Imperial's Rating:

On to regular porn. I have finally lost even the last remains of patience I had with current American product. It is, with very rare exceptions, crap. All I have ever asked for is reasonably attractive people having reasonably good-natured sex under a reasonably titillating premise, filmed by a reasonably competent crew. All the rest, beautiful women, raunch, "production values", are just welcome additions. But today's US pornsters will never even give you the basics. The choices the poor consumer is faced with always seem to boil down to: (1) incredibly crappy, run-of-the-mill, Vivid/VCA "porn thrillers" or "art porn", featuring cookie-cutter plastic bimbos who wear a perpetual scowl on their faces while having cold and unerotic sex on grainy film, edited by some talentless bozo who believes MTV video clips and car commercials are the pinnacle of art; or (2) incredibly crappy, run-of-the-mill, "gonzo" videos featuring badly made-up trailer park trash getting abused by teams of ex-convict types and captured by some idiot holding a cheap video camera as if he has Parkinson's disease (and most probably Alzheimer's as well).

The few exceptions all seem to bunch in the "gonzo" field, but that may simply be because everybody and his uncle are shooting gonzo these days. The virtually lone example of *real* quality remains the wonderfully talented and funny John Stagliano. A typical example of why he is so great is his 1996 video "Buttman In The Crack". Not that it is without its problems: one of the five very long sex scenes is completely destroyed by the extreme closeup, and a damn shame it is too since the featured girls (Gabrialla Gotti in particular) are very attractive and natural. Also, some of the visual effects are a little too annoying, particularly the flickering strobe light that seems to be on for about one-third of the video. But Stagliano's strengths shine through these problems: funny premise, hilarious dialogue, pretty girls (the cast here includes some truly beautiful women, with Sabina and Lea Martini having pride of place), very rare instances of plastic (Kimberly Kyle is the only guilty one here and she is nice enough in other respects that I forgive her) and hot sex scenes.

The premise is perhaps the greatest asset of the film; it is the typical example of what I have always droned about: simple, cheap but effective. John is (again) editing his videos at home when suddenly the bell rings. Once again it is a girl (Ruby, a very, very pretty girl with a very, very bad boobjob) who lures him to a nearby hilltop. John worships Ruby's admittedly very impressive derriere a little too intensely with the unfortunate result of falling into the crack in the best surrealist tradition. Naturally, the world he falls into has its own inhabitants so Buttman has plenty of worthwhile material to shoot. Some of the gags are extremely funny, particularly the pisstakes of Greg Dark (of whom more later on in this chapter), but I will not spoil them since a funny porn video is a rare enough commodity. As mentioned, the girls are almost invariably very pretty and they all get very down and dirty. This is a solid outing by the inventor of pro gonzo and proof that you need some talent as well a cheap camera to make good video porn. By John's standards, this is above average, although not reaching the stratospheric heights of a "European Vacation".

Copyright © Imperial Reviews

Posted By Imperial, www.excaliburfilms.com | 10/5/06 1:58 PM