The Contestants

The crap that passes for 21st Century horror films in the vein of "Saw", "Hostel" and their many imitations is often called "horror porn" by detractors, but Adult filmmaker David Stanley foolishly invaded that turf with real porn for this awful Vivid release. Contract star Briana Banks enthuses over its merits in the BTS short subject but I guess she's biased. And one has to watch the BTS to find out where its weirdness came from.

Structure is painfully familiar: 3 couples are offered $6 million to the winning twosome by villainess Stephanie Swift if they are the first to escape from an old warehouse, a very crummy setting even among the cheap and ugly sets that usually populate a Stanley 1 (or 2) day wonder for Vivid. The losers will get eaten up by a monster named Max. More about that beastie later.

Swift is decked out with a big-hair lousy wig and encouraged by Stanley to overact miserably, but lo & behold, the production manager on the shoot Jim Steel explains why in the BTS. The actor cast as the wheel-chair villain didn't show up, and SS was substituted for him at the last minute. Steel had the bright idea of bringing dumb props including wigs and costuming from home, and David's quickie rewrite turned the character into a bargain-basement riff on Glenn Close's Disney creation Cruella De Vil. Stanley retains the character's original name "Gil Parsons" in the credits for Swift.

Swift's right-hand lady, playing it mute until a single word of dialog at the end (how cute!) is Brit import Ashley Long, famous for being tall. So Swift at one point calls her a "high-altitude bitch", more wit from Stanley's pen. He didn't do a very good rewrite, as Ashley is billed as "Stewardess #1", an utterly cryptic appelation.

Porn gimmick is that Swift gets off on watching the couples hump, rewarding each money shot by dropping a useful key onto them, allowing them to move on in the warehouse as maze. Banks is sexy as usual while she faces stiff competition in the big-breasts department with co-star Sunrise Adams. Holly Hollywood representing the third couple is the hardest working of the three.

The monster is never shown, just speeded-up footage to represent it invisibly attacking this or that protagonist. Gore is also left off-screen, but in the BTS we not only see Stanley's crew member Ida Know (who often gets cameos) in a cage supposedly ready to play the monster, and Banks calls it a tiger. None of this makes the final cut.

So all Stanley has proven is that even a talented pornographer such as himself can come up with lousier results than the hacks like Eli Roth who regularly raid porn turf (soft-core editions of course) for fun and profit in the debased horror genre.