The Pornographer

Given my dislike for Bryn Pryor/Eli Cross films, I set a very low bar for this Wicked Pictures release. It managed to provide some entertainment despite the auteur's usual pretentiousness.

It's just a send-up of B movies, not the ones from the '30s or '40s but rather the drive-in shows from the '50s and '60s. Since I've seen practically all of the target pictures, I found Bryn/Eli's approach facile and condescending.

He cast the dislikable James Deen in the title role, a young director of black & white cheapie monster movies, a scene from one opening the show. It has Zoe Voss and Danny Wylde combating not giant grasshoppers but rather giant crickets set against cute little models in a merely okay mocking of the real thing.

Deen's boss, played by Nic Danger, rightly sees the writing on the wall for this type of picture, requesting that Deen drop his specialty in favor of thrillers involving damsels stalked by a killer. Complicating matters, the power behind Nic's throne, wife Kylie Ireland, shows up and tells Deen she's the moneybags in his organization and insists that he shoot on a bigger budget ($125,000, certainly sizable for 1964 when this movie is set) and in color.

So we get a series of cliched scenes making fun of auditions, shooting low-budget junk, etc. Pryor cannot resist injecting himself into the show, playing the role of the cameraman hired to handle the color shoot, and killing running time with a very bad imitation of Abbott & Costello opposite Deen, namely the team's famous "Who's on First?" routine.

Where the movie goes off the tracks is in its main premise telegraphed by its title: Deen discovers that Pryor and his production manager Tyler Knight have been shooting stag footage (XXX content) on the sly with the cast. He blows his top but is almost instantly convinced that porn is the way to go, leading to a rather silly conclusion meant to anticipate the 1970s revolution in which dirty movies replaced mainstream content at Art theaters.

The actual history is so well-known that this stupid script ploy is ridiculous. The same movie could have been made as a late-night R-rated (or soft X) cable feature, mocking the change of indie production in the 1960s (1964 is fine) to softcore porn (think of the rise of Russ Meyer and Radley Metzger for example), so even the title could be retained. But Pryor and Wicked and his producer Axel Braun are in the hardcore XXX business so rewriting history radically for effect is what we get.

The sex scenes involving stars Ireland, Kim Kane, Nicki Hunter, Katie Summers and the late great Amber Rayne are merely okay, overwhelmed by the tons of B-movie homage content. Result is neither fish nor fowl, hardly of great interest to either B-movie addicts or porn hounds.