Adam & Eva

I'm waiting for an uprising among fans of Missa X's website subscribers (at MissaX and Allherluv) as the auteur has moved from directing to a more behind-the-scenes role lately. This feature from the team of director Ricky Greenwood (aka Eric Boisvert) and writer Maddy Barton is entertaining, but hardly as impressive as the distinctive content Missa was cranking out routinely before her brand of story (and fetish) porn became mainstream a couple of years ago.

The story fooled me, as it begins in such familiar territory: innocent hitchhiker Haley Reed accepting a ride and lodging from "Adam and Eva" (Nathan Bronson and petite Keira Croft) after they save her from a would-be rapist Able Rye, latter played by a crew member in time-honored porno tradition of saving a buck on NonSex acting roles.

The couple is sexually liberated and we seem to be in hippie-era territory as Eva extolls the wonders of their life style and soon has Haley agreeing to sex with them and morphing into a crypto-prostitute (sex with strangers but no money exchanged). Not only does Keira's character of Eva seem sinister but guest star Seth Gamble is definitely so, playing "Pops", a somewhat obvious miscreant who immediately does a casting couch routine on aspiring actress Haley.

This all adds up to the format of a typical Exploitation movie "cautionary tale", dating back to those 1930s films about girls headed for Hollywood only to be mistreated and emerging disillusioned. But instead, perhaps cynically, Barton & Ricky concoct a happy ending for Haley which is as unconvincing and illogical as can be. It's as if the Flower Children had won the cultural wars since the 1960s, rather than the reality of an American culture increasingly turning reactionary if not downright Trumpian of late. Even in a porno context, this story is fake, fake, fake.