Killer Kleavage from Outer Space

This is my first exposure to the video world of Joanna Angel, punk-styled porn actress/director who has been cranking out these features for years now to an apparently niche market. This amateurish attempt to mix XXX porn with low-rent comedy and sci-fi is stillborn, just another case where the perpetrators had a lot more fun on set than the audience will have watching them.

Alliteration telegraphs that this is meant to be in the vein of KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE, a junker with a cult following of its own whose director went on to become a crew member/flunky rather than successful auteur.

But its forebears are porn-oriented, the "outlaw" XXX satirists like the Dark Bros. and Rinse Dream (CAFE FLESH) of the '80s, the soft-core Seduction Cinema team from New Jersey and almost identically, Elizabeth Starr with her precedent-setting Russ Meyer tribute FASTER PUSSYCAT F*CK! F*CK!

My problem sitting through Angel's work is that it is patently phony, with the punk attitude merely a gimmick. There is nothing disruptive or threatening to the (porn) status quo here. Instead we have the usual gang of male porn stalwarts, a new breed of egregiously tattooed young women in the "acting" slots, and mere silliness where all the humor is supposed to be. Biggest sin is that the promised sci-fi is minimal to nonexistent, ultimately disappointing to stray genre fans who might sample this. (From her trailers, it is clear that Angel at least pours on some gore in her similar horror spoofs, but sci-fi sets and special effects cost money.)

There is no space ship in the movie, just editing to transport star Jessie Lee to Earth in search of the perfect penis with which to save her home planet Areola from extinction. End of plot summary and story.

She goes to a bar and humps bartender Seth Gamble, beginning an obverse of Cinderella premise in search of not a glass slipper but just the right cock. Gamble fails and she zaps him to death (cheap momentary green animation effect) with laser beams from her tits.

Back on her home planet, very poorly represented by some fake rocks and a green-screen background that sloppily bleeds due to bad sync of moving stars or something in the night sky, her mission's Captain Sheridan makes love to cutely-named assistant Axis Evol (a porn star for Republicans evidently), both of them showing huge natural (and floppy) breasts. Sheridan Love plays the captain and is the ringer in the cast, a bona fide lesbian star whose presence is why I bought this video in the first place.

Back on Earth, Lee is competing with Veronica Rose, who has very few porn credits (or rep) to her name, and merely points up auteur Angel's number one bias: hiring actresses who fell asleep at the local tattoo parlor. It's hardly subliminal, but judging from this feature and the various trailers on the DVD she is surreptitiously using her video platform in a campaign to make head-to-toe tats the new norm, and certainly the baseline standard for beauty. I'm not buying it - tats in porn are standard procedure nowadays but merely one of the many reasons why most serious porn fans long for the Golden Age just before Viper broke through the tattoo barrier.

Rose and fellow Aerolite Vyxen Steel team up for a group-sex foursome with FBI agents Michael Vegas and Mr. Pete, which allows Steel to indulge in lots of anal sex including the requisite d.p. Bill Bailey is another victim of the interstellar gals (reportedly having been transported 2 million light-years to Earth), until Angel taps her go-to guy Tommy Pistol for the finale. Dressed in a silly outfit of aluminum foil hat and shorts, he's a UFO nut who's rewarded by the sudden appearance of Jessie in his bedroom and after humping she declares his Johnson perfect and they disappear -film ending abruptly.

This scene repeats the use of a condom for Jessie's sex scenes, presumably part of her contract but jarring nonetheless. Since Pistol makes an elaborate speech on how he must wear a rubber when humping an alien this takes on the feel of a PSA, and is in direct contradiction to any anti-social or punk/uppity stance director Angel is taking - her whole act is a pose.

Finale leads directly to end credits which show cast and crew horsing around on the set, including the infamous & prolific gonzo Quasarman (Mike Quasar), who was d.p. (the other kind) for this video, and who I rightly and intuitively blamed for some of the lousiness of Kay Brandt's AGAINST HER WILL (also starring Sheridan) on which he was d.p. - he seems to be the den mother for fledgling femme pornographers. During the end credits sequence his wise crack when we see a replay of Sheridan's sudden mega-squirt orgasm during her lesbian scene is typical.

Us old-timers are obviously thought of as "moldy figs" (to steal the outdated jazz terminology that was popular when bebop was warring with trad jazz), but I steadfastly maintain that the honest entertainment of true B movies of the '30s through '50s (B meaning literally the second feature of a double bill), with their clever scripts and talented character actors has been completely lost now into the 21st Century when B merely stands for Bad in intentionally crummy filler posing as hip entertainment. I sort of gave Elizabeth Starr a pass for her heartfelt homage to the incredibly influential Russ Meyer (himself an extension of the B movie into the '60s drive-in era), but Ms. Angel is a self-styled fake-rebel whose "everybody must get stoned and get tattoos" cause went out with the '60s.