Crossroads

"Crossroads" represents a promising genre that never seemed to catch on: hard-core portraits of rural America, filled with atmosphere and poles apart from the urban (and claustrophobic interiors for sex) setting of most porn.

The two films this one resembles are Michael Raven's "Adrenaline" and Red Ezra's "Roadblock", all small town affairs. This time the main concern is a familiar, practically universal theme - the need to get out of a nowheresville provincial existence and get on with your life in more fast-paced (read: urban) surroundings.

That is the motivation driving a motley list of characters. Brad has a quite varied cast: Stephanie Swift still believable as a virgin deflowered by a very young (and different looking) Erik Everhard as her boyfriend; Alec Metro as the bad boy, humping Tera Patrick (seriously miscast but easy on the eye as a small-town girl) in his trailer; Tony Tedeschi hamming it up a bit as the Brando-styled bad boy with many a poor pick-up line, intent on taking diner waitress Coral Sands away from all this; and several character actors like Herschel Savage and Veronica Hart adding some depth to the proceedings.

It's saying something that one grows to care about these characters and their miniaturized fates, which makes "Crossroads" a useful addition to any list of porn films that clearly put the lie to the conventional wisdom that all Adult Entertainment should be wall-to-wall sex. Good films like this have a lot more than just generic footage -and this one plays very well 16 years after it was made.