Stardust 5

This episode of Michael Zen's silly "Stardust" series brings our principals to Beverly Hills in a very stupid takeoff on the tv hit "The Beverly Hillbillies". Nothing much happens, except failed slapstick comedy and plenty of concise XXX scenes.

Badly dated, this typical low-brow porn from the VCR era of the '90s seems intentionally bad, as Zen looks down on his audience, evidenced by slapdash script, editing and the embarrassingly broad acting. Of course, it's all explained away by the "sex is all" doctrine still persisting among porn fans and industry types.

For people new to this series 3 decades after (myself included), the motifs here are cryptic and annoying. For example, a moose head on the wall has a stogie hanging from its mouth, making voice-over wisecracks. It seems that the low-brow approach of MST3K has infected the movies themselves. Frequent appearance of a flying saucer overhead zapping the cast is left unresolved, for now.

Actual attempts at a plot, with zero continuity, covers very little ground in this 80-minute episode, that total running time padded by credits' sequences, a recap of episode #4 and a preview of #6. Star Jenteal get exasperated at fiance Steven St. Croix having sex right in front of her in the back of a limo with undercover spy Kobe Tai. With their hillbilly entourage newly ensconced in a hotel, she humps the bellboy (Mitchell Gant a/k/a Mitchell Grant) in the bathtub and is later serviced in bed by New Age guru T. T. Boy. An element of fantasy is thrown into the mix as we see T. T. able to materialize out of thin air pointlessly.

T. T. Boy also gets to have a rather arousing 3-way at a massage parlor, serviced by prostitute Stacy Valentine working there, along with new hire Brittany O'Connell, playing Jenteal's sister. Instead of the redhead we porn fans know and love, Brittany here is fitted out with ridiculous wigs.

A significant character (and scene-stealer) is busty Sahara Sands, playing a domineering gossip columnist, who uses a voodoo doll to punish St. Croix by stabbing the doll's dick with a pin. She gets to have sex in her office with copy boy Rick O'Shea, after off-screen subjecting him to a "pencil test" which was implied to have something to do with Rick's dick, but in the urban dictionary turns out to be a rather innocent reference to female anatomy instead. Just misinformation here from Michael Zen. Sands figures prominently in the coming attraction for Episode Six.

I'll probably return to this series again sometime (12 episodes released in total, but hopefully some are better than this clunker.