Hiring XXX performers to enact soft-core sex roles is a popular practice dating back to the '80s, when Chuck Vincent especially gave Tracey Adams and many of his other stars opportunities to have big roles in very minor R-rated and soft-X features he cranked out for Playboy and Vestron Pictures. "Strip Club Slayer" employs this device, but untalented filmmakers create a worthless late-night-cable time-killer of little interest.
The genre involved was made viable 30 years ago by a talented actress turned director Katt Shea, whose work I championed at the time (even getting her a gig at the Museum of Modern Art back then to present her Drew Barrymore film "Poison Ivy"). Unlike Shea's influential stripper- themed thrillers for Roger Corman, this stale approach has actors giving very bored, drowsy walk-through performances, and nothing much happening for a full hour and a half, apparently intended to help Showtime/The Movie Channel subscribers doze off after a hard day.
Title is misleading, as soft pornographers credited as Alan Kramer (director) and Annabella Hersh (producer) avoid violence -part of the current fear of mixing sex with mayhem. Sad excuse for a story has female stock brokers moonlighting as strippers (I kid you not), with the great Adult star Dana DeArmond a partner in a pop-up, underground strip club run by her boyfriend Paul Case.
Early in the film a customer named John (appropriately) played by big- dicked Chad White (you'd never know it to watch this one -no male frontal nudity allowed) is serviced in the back room by stripper Cat (soft-core sex queen Beverly Lynne, who has completely lost her fresh & appealing look after toiling for a decade or so in Fred Olen Ray skin epics). Afterward he is hit over the head (staged so weakly as to be nearly invisible/non-violent), and killed.
Case covers this up, and his employees go along with this, afraid of dire police actions against them for running an unlicensed club. Weak premise is that they are forced to break the law due to local prohibition of selling liquor and having full nudity on the premises (let alone prostitution in the back room).
Maddy O'Reilly, one of my favorites in XXX acting, is seriously miscast as Dana's accountant (!!) for the club, merely an excuse to insert her into the film for her beauty and some poorly simulated sex scenes. Other sex chores are handled by bartender/stripper Georgia, played with some conviction by the late, great Amber Rayne.
The explicitness of the sexual content is about at a 1968 level, with no split-beaver shots and none of the "actual sex" stagings edited down from hardcore to soft that typify most of the current Showtime and The Movie Channel After Hours/Midnight programming.
Non-story meanders along until one of the characters is revealed to be the killer, but let go by the others in yet another cover-up. No tension or thrills are delivered, and scene after scene is listlessly directed and lifelessly, mechanically acted.
Principal casualty of this creative vacuum is DeArmond, who has never been dull in her mostly over-the-top performances apart from this one. She seems to be on Prozac and delivers her lines as if under protest, while dancing at a pole languorously and humping half-asleep. All the women are flat-chested by porn standards, a rather stupid decision for a soft-core picture where only secondary sexual characteristics are shown (there are zero pubic area close-ups).
The guys, apart from Chad White and Seth Gamble from XXX land, are a lousy bunch, worth noting for the eccentricity of casting. Paul Case as Nico looks like an odd combination of Ed Harris and Clint Eastwood, not recommended for an aspiring actor even though it sounds intriguing on paper.
Worse yet is the male second lead Bradley King in a poorly written role as a tattooed stud hired as security for the club after the murder. He cannot act at all, and after a dozen scenes of spitting out his lines awkwardly, in his final happy ending sex scene with Dana he suddenly speaks with a thick Irish accent, not a plot device but mere sloppiness in the continuity department. It's a fitting goof to end a desultory attempt at porn.
