Live in My Secrets

Working with a fakir named Eon McKai (as her exec producer), Kimberly Kane made perhaps the worst of her misguided features for Vivid Alt, a trend in her otherwise laudable Adult career which has hopefully been abandoned. This exercise in the Theater of Ugliness is one of those innumerable works made in the wake of Max Hardcore's '90s revolution in porn that has been the main contributor to the death of a budding art form.

I'll start off with its industry award win for Best Score - a ludicrous tribute in that the music frequently uses a ripoff of a famous Led Zeppelin chorus, which hardly makes it eligible for plaudits, except perhaps "Best Pirating".

With the assistance of a crew member who has chosen "Noname" for his/her porn moniker, Kane presents a series of unrelated segments shown in 8mm and also widescreen color footage, sometimes simulating the look of ancient stag films. It's all so hip circa 2008, but viewed at a distance is barely watchable. I saw thousands of actual avant-garde underground short films by the greats (Emshwiller, Brakhage, Vanderbeek) back in the '60s and '70s and pornographers invading that turf, retro-style, is absurd. I saw Curt McDowell's "Thudercrack!" at a midnight showing when that famous feature was new 40 years ago, and it marked the beginning and ending of my tolerance for porn/underground fusion.

A couple of Kane's actresses get short shrift in pointless filler solo segments: the great plus-size star April Flores cavorting nude with an iguana or two, and never-made-it Mandy Morbid horsing around on the sidewalk, sporting a punk hairdo that reminded me of retro-Pinhead (see: Tod Browning's classic "Freaks").

Main event matches Kimberly with superstar Sasha Grey in a rather ridiculous tribute to Fangoria Magazine (my humble interpretation), as they go lesbo together covered in Strawberry Syrup (handily identified by an empty bottle so we won't worry that actual blood was spilled). Topping this in crappiness is certainly Claire Adams, a renowned dominatrix/rope artist whose work in bondage videos by Ernest Greene is artistic on its own turf, woman-handling Bobbi Starr in a distressing exercise of nastiness and extreme masochism by Starr.

I know Bobbi is just making a living in the skin trade, and apparently enjoys abuse, but why foist it on the viewing public? It remains one of the sad truths of the transition back in 1970 from soft-core to hardcore porn that the newly permissible explicitness eventually opened the floodgates to the generic sex footage and grossness for grossness' sake now dominating the industry in the internet age.

More conventional segments have Faith Leon cavorting in her bathtub, Tyler Knight in BDSM suspension so that top dominatrix Aiden Starr can seemingly give proof to AC/DC cred by humping him rather than one of her usual lesbian victims, tossing in IR content to boot.

Kane also indulges herself in a sex bout with her go-to guy Mick Blue that is hardly one of his finest moments in a career now spanning thousands of appearances. I discovered Mick at his youthful peak in a classic European video co-starring Sandra Romain about sex with a nun, and it's been all downhill for him (artistically speaking) since, as both opted for Chatsworth over Euro porn.