Emperor

The horrible script credited to "Jack Cole" helps sink another ill- advised big-budget Paul Thomas feature for Vivid. It received the big- deal 2-DVD treatment but is something of a disaster.

Basic premise fails miserably, as PT & his scripter bite off the topic of a mainstream director, poorly impersonated by superstar/super-stud Rocco Siffredi, having a midlife crisis not unlike Mastroianni in Fellini's classic "8-1/2". Ripping off, or should I say being inspired by "8-1/2" has been the province of innumerable filmmakers, but PT's imitation elements are ridiculous, not inspired. Dealing with the mainstream was a bad mistake, as PT & crew are only equipped to comment on their own end of the Entertainment continuum, namely porn.

Shot mainly in Budapest as a big-budget project in association with Euro whiz kid Anita Rinaldi (who unfortunately does not take an acting role on screen), we get plenty of local Euro talent in addition to Vivid stars Janine and Dasha. For Fellini addicts there is a plumper named Cindy, and we even have a poorly staged "with a whip" scene but using a riding crop instead that immediately brings to mind Mastroianni in his stylish black hat riding herd on all the women of consequence in his life, brought together in his imagination.

His character Narciso Nunzio is in the Hungarian capital for a film festival retrospective of his work, including titles like "Anatomy of a Lover" (with a poster cleverly imitating Saul Bass's style for the Preminger movie with Jimmy Stewart), "Mind Games" and especially "Original Sin" starring his current wife Claudia, played by a much- tattooed Janine. (In one of the Bonus Scenes inevitably stuck on the 2nd DVD for the fans we get to see Janine with the divine Inari Vachs in an excerpt shot before she defaced her arms with ink.)

Dasha plays Nunzio's ex-wife Andrea, who is now sort of his manager or keeper as it were, and the film's aimless structure climaxes sexually, after many a concise sex scene, not the endless ones we get in current porn a decade later, with Dasha superseding Janine in bed with Rocco after the two wives hump each other, all designed to deliver Dasha's anal sex specialty.

Many other beauties, though lacking in star power, hump away in earlier footage, with a couple worth singling out: blonde Veronica Carso who is quite impressive (though her scene in a limo servicing an actor named Dominic is left on the cutting room floor, resurfacing as one of five bonuses on the 2nd DVD) and a hot brunette named Tera Bond. Another Vivid girl, the untalented Tawny Roberts, humps Rocco early on and comically (for us, not for him) gets carried away in the gonzo and gives him a black eye that the actor sports throughout the movie. In one scene the eye flips from left to right on screen via an edit, I assume meant to be cute rather than just another flub.

The script has deadly dull dialog, with Rocco having stereotypical troubles with his studio, and a desire to make documentaries after cranking out the typical erotic (soft) art films that have always impressed dunderheads on the Film Festival circuit. He has an alter ego version of himself (slight SPFX to put two Roccos in the frame at the same time) who gives him a hard time, but I didn't appreciate the pidgin English response of "Documentaries doesn't tell the truth" the Italian actor spits out.

Director PT also appears briefly as an alter ego credited as "Mesmerist" in the end credits roll, who takes Rocco through a tent flap into another world, a gypsy encampment at night where he enjoys an orgy. This scene, together with a stupid wraparound sequence of 5 nude beauties wearing masks/headdresses standing in a pond as Rocco gets baptized in the water by a nun, is shot on video as opposed to the overall film made in 35mm, a pointless gimmick more likely due to production exigencies than art. More Fellini riffing I suppose in the baptism & nun motifs.

Ultimately, Rocco's dabbling in documentary work takes him to a lavish set (which PT tells us in the BTS short subject is left over from a shoot of "The Bourne Identity" or some other mainstream picture) where PT himself is a pornographer directing a ridiculous military guys humping a couple of girls out in the cold. PT digs Rocco's video docu footage just shot, and gives the visitor carte blanche to direct a porn scene of his own with the assembled cast. This sort of nonsense is cut from the same cloth as the rest of "Emperor"'s ridiculous presentation of mainstream and porn filmmaking, total b.s.

Just recently I had watched an excellent PT production on this subject, but strictly about the travails of a pornographer, in that case a lowly screenwriter for Adult Cinema. Titled "True Blue" and made four years earlier, its direction was credited to "Emperor"'s cinematographer Ralph Parfait, and was insightful on a low budget for Vivid, unlike the bloated and empty feature here. "Emperor" sat on the shelf for two full years before being released. This was a time when money was flowing freely for large-scale porn productions (most successful being "Pirates" and its sequel) but a decade later the industry is in peril, being killed off by free internet porn, gonzo crap and the self-fulfilling prophecy that nobody wants to see stories or characters, just generic sex.