At the end of every year, each of us should ask her or himself: "What porn have I watched? Was it
good? Was it weird? Was it funky?" People like me get to answer "yes," "yes," and "mas oui," for
better or worse. After viewing maybe 500 porn movies this year, there's little left in the field of
human sexual behavior that I haven't seen and laughed at. Watching that amount of porn is
guaranteed to make you appreciate the finer points of Victorian poetry or the laws of quantum
mechanics; that said, a number of titles this year stand out as being among the industry's most
audacious, bizarre, awesome and flat-out interesting, usually all at once.
While the commercial porn industry continues to be dominated by a few big companies, there's more
independent porn being produced on DVD than ever before, and indie porn is where you'll find some
of the weirdest shit on the planet in addition to some very hot titles. To anyone who considers her or
himself a cultural libertine, taking a stroll through a truly diverse stack of porn is like a Ballardian
trainwreck with cumshots.
Trying to come up with a "year's best" list for porn is like trying to argue Stravinsky vs. the
Stooges—what works for you is almost certainly not going to work for me, my friend; that's why I've
focused here not only on the quality porn I've seen this year, but also on the wackiest, weirdest and
most memorable for whatever reason, whether because its stars are hot or it features a little person
dressed as Jesus cussing me out. Don't say you haven't been warned.
Patrick Collins' celebration of female masturbation starts out as a patchwork, with a series of varied
hotties doing themselves on camera, often with dirty description and nasty talk. There, it's the variety
of chicks that makes it great. Volume 2 becomes a little more predictable, focusing on the
young-pretty-girl market, but nonetheless I have to admit that Collins nails it admirably; the stars of
All By Myself 2 are amazingly hot. More importantly, it's almost the only female-masturbation series
that doesn't make my eyes glaze over.
Tony Comstock's films represent the artistic rendering of real sex between real couples who have sex
in real life, interspersed with the stars talking about what they do and how and why they do it. In
Ashley & Kisha, Comstock turns his lens for the first time on a pair of women, specifically two
gorgeous African-American lesbians who are not only amazingly hot but irresistibly forthcoming
about their sex life. If their candor doesn't sway you, then the scenes of them fucking definitely
will—these two are awesome. It's a worthy addition to Comstock's previous films Marie & Jack and
Matt & Khym, which featured straight couples, and Damon & Hunter, which showcased the sex life of
a male couple.
In case you prefer actually watching porn to debating the finer points of constitutional law, I'll fill you
in: Extreme Associates has been the defendent for some years in a federal obscenity case. It is
therefore with some desire to support a persecuted minority of god damned freakazoid weirdos that I
find myself at the Extreme Associates release of director Thomas Zupko's Ass Squirts, of which Zupko
promises "You'll either love it or hate it but I guarantee you'll never forget it." The ambivalence -- that
is, neither love nor hate, or more accurately both of them -- that I feel toward it is probably an artefact of my oddly Victorian upbringing
cross-referenced with the stack of creampie titles threatening to fall on my head at any minute.
Ultimately, I don't know who these people are or where they came from, but I'm just relieved it wasn't
a bunch of spraying enemas; in fact, there are virtually no ass squirts in here at all, but I remain
untroubled by the false advertising given that genuine ass squirts often threaten to create, in me, the
dry heaves.
Nonetheless, Ass Squirts is one of the strangest porn titles you'll see, even without the assistance of airborne enema water. In its opening scene,
Paris Gables plays a dominant nun teasing Amber Rayne with a riding crop, whereupon Brett
Rockman shows up dressed like a priest. He begins misquoting scripture while Diablo, a differently
abled little person dressed like Jesus, hangs on a cross and screams non-sequitur encouragements
like "Oil her ass! I need my fucking dick sucked! I'm Jesus!" (Yup, you caught me, I’m making this up;
I’m making it ALL UP.) No, seriously, it's just plain weird. Love it or hate it, I have no idea, but it goes
on the "Weird porn" shelf.
From Eroticist Films and VCA comes Ass Vamps. It's a title of which I was originally suspicious,
because I feared it might turn out to be some wannabe-goth poser crap they'd sell in Hot Topic.
Actually, I ended up adoring this modest piece of fun trash, not least because its tongue-in-cheek
ultra-pretentious soundtrack, with its synthed strings and twangy hollowbody gothabilly guitar sound,
evokes all the echo box orgies I drooled over in my early days as a mid-'80s babygoth.
Perhaps
more importantly, Ass Vamps layers on the atmosphere with a trowel, and never seems to take itself
too seriously; in fact, the fun is in how far they'll go with their goth-as-fuck atmosphere, and the
establishing shots of exotic streets and market squares in Europe are as delish as could ever make a
misunderstood 19-year-old sweep his black hair out of his eyes and sneer "I don't need your
candy-apple fairy tale."
You might say Audition is a departure for director Simone; in fact, it could be seen as a melding of
the intense female-on-female BDSM she's explored in her Vicious Vixens series with the boy-girl
porno she created with Smoking Interviews. Audition, however, is a whole new ball game. It takes
BDSM porn about as far as it's ever gone on DVD, coupling techniques right out of horror movies
with a genuine taste for the psychodrama that fuels real-life BDSM among real-life players.
Audition
follows Gia Paloma, an aspiring actress who's called to an audition that puts her squarely in the
clutches of Julie Simone, posing as a film director to get access to nubile young victims like Gia. This
is hot stuff, owing partially to the fact that all four of its female stars are drop-dead gorgeous and
sexy as hell.
But what makes Audition such an edgy and satisfying BDSM flick is its willingness to
show Gia's ordeal as entirely non-consensual. Though slaves Krissy and Lystra show typical hints of
slave rebelliousness, they're essentially trained slaves who obediently submit to their punishment and
to being used as sexual objects. Gia, on the other hand, is brought to tears early in the production
and stays there, sobbing as she's humiliated, degraded, punished and tortured. No physical action is
any different than what you'll see in other BDSM films, with the important exception that Liam
actually fucks Gia, whereas boy-girl fucking has long been considered too dangerous for BDSM
porn. But what makes Gia's ordeal so visceral and immediate is the fact that she reacts to it
emotionally, with sobs and screams and struggles, the way any of us would if we were kidnapped
and raped, which is what makes SM hot in the first place, and what makes Audition a brave and
dangerous film.
Also check out Simone's Vicious Vixens series for intense female-on-female fetish, bondage, and SM, featuring kinks you just won't see north of Ventura Blvd.
Joe Gallant's Avenue X is a political post-apocalyptic freakfest. It takes place in 2010 where there's a
black market in porn, representing "the front ranks of a new humanist Resistance, committed to
re-establishing the soul, spontaneity and dignity of the human experience through the filming of
stark, hot and orgasm-filled clandestine sex scenes." The result leaves you with scary fishtank
experiments, crazed desert schtupping, and a sizzling hot 3-part Kimberly Kane/Alex Sanders scene.
Directress Audacia Ray's bisexual odyssey is in many ways an attempt to cast a commercial porn
genre in light that reflects the community it actually represents—and as such it's largely successful,
though the political pedagogy of the bisexual movie in Porn Valley remains as unshaken as ever.
Doubtless men who like bisexual porn will continued to be defined by Adam & Eve, as with every
other studio, as part of the "gay" segment, and women who like bisexual porn will be dismissively
said not to exist, but at least The Bi Apple is around to prove both those cherished
marketing beliefs wrong, wrong, wrong!
Part of the strange and charming series of BDSM titles known as "The Fetish Zone," Blackmailed &
Sissified finds Mistress Chantz Fortune calling up her sleazy older neighbor to invite him over for sex
while his wife is out of town; once he's there, she tells him there'll be no nookie for him, and not only
that but she knows he's been jerking off outside her window and now she's going to tell his wife
unless he lets her dress him up like a little girl and make him suck cock, which certainly isn't going to
give her any fodder for future blackmail, dude, especially not if you let her capture it all on camera.
Not your kink? Who cares, it is so fucking freaky that you just gotta watch it. In addition to the
strange aviator sunglasses worn throughout by the principle sissy slut, B&S goes on the shelf where I
put porn movies that I admire because they so thoroughly embrace their fetishes; like Nixon and
power or Randy Spears and feet, Blackmailed & Sissified is a
ravenous beast, devouring all before it.
At its best, the classic '70s crime saga drips with sleaze and sexuality, so I'm always surprised the
adult industry doesn't go there more often. Enter Pulpo Inc., a new production company dedicated to generating hardcore with
the look and feel of pulp entertainment. Black Worm, a gangster saga in which drug lord El Capo (Jean Paul) pimps
out his girlfriend Carla (Lorena Sanchez), first to his brother Lincoln (Van Damage), then to Brit
assassin El Oso (Tony DeSergio), an associate of Capo's Papa, as part of a plan to rip off $20
million of Oso's green.
Sad to say that upon discovering the money's gone, Oso grabs Carla who, it
turns out, has some needs of her own, and an agenda that can only end in bloody and horrifying
revenge. If you were to say Black Worm sounds like a made-for-Skinemax softcore, you wouldn't be
that far off; the plot, while tight and satisfying, is admitted pulpy mescal candy with a poison worm
inside. But Black Worm's hardcore cred means that it can groove on a level of violence and harsh
language that would never show up in softcore. Moodily lit, the sex scenes don't look anything like
typical gynecological hardcore; they're explicit but darkly romantic, not in the love story sense but in
the doomed noir nightmare sense, which goes perfectly with the story of a gangster's girlfriend out for
blood. If you've love the natural but rare marriage of the '70s-style crime thriller and explicit porn,
Black Worm is another entry in that small but cherished genre.
The debut adult feature directed by guitar legend Dave Navarro, Broken is actually quite a shocker. I
know he's all famous and cool and everything, but the last thing I expected from Dave Navarro was a
porn flick that is as intense, edgy, and artsy-fartsy as what I would expect from, say, the guitarist from
Jane's Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Imagine my shock when I not only got that but a
porno movie that, in its hardcore sensibilities, is also fairly coherent, that sought-after and rarely
experienced quality in porn.
For all that it occasionally slips into impressionistic artyness, Broken
never tries to be anything other than what it is—a god damned good porn movie with the most
effective porn soundtrack in ten years, a factor that can't be overstated. The video-art affectations
never get in the way of the sexual storytelling; on the contrary, they just give it a punch that makes
Broken, as glitzy and high-end as it is, one of those desperately-craved "hip" porn movies that
satisfies all comers who'll just go with it.
Remember it with me. The months-long gangbang of gay cowboys in the mainstream media from
People to Newsweek (gay cowboys!?!? ASTONISHING!) left longtime line dancers
named Tex, Kurt and Sergio scratching their ten-gallons from the Castro to Christopher Street. The
mournful ending had straight people everywhere thinking "Holy shit!!!! Thank God we're straight!!!"
and fag hags came out of the closet in droves, writing each other mash notes about whether they
wanted to wear Jake's or Heath's ass for a hat or, just slide on into that cozy-warm sleeping bag next
to the pair, with a fistful of cocoa butter and a battery vibe.
I ask you what riper piece of
binary-sexuality propaganda for tranny porn terrorist Buck Angel to ride like a pony? The answer is
none, I tell you, none more ripe piece of binary-sexuality propaganda. What can one say about Buck
Angel? He's the world's most prominent female-to-male transsexual superstar, both butch enough
and queer enough to lay pipe in Brokeback Mountain's ass and spooge up a weird cocktail of gay
cowboy fetish porn and camped-out draggy hillarity. It's also gorgeously photographed and features
some sizzling hot man-on-man action.
Tristan Taormino's Chemistry series just keeps getting better, and Volume 3 continues the hot formula
of putting a bunch of porn stars in a house for the weekend and letting them do whatever they want,
whenever they want—and then filming it. In between fuck scenes, the stars get interviewed both
together and individually about being porn stars, about each other, about having sex with each other.
The confessions are disarmingly candid, and you'll learn more about porn stars by watching this
video than you will in a thousand promotional interviews.
That's one of the things that makes
Chemistry 3 so lovable, but there are plenty of others. The stars this time are Roxy DeVille, Jada Fire,
Hillary Scott, Christian, Steven St. Croix, and Derrick Pierce. St. Croix seems strangely shy and
standoffish in the group interview segments—he was, after all, making his zillionth porno when most
of these people were in short pants—but when it's time for him to come forth, he pulls no punches.
But the sex is fantastic as well, and the pairings go from explosive (Hillary Scott and St. Croix) to
casual, friendly, and enjoyably silly. It's got all the fun of watching your neighbors have laid-back
Saturday-afternoon sex, except that your neighbors are porn stars. Taormino has again produced a
video that's as educational as it is hot, and if anything it's the best of the series.
Club Satan: the Witches' Sabbath (Extreme Associates)
Club Satan purports to feature the first
instance of a real Satanic ritual, conducted by an ordained Satanic priest, captured in a sleazed-up
piece of rotten filthy hardcore. Fact is, it doesn't look all that different from your garden-variety
gangbang, 'cept one of the guys happens to be wearing horns and the rest are wearing black robes,
and they're all jerking off onto crucifixes and everybody's pouring blood all over each other.
The hype
about Club Satan ensured that there was no way this puppy could live up to it -- and I'm not
talking about Extreme Associates' frequent press releases during the production process, including
Paris Gables' assertion that during the filming of the gangbang/ritual, she felt a dark presence settle
into her and now she thinks she might need an exorcism. No, I’m talking about the 20 or so
Centuries of propaganda from the Church, Ann Rule and Ms. Magazine about how
Satanism is, you know, like, the worst thing ever and it really sucks and it's going to corrupt our
children and seduce us with its dark rituals and drag us weeping into the great maw of Eternal Evil,
all that. According to this flick, um, yeah, duh, and yet either a) people in porn and many
of my friends are already snug in the clutches of Satan, six or eight times a month at $850 a pop
plus the AIM test, or b) Satanic rituals really aren't that scary any more. Whichever way you interpret
it, I'm pretty fine with that. The bottom, and I do mean bottom, line, is that Club Satan: The
Witches' Sabbath is a lot of groovy porno death metal horror-movie badness, and if you want to
go to Hell, this is your ticket, fucker.
Robby D's series for Digital Playground has always been on the edge of Porn Valley's flirtation with
BDSM. There are posture collars, spreader bars, spider gags, and all that, but no actual bondage; all
the paraphernalia either comes off before the fucking starts or is rendered more or less irrelevant by
the female star's moans of pleasure and pleas for more. Which is all reasonably hot if that's what
you're into.
What makes Control 6 a strange and compelling document, especially when paired with
its equally hot Red Hot Fox, is that for some reason for a brief period this year Robby D got obsessed
with verbal abuse. No, no, not the typical type, men saying "Oh yeah, you're a little slut, aren't you" to the porn star they're boinking. Here, it's hot women verbally ridiculing and laughing at the viewer for jerking off. That is sooooooooo
wrong. And it works. Control 7 doesn't display the same style; it's back to the usual Control formula,
but Control 6 is special, trust me, and Red Hot Fox is its best bitchy girlfriend.
In my book, director and porn star Joanna Angel is at her best, hottest and most charming when
she's doing her small-time DIY-feeling work for her company Burning Angel Entertainment. In the
Cum on My Tattoo series, the idea is that hot tattooed girls fuck and guys spooge on their ink. Sound
silly? It is, a fact that does not escape director Angel or any of the stars, and in its weird ironic
attitude this series manages to showcase some genuinely smokin' alt-talent, which is why I love it.
Continuing the tradition of altporn meister Eon McKai's assault-on-slash-homage-to vintage '80s
porn, Debbie Loves Dallas is a clever remake of Debbie Loves Dallas, with more spunky slaps at pop
culture than you can shake a stick at. Debbie (Vivid contract girl Debbie) is obsessed with synthpop
supergroup Dallas, leading to some bitchy shit-talking with DeArmond and Stokely. Before you can
say dyejob it's on, with Wendy and Debbie challenging each other to a skankoff—the first
one to bang Punky's the winner. Debbie Loves is shot with an attention to freaky detail that
evokes the coke-addled New Wave, post-Disco era like a candy-coated rave-retro nightmare. With
video flaws introduced for fauxthenticity, it reminded me of the brilliant HP Lovecraft Historical
Society's Call of Cthulhu, only done for early-video instead of silent film. With its clever visual jokes
and its breakneck pace, Debbie's a fun watch and eminently strokable, as lovable as a
retro-obsessed porn film can get. With two bonus disks (one a soundtrack EP, the other packed with a
music video, trailers, a preview of McKai's next flick The Doll Underground, and a short McKai film
featuring Dave Naz and Smokin' Mary Jane, it's a big package of fun.
Vena Virago's debut for Vivid Alt is, much like it's VCA-released Silverlake Scenesters predecessor in
Virago's canon, a frolicsome showcase of hot hip chicks and dudes getting it on. Virago brings a
woman's sensibility to it, rendering it all with irreverent glee and showing off her stars with plenty of
wacky pleasure.
What can one say about the Sodomania series? Conceived in the early '90s, this porn series took a
vignette format and fulfilled all the expectations that porn could muster back in those days. It is far
from the Golden Age, and yet viewed today it has a bizarre dated sense about it that makes it as
entertaining as some of the strangest nudie loops from the '60s. In fact, Sodomania is even stranger
and therefore cooler than a lot of so-called "vintage" porn, because the early '90s were a time of
experimentation for erotic video. As the "vignette" idea developed, Sodomania was there, making it
happen, making it weird.
This new collection has all the the camp and grandeur, all the goofiness
and unintentional surrealism that you'd expect to see in porn films from a decade earlier; more
importantly, it looks like holy hell warmed over, with the oversaturated colors and freaky sound
spasms that only decaying magnetic media can provide. The clothes and sets, dialogue and
scenarios are just as weird and grotesque as can be, with everything I remember vividly about porn
from that era, including the disturbing pervy hotness. It's like stepping into a wish-fulfillment time
machine: Freed from the demands of the gonzo-vs-feature battle that now divides porn's corrupt soul,
SodoMania freely careens between both concepts, like a freeze-frame of the baked-silly Penthouse
Letter that is the American sexual psyche. Its simplicity makes it bizarrely erotic in a way that current
porn isn't; SodoMania scenes are strangely credulous, a sympathetic love letter from a simpler time
when the president happily got his knob polished in the Oval Office and you had to buy these things
in VHS from a dude named Lenny and hope you didn't get mugged walking to your car.
The short
version: You haven't lived until you've heard Sean Michaels say to Peter North over the writhing and
twisting body of a sweetheart being mutually enjoyed by the both of them: "Hey, Bob, you don't mind
if I slap your wife on the ass a little, you don't mind, do you Bob?" and North respond jauntily: "No,
Dick—go ahead!" Buy it. Now.
In Tina Tyler's Handyman series, the longtime
porn star turns her camera on what appears to be a particular obsession of hers—guys jerking off.
Now, if you want to see guys jerking off all you have to do is head over to the gay section of the
Montmartre Sleaze Emporium, but Tyler's made this series explicity with female viewers in mind;
though she mostly lets the male stars relax with their thoughts, her occasional coos, purrs and
encouragements make it very clear that this is a woman watching it, lending it all a deliciously hetero
energy, which appears to both satisfy female viewers and porn's straight bait fans. Hot, original, and
not quite like anything else on the market.
InTERActive is the first truly choose-your-own adventure porn DVD that I've seen. If you make the
right choices, good things can happen—and "good things," in this case, means sizzlin' hot sex (of
course). If you make all the right choices, you'll even get a secret code that unlocks
extra-special content that can't be accessed otherwise. Another option is to play the "hands free"
version, in which choices are made for you while you just sit back and, well, you know,
relax. Don't expect "hands free" to mean "easy way out," though—the only way to hit all of
Tera's high notes is to play the game yourself, so expect to put in a little effort if you want to pick this
hottie's locks. InTERActive represents a new step in "virtual sex"—a porn disk that plays with
storytelling as amiably as it dishes up hot sex.
Penthouse is making a move for the twentysomething market, answering the challenge placed by lad
mags like Maxim, FHM and the now-defunct Stuff. Apparently they're attempting to bitchslap altporn,
too, and strike it a glancing blow with Klub Slutz. It's a style-heavy, bad-goth-poetry-laced descent
into the cyberpunk nightmare of the freaky drug-dosed urban nightclub scene. You'll love it or hate it,
or maybe laugh at it; I both loved it and laughed at it. Whether it's serious or not I really couldn't tell,
but it's more like a Laether Strip video than a porn movie, which is either a good thing or a bad thing
depending on your aesthetics. Regardless, if you can either groove with it or forgive it its pretensions,
the sex is pretty hot, and the weird goth poetry aspect, combined with strange moments like Nick
Manning fucking punked-out Victoria Sinn and Nautica Thorn while he screams "FILTHY!!!!"—well,
let's just say this may not be the best porn movie you've ever seen, but if you get baked and watch it
with a room full of recovering Goths it may just be one of the best nights of your late '30s. Not that
I'd know.
If you think this is some snooty San Francisco art-porn list about feelings and sex positivity and shit, I
hereby place Little Red Rides the Hood on the list just to say "fuck you. Why? The reasons
are simple. In Little Red Rides the Hood, the theme is that "Little Red" shows up at a house where
double-digits of black men are ready to ravish her. If you were paying any attention, you might say
"Isn't this all basically a glorified interracial gang-rape fantasy?" to which I would say, "Glorified?" The
key word is "fantasy," and while we're at it people who want to write dissertations on the wrongness of
race-and-class-based porn will find as much here to occupy them as the off-pink gentlemen who
obsess over petite women serviced by or servicing (your call) large groups of chocolate-brown studs,
with, I suspect, boners being popped on either side of the porn-theory aisle.
But most interestingly (to me at least),
the thing that I like about this series is that each disk is about one woman subjected to all the
experience she can handle, and then some—how often do you see that in porn? For all porn's
promises of women getting all they can take and more, it doesn't actually happen very often because
porn producers, like their perceived customers, have the attention span of a gnat. Usually we spend
two minutes interviewing some boring chick whose name the director can't even be bothered to
remember from moment to moment, and then she fucks for twenty minutes and she's gone and we've
moved on to some even boring-er girl whose name the director can't remember from one moment to
the next. Here, the ravishments of Kissy and later Isabella amount to nothing less than a spiritual
journey, a pasty-white yet somehow Jungian confrontation of the Other or a re-enactment of
Persephone's journey into the kingdom of Hades, who I understand often enjoyed a forty and some
Italianate chippy smokin' his prong.
The fun and frenetic Man's Ruin is the second of Winkytiki's candy-coated confections for Eon McKai's
Vivid-Alt. Casting aside the Airstream trailers and Southern roadhouse dive bars of his directorial
debut, ReBelle Rousers, Octavio now delves into the virtual world of pervy sex craved by that
naughtiest of nerdlings, the video-game playing alt chick. Man's Ruin is a freaky little artifact, steeped
in Winkytiki's bizarre brand of hyperactive camerawork and obsessive-compulsive set design. The
visuals are a triumph of form over function. If you ever admired Octavio's photography, imagine
what would happen if you handed him a budget and a video camera…. which I guess is more or less
what happened. The result is a collection of amazingly freaked-out retro-styled cool. If you're a
design queen you'll cream your jeans over this flick. And if you want hot sex, that's definitely here,
though it's interspersed with enough rock video insanity to distract the most turgid self-stroker. If you
require a story in your porno… uh… well, let's just say a couple of bonghits wouldn't hurt your
attempts to follow the narrative in Man's Ruin. As with Octavio's pix, the visuals are what make it
here—pretty and freaky and sassy and weird.
As with director David Stanley's Crescendo
2012, which came out around the same time, the strangely spiritual hardcore flick
Melt believes that the right place for porno is woven through the tale of a New Age
journey, with themes of betrayal, death, unconditional love, altered perceptions, drugs, alternate
reality, and redemption. But where Crescendo sold its intentionally humorous pretensions with goofy,
wacky party favors, Melt is dead serious, a movie that's really about death far more than Crescendo
was really about the apocalypse. Melt's pretensions are largely forgivable because its emotional
content comes across as more earnest than even a pretty good indie feature, and because it actually
requires a fair amount of brain power to watch. If your attention lapses, there's no way you'll follow
the story. And the story, miracle of miracles, goofy as it is, is worth it. This may not be Carlos
Castaneda, but it's an interesting experiment, equal parts trickster myth and death's-head homily. It's
not a slam dunk, but it kicks the ass of every indie feature I've seen this year, which is a testament
both to how shitty a job indie features are doing of reaching their own meager standards, and how
good a job porn is doing of exceeding them.
Incidentally, it was a close race between this one and the similarly-themed but wackier Crescendo 2012. It's Julia's performance that tips the scales, but they're both worthy films.
The Penthouse empire is currently undergoing a serious re-vamping, the magazine being
re-imagined under the guidance of a new hip young management, or something—at least, that's
what I hear, and it's pretty obvious from reading the magazine. Attemping to give flagging lad mags
a run for their money, Penthouse is being largely successful, tweaking their selection of Pets and
giving the mag an overall new look and a hyped-up editorial feel. Penthouse films is going to the
same direction, with the hipper-than-hip Out of Control, with which they're shockingingly more
successful than I ever could have expected. Following newcomer Riley Shy as, running an errand for
her businessman boss, she runs out of gas and stumbles into a freaked-out nightclub a la the
Scorsese flick After Hours, Out of Control is a feature with a story that makes sense,
something almost unheard of, and it's actually pretty weird that Out of Control is narrative, clever
and hot all at the same time. It's got drag queens, bathroom sex and a gothed-out makeover for
Riley; what's not to love?
Benny Profane's Psychocandy 4 is a continuation of his irresistible DIY series that features freaky
alt-nerdy punk chicks and guys gettin' it on. When we say alt-nerdy, we're talking ALT-NERDY—these
are not high-gloss wannabe Hollywood rockstars snorting coke off Jesse Jane's ass; on the contrary,
these people smoke opium backstage at the Dickens fair and then have sex with Rudyard Kipling.
What I like about the series is its utter lack of pretension—it's straight-up sex positive porno, a
celebration of DIY porn and unabashed sexual debauchery.
As with David Stanley's Melt and Crescendo 2012 (see above), it was hard making a call between this one and Benny Profane's Barbed Wire Kiss. In many ways I liked Kiss more, because it had a higher budget and was on someone else's dime, so it could be more intentionally goofy. I could say that Psychocandy 4 got the nod because I'm taking a stand for DIY, underground, creator-owned porno, or that I like the fact that it looks like it's made in somebody's basement. I'd be lying: I picked it over Kiss because in Psychocandy 4, someone gets porked to "Bolero."
Philippe Soine's Scary Minds is as close as it comes to melding of actual non-consensual or
semi-consensual female-submissive BDSM fantasies and hardcore porn. It walks the ragged edge
between danger and reason. Offering intensely dark ambience and edgy power-play fantasies,
Scary Minds is just that—scary—and not for everyone. But if you've been searching for that
elusive porn DVD that features male dominance and female sexual submission, rather than
standard-issue porn with the fashionable trappings of perversion, Scary Minds may well be
it.
Cult porn legend Maria Beatty has a painter's eye for photography, and a photographer's eye for
fetish pornography. Nowhere are these two facts more evident than in the gorgeous, lavishly-lighted
scenes of Sex Mannequin, in which Dylan Ryan orders up her own personal sexbot, who turns
magically from plastic tart to hot tomboy London in the blink of an eye. Like its predecessor in my
DVD player, Skateboard Kink Freak, it's a minimal setup that provides ample opportunity for
essentially story-free fucking, in which the drama and narrative are communicated by moans,
movements, stares, glares and pelvic thrusts, each one as lovingly rendered on camera as a brush
stroke in a Monet. But lest you think that Sex Mannequin relies too much on visuals and is one of
those "art porn" things where there's no hardcore sex... um, no, the answer to that would be … NO.
In fact, Sex Mannequin includes some of the most intense female-on-female sex ever put on camera.
By this, I don't refer to the kind of screaming, spitting and carrying-on that provides sportfucking in
typical commercial porn; rather, it's just plain intense, incredible, real, transgressive, and
hot.
Beatty's Skateboard Kink Freak ended up on the honorable mention list; I just like Sex Mannequin better, but it is a close call.
Otto Bauer's second Supercore release for Ninn Worx is every bit as intense as his first, this time with the theme of "humility training," which you might get from the
subtitle of Smut Merchant: Make Her Beg For It!. Starting with an intense scene between Annette
Schwarz, Dave Hardman and Otto Bauer in a car garage, it proceeds to a supremely dirty but
strangely romantic (for Bauer) scene of Audrey Hollander getting ass-fucked by Jay Lassiter involving
choking and auto-asphyxiation. Then there's Jennifer Dark in a peeper scene with Jay Huntington,
deliciously vampy and nasty. By the time Liv Wylder is tied up with electrical cord in a sleazy public
restroom, you know you're watching a dirty, dirty film. Lovers of ass-sex and rough, slappy, spanky,
drooly, atmospheric, arty, gooey, hardcore fucking will find no better entertainment than Smut
Merchant.
As with several other directors represented here, it was hard to choose between this one and Make Her Ass Scream. Scream, after all, has Bauer's wife Audrey as the subject of a biker gangbang. Close call. I picked Merchant because I like the title. See 'em both.
Andrew Blake is a legend in the erotic entertainment industry. Blake's vision is one of magnificently
formed female bodies bound, gagged, plugged, writhing, dancing, spanking each other, wriggling,
twisting and shouting amid a succulent ambient soundtrack. Is it cool? It's impossibly, beautifully
cool, like a lushly textured dream you can jerk off to. Is it hot? It's magnificently hot, if you like
gorgeous women in beautifully-rendered and lovingly soundtracked shorts. Mentioning just a few of
the women showcased here—Aria Giovanni, Jennifer Dark, Faith Leon, Jelena Jensen, Elena Rivera,
Gwendoline—should give you an idea of the sort of high-end erotica we're talking about; this is the
stuff that makes LA look like the most beautiful place in the world, populated by the most beautiful
women, and suckers guys like me into moving there hoping to find the ghost of Raymond Chandler
ogling barely-clad sluts on Venice Beach.
Carlos Batts' self-produced Voluptuous Life (CBattsFlyVideo) would be an honorable mention, except that an expanded version was just released commercially from Bad Seed -- but at press time we had yet to watch it. Not a longshot to say you can watch for it on next year's list.
•
EROTICA
/ ZINE
