwarz' scene directs her by letting the sweat-slicked uberpornfrau be herself. Sometimes the best way to direct is get out of the way.
So when Schwarz moves from one position on her partner to another, where one director might omit that transition, director D. leaves it in, and we see Schwarz, all puffy labia and long legs, leap coltishly off and then back on. I love the dismount.
 But back to Stoya (the movie, as you remember, concerns Stoya). Her most valuable asset out of all 5'9" of valuable assets is her facial expression. When she, as much as in frustration as in lust (I assume porn girls are capable of lust) screams "I want your cock!" I can read it in her face.
 This movie is a hit. A great cast and the faith to let them be themselves is a winning combination.
Labels: "digital playground", "robby d", Annette Schwarz, directors, Hannah West, James Deen, Memphis Monroe, stoya, Tommy Gunn
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Hearts And Minds II
 Studio: New Sensations
Director: Andre Madness
Cast: Ashlynn Brooke, Sadie West, Tommy Gunn, Cassandra Cruz, Tyler Knight, Jack Larence, Seth Dickens, Marie McCray, Celeste Star, Samantha Ryan, Anthony Rosano
Portions of this review also appeared on Fleshbot
Couples' movies, the porn term for movies with plots and scripts, fight an uphill battle for the hearts, minds, and pants of consumers. Today we look at New Sensations', er, tentpole movie for 2008 AVN award consideration, the military porn drama Hearts And Minds 2.
If sex is not integral to the plot of a porn movie, if it is instead peripheral or interstitial, then how should the non-sex aspects of the porn movie be judged? Where stereotypically porny acting showed up (but only occasionally) in movies like Upload and O: The Power of Submission, viewers could at least be consoled with the idea that the movies were about sex and its politics and applications.
Comedy porns like Pirates and The Da Vinci Load also make up for lower-rent production values by either commenting on themselves or getting out of the way of zesty performances. Hearts And Minds 2: Modern Warfare opens with a search and rescue mission gone awry in a distant and dusty land, and military wife Ashlynn Brooke getting the news stateside.
The first problem is one easily filed under Good Problems to Have: Brooke approaches the fateful news-bearing mailbox looking sweater-bustingly delicious in short jean cutoffs. Whatever the viewer's opinion of the war, he simply cannot understand why Brooke's husband ever left.
Back in Rentallocationistan Brooke's husband, Tommy Gunn, leads a squad of Heroes that have just been told that help isn't coming for a long time. Cassandra Cruz takes the opportunity to have a private pee on some ruins. Then she gets sloppy; finding a jug of water, she gives herself an impromptu sponge bath, fantasizing about fellow grunt Seth Dickens against a sonic background of what appears to be cut-rate Garage Band Youssou N'Dour-lite. When in Unspecified Arabia...
 This is not to say that we don't want Cruz to do exactly this and wind up writhing in the dust like a jackhammer, but I suspect we don't need a whole war movie built around such things.
By now we've settled into how good Hearts And Minds 2 is For A Porno (FAP). Written and produced by Nic Andrews, long a director of high-end projects for Vivid, New Sensations, and Digital Playground before a three-year hiatus, and directed by Andre Madness, HAM2 goes the extra mile in making sure all the uniforms look alike and the performers hold their prop weapons the right way.
We don't forgive the movie when the squad of heavily-armed Americans is attacked by all of three jihadists wearing gingham do-rags, or when the cab bringing one of our heroes home inexplicably lingers, but we do appreciate the honest efforts of the performers in delivering dialogue that is not necessarily bad but, in terms of the things any reasonable person expects from a porn movie, is still useless.
 As the squad waits to be picked up, its members think about what they left back home. Gunn writes a letter to Brooke and, in a moment both Capraesque and porny, Tyler Knight gets a video message from girlfriend Samantha Ryan, who touchingly tells him that she will be faithful to him aside from the girl that she proceeds to do, by webcam, for his pleasure.
We delight when soldier Jack Lawrence's home reminiscences include not only his hand-built sports car but also newcomer siren Sadie West and, though neither Tommy Gunn nor Army wife Ashlynn Brooke wear wedding rings, he does drop a load on her stomach that most could not summon even after several tours of duty.
 So I award Hearts And Minds 2 an A for effort, and have a new appreciation for reunions with Ashlynn Brooke in the morning sunshine and trysts with Sadie West on the hood of a car. I'm just not sure about the war.
Hearts And Minds 2 will be released at the end of September.
See the gallery here.Labels: andre madness, Anthony Rosano, Ashlynn Brooke, Cassandra Cruz, Celeste Star, Jack Larence, Marie McCray, new sensations, nic andrews, Sadie West, Samantha Ryan, Seth Dickens, Tommy Gunn, Tyler Knight
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 Studio: Vivid-Alt
Director: Benny Profane
Cast: Mandy Morbid, Zak Sabbath, Caroline Pierce, Benny Profane, Sochee Mala, Coco Velvett, Marie McCrae
Mandy Morbid wakes up, pantsless, in a hospital to which she has been committed, she later learns, for her sexual deviance and drug addiction. But the lunatics are running the asylum and, though she would probably benefit from some eclectic therapeutic milieu, her current managed care environment is not salutogenic.
For one thing, the nurses Morbid spots upon waking (Caroline Pierce and Sochee Mala, who observes of Pierce's mesmerizing [parts collection: "it looks like a hot pie cooling on a window seal") are engaged in some item-stacking exercise that seems pointless unless the goal is to look up each other's skirts, which they do, and more. Morbid can't help herself as she watches. She needs to rub one out. WHAT IS HAPPENING TO HER?Then they force the already-clean Morbid into the shower, where she is obliged to writhe.
 When the mad doctor Benny Profane arrives, he suggests a session of trepanning to cure her of her ills - and Morbid's hairdo certainly suggests that a pre-trepanation shaving won't be necessary - but she manages to escape.
Along the way we get an idea through flashbacks why Morbid was sent to the hospital. She and her hoodlum boyfriend, Zak Sabbath, scam people like Kimberly Kane out of cash and into thinking that Morbid is pregnant. As the movie was released during the Sarah and Bristol Palin pregnancy controversy, Hospital could not be more timely.
 The movie has its ahare of sight gags and memorable bits of dialogue. Marie McCrae seduces the affable Daniel as the latter appears to be playing a videogame but is actually staring into a burning television. Profane helps himself to an excellent monologue before he is put out of commission by a pencil, and the rescuing Sabbath utters a line familiar to anyone eager to jump off the wagon: "Looks like you're about to have a relapse."
When Morbid escapes from her bonds she quickly and joylessly leaps back into the very behavior that sent her there, but what did you expect? It's not like she stayed long enough for Profane's course of treatment to work.
 Even though porn never really had a soul, the so-called altporn movement defined itself in contrast to what was quickly becoming a standard issue Porn Valley style of bleached and augmented porn performer. People like Matt Zane and Benny Profane, as well as websites like BlueBlood.net, championed the type of porn girl who didn't come off as addlepated and accessible as her Porn Valley counterpart. Instead she was pierced, tattooed, kohl-eyed and actively post-feminist.
Profane's Psychocandy series, which he sold from the back of his car, was a textboook example of DIY porn filmmaking from the attitudes of the models to the barebones filmmaking and distribution.
But when altporn began to be heavily commoditized in the past few years, many of its filmmakers forgot that bigger budgets required the production to look more competent. Back when the movie was being made out of some garage it was allright if it looked all Dogma '95, but when Vivid purchased a strain of VCA altporn in 2005, people began to wonder where the larger budgets were going, because they certainly didn't show in some of the films.
Profane's Hospital at first seemed like an unholy union of his talent with a label known for its poseur aesthetic but, like Winkytiki's ReBelle Rousers and Dave Naz' circa '82, Hospital succeeds because it is its own thing, a movie that doesn't really owe anything to anyone.
See a gallery here.
Labels: Benny Profane, Caroline Pierce, Coco Velvett, Mandy Morbid, Marie McCrae, Sochee Mala, steveporn, Zak Sabbath
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 Studio: Hustler
Director: Stuart Canterbury
Cast: Kayla Paige, Veronica Rayne, Britney Amber, Eden Adams, Veronica Jett, Envi, Eric Swiss, Rod Fontana, Tony De Sergio, Dino Bravo
by GramPonante.com Guest Reviewer Chauncey Boyd
Get Smartass does an admirable job of matching the whimsical tone of the Get Smart franchise. As a knock-off, it’s closer to the 1965 Mel Brooks/Buck Henry series starring Don Adams than to the 2008 feature starring Steve Carell.
And that’s a good thing.
Here, the evil organization KAOS has become PENIS, and the good guys at CONTROL now work for KUNTROL. At the outset, PENIS has learned the identities of all the KUNTROL agents, seducing and sedating them one by one. Unfortunate for KUNTROL, fortunate for us. It’s up to Max (Dino Bravo) and Agent 69 (Veronica Rayne) to save the day.
For viewers familiar with the Get Smart series (and, really, why watch this if you aren’t) the plot of Get Smartass will seem surprisingly…spot on.
First to fall is Larabutt (Eric Swiss), seduced by the lovely Kayla Paige. She takes charge in the sack, in what will become a theme in the film: women seducing men. At least Larabutt manages to fit a few extra fingers inside Kayla before climaxing and passing out. Sure, his fall may be drug induced but, since I once fell asleep on top of my girlfriend after sex, it all makes sense to me.
Chief (Rod Fontana) is quickly seduced by blond cutie Britney Amber, who unintentionally could pass as his daughter, but who handles his thick member like a pro. Again, the women are in charge as the two sweat it up.
With agents falling one-by-one, Maxwell’s plan is to let himself get seduced but not sedated. Unfortunately for Max, he’s no match for temptress Veronica Jett, who seduces him like the others. And that’s the problem with Get Smartass; the girl-seduces-guy theme gets repeated over and over. Different girl. Different guy. Same scenario.
Two natural-breasted blondes give us a quick break from formula when they use each other’s thin bodies to practice their seduction techniques.. But then it’s back to formula when Agent 69 does double agent work to seduce evil boss Dr. Ho. Of course, Agent 69 quickly assumes her namesake sexual position in her quest to save the day.
Too bad more thought hadn’t gone into varying the sexual scenarios, but clearly much thought went into the rest of the film. The actors look their parts, and Dino Bravo does an impressive Don Adams. The filmmakers pay attention to wardrobe (right down to Max’s updated shoe phone), quirky music, and lighting, which is often stylish and sometimes flattering. Sure the hallway set in the opening sequence may be constructed out of cardboard, but you have to give director Stuart Canterbury an A for effort. Only Rod Fontana’s unexplained finger splint was a distraction, but the inappropriateness of it proves the point that the rest of the film, as a whole, works.
 Labels: Britney Amber, Dino Bravo, Eden Adams, Envi, Eric Swiss, hustler, Kayla Paige, parody, Rod Fontana, Tony De Sergio, veronica jett, veronica rayne
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Studio: Adam & Eve and Zero Tolerance
