Future Darkly Volume 1

Bree Mills's porn success has gone to her head, illustrated by this ill-conceived entry in the "Pure Taboo" series she directs with Craven Moorehead. It's a simple concept run into the ground.

Michael Vegas is merely creepy (no acting talent required or delivered) as a perverted gamer who adapts his Virtually Real brand video game to an exploitation of young women, using them to create imaginary sex slaves for him to hump while "in the game". Scientific logic here is thrown to the winds, merely in service of the series emphasis on depiction of abusing young women.

Even as fantasy this won't fly, as Bree is careful in her script to have each of the five actresses repeatedly recite (in character) their age of 18, to satisfy current censorship restrictions on underage characters. Vegas is their school bus driver, who obtains their DNA (through a discarded lollipop or actually tearing hair out of a girl's head when she's exiting the bus) and somehow uses it to create virtual profiles and inject them into his doctored game.

Two chapters are shown, in which he rapes Carolina Sweets and Whitney Wright. Story gimmick has him limited to only one girl at a time, a premise that contrivedly permits Wright to organize a rebellion of the virtual teens by having them stage an orgy in Chapter Two, exploiting a glitch in the program and supposedly saving the day, though Mills prefers to leave us hanging with Vegas back on the bus smiling, for an open ending resolving nothing (evidently sequelitis trumps logic).

The gals are sexy and look suitably underage, the driving force behind this type of porn. White Room is an all-white set, the most striking aspect of the production (first used so memorably in George Lucas's sci-fi classic "THX 1138".

Material was issued combined with another Pure Taboo sci-fi episode "Artifamily" on DVD as "Future Darkly Volume 1".

For that vignette Bree Mills confuses all sorts of topics, namely cloning, robotics and even creating androids and cyborgs.

By coincidence I had just viewed Yorgos Lanthimos's 2011 film "Alps" -he being the currently hot-hot-hot director of "The Favourite". It has the same premise as Bree uses here, but viewed from a psychological rather than sci-fi vantage point. "Alps" concerns a group who name themselves The Alps and make a living impersonating recently deceased relatives, paid by the survivors of the family, in order to ease the bereavement of those concerned.

In "Artifamily", Nina Hartley is a scientist, with cameos as her assistants by Bree herself and cameraman Billy Visual, who uses DNA to create a robotic clone designed to do exactly the same thing. While avant-garde Lanthimos was dealing with Theater of the Absurd and a critique of modern society, Mills is content to simply exploit a gimmick to indulge her patented brand of incest porn.

Killing off the show's potential immediately is casting of Tommy Pistol as the grieving father, his wife and daughter recently killed in an auto accident, in the year 2095. (Despite setting this way into the future, the main set depicting Pistol's home has nothing futuristic about it, could be from the 1950s even.)

Next plot gimmick is that a law exists that permits only one clone/robot per family, so Nina announces that due to greater DNA viability her team decided to clone only the daughter, not the wife, without even asking Pistol to confer. After this phony plot element, the show quickly devolves into sex, sci-fi no longer of much interest.

Cloned kid Jill Kassidy talks like a robot and immediately sets out to seduce Pistol, with all the requisite "Oh, daddy!" porn dialog of any role-playing saga. We are reminded he's merely the stepfather, crucial to Bree's fear of censorship (re: incest.) Pistol's exaggerated histrionics are pitiful to watch as he supposedly tries to resist, ultimately looking very scruffy, and dare one say, perverted. He gives in of course, and is soon into pornspeak and behaving as he does in countless BDSM titles for which he remains in high demand despite his acting shortcomings.

In addition to a crummy, cornball ending, this story fails to establish what sci-fi creation we are dealing with: human clone, robot, cyborg or android -take your pick.