★½
“Porn stars vs. Incels”
This poorly-conceived and even less effectively executed cheapo, starts off looking like a home-video recording of a movie, taken off late night TV. There’s a bikini-clad hostess, who introduces the film, and it might not have been a bad idea, had they actually run with it. Cut into the movie for spoof adverts, bad infomercials, further host segments, etc. Yeah, could have been fun. Instead, it’s completely forgotten until almost the end, when she pops back up… purely to showcase a trailer for the directors’ next film, Slash-lorette Party. Verily, the level of cringe is strong in this one. If it had even embraced the eighties aesthetic for which it is clearly aiming, that would have been a credible substitute. But outside of the synthwave score by the very wonderfully named “Vestron Vulture,” there’s hardly any effort put in there either.
Instead, what you get is porn star Mila Lynn (McKinney), who is about to quit the profession. Her boss, disgruntled by the news, delivers her up to a member of The Sword, a “men’s rights” group who have been abducting and torturing other adult entertainment stars, blaming them for causing addiction to porn. Mila manages to escape, beating her captor to death with a baseball bat, and sets up a vigilante squad, who will take the fight to the members of The Sword, and show them the error of their ways.
The above sounds considerably more interesting than the reality. I will say, that most of the actresses make thoroughly convincing porn stars – unfortunately, this is mostly in the way they can’t act their way out of a paper-bag. The pacing is also terrible. At 101 minutes, it’s at least twenty too long, and takes far too long to get to the meat of the matter. As a result, it commits the cardinal sin of grindhouse cinema: being boring. This is in part because it insists on being didactic, pushing its moral viewpoint to an obvious and rather painful degree. That’s another sin in which you never see good grindhouse flix indulge. I Spit on Your Grave didn’t need to spell out any obvious messages.
There’s a certain hypocrisy here, given the female nudity on view, frequently combined with things like the owners having their throat slit, New York Ripper style. None of the main actresses indulge, implying they are in some way “better” than that. It also fails to make a coherent argument against The Sword’s proposition – basically that, without porn, there’d be no porn addiction, and those who profit are no better than pushers. It’s just taken as “bad,” m’kay? Of course, the brutality with Mila and her pals react, is morally little if any different from The Sword: an uncomfortable truth the film never dares address. All of which I could probably tolerate, if this was anything like fun to watch. It isn’t, and I couldn’t.
Dir: Paul Ragsdale, Angelica De Alba
Star: Delawna McKinney, Anthony Iava To’omata, Paige Le Ney, Daniel James Moody