Devil on a Chain

I could blame it all on the worst influence in Modern Film history -one videostore grad named Quentin T., but Kim Kane's clunker tagged a "Sexploitation Feature" is her own damn fault. I loved the drive-in movies of the '70s and watched them religiously, Pam Grier the patron saint of the genre, and this zero-effort porn junker couldn't shine Pam's shoes.

It's sloppy, poorly shot, badly acted, and oh-so proud of its nonexistent cleverness. In the BTS on the Vivid DVD Kane does her "I'm stoned" routine while patting herself on the back with both hands for such an "ambitious" project, as if a Monogram Bowery Boys movie from the early '50s could be called "ambitious" by director Ed Bernds. IMDb informs me that one of the Adult industry's no-nothing arbiters (XRCO) nominated it as Best Epic - apparently in these times when dictionaries have been replaced by some internet colloquial website, the already made-meaningless word "epic" when applied to motion pictures (commonly confused with "lengthy" as in epics like Shoah or anything else running many hours in duration) has been rendered even more pointless by the dudes who foist XRCO on the world.

Kane hams it up (yep, that results in another industry nomination, Best Actress division) in the lead role, wearing shades and acting violent as she hunts down the baddies who have applied human trafficking to her sister Skin Diamond. Sample dialog written by Kane and her untalented cameraman Nate Liquor: "My sister, she's a mushroom cloud of nuclear hatred, and she's headed straight to that f*cking pimp, just like a scud missile shot from Outer Space".

Culprit is slimy Tommy Pistol, insufferable as always, here cast as a panties-sniffing pervert who of course gets his violent comeuppance from a vengeful Kane. Adding violence to the porno tool-kit seems to be her goal in this exercise, but Grier's ultra-violence in poor taste in "Foxy Brown" is a million times more effective than KK's puny and poorly staged efforts.

Similarly, instead of the expected chain-gang women genre content I was expecting, having been brought up on oh so many shot in the Philippines "Epics" starring Grier, Margaret Markov and Judy Brown, I was mighty disappointed to see nothing like a Big Bird Cage or Big Doll House but merely Skin stuck out in some shack with guest stars like lovely Charlotte Stokely as a fellow prisoner.

Extremely poor male casting has DSnoop incompetently doing his lousy Snoop Dogg impression as a cleanliness freak in charge of delivering the sex slave girls including Diamond to sleazy pimp played by alt creep Zak Sabbath. Yes, this is a vestige of Kane's militant if misguided alt-porn career which resulted in several low-grade Vivid bargain-basement "art" porn videos prior to her moving up, sort of, to the main label. Alas, Vivid expired soon after, not because of junk like "Devil on a Chain" but rather because its vision of Adult Entertainment was gone with the wind, or internet, whichever is less (pardon me, I just finished calculating my income taxes, filled with such dumb commands).

I don't know which is worse: the usual stance of pornographers (and Tarantino for that matter), insulting and belittling their audience with intentional crap, or deluded auteurs of the Kane ilk, actually proud of doing a terrible job. Condescension or self-delusion - take your pick.