Creative director Carlos Batts delivers the third in his April Flores centric art-porn series, which originally kicked off with Alter Ego. April has such good chemistry one film as well as pictures and it’s always fun to see more of her. Glamazons gives us some interesting voyeuristic insight into April’s sexy life as her sexual star rises. I would like to see a little more footage of things like her art-nude drawing parties and fan signings and other real life coverage, but I know there are also some people who might not be into more of that. From what we’ve seen it does have a bit of a documentarian feel than standard porno though and although it can come across as a bit indulgent in it’s production, these guys really are exploring their media and it’s fun to be along for the ride.

Babeland Premieres debuts their first ever porn release, The New Romantix by first-time filmmaker/ director Max Royale. The premise of the film starts with an interview of each of the six porn stars followed by a porn scene with one extra thrown in for good measure. The film is marketed as profiling “six beautiful, intelligent, funny, and amazing women on their passionate quest for sexual liberation and empowerment”. The girls in the film are hot (Joanna Angel, Ryan Keely, Riley Mason) and a few of the interviews are very good, in particular Ryan Keely who comes across as “beautiful, intelligent, funny, and amazing.” Joanna unfortunately doesn’t really seem to know what to say, looks uncomfortable and is a bit lame during her interview. Lexi Belle’s interview is shot in downtown LA with a graffiti backdrop, which is visually interesting, although she comes across a very young and a bit naïve. The girls talk about first-time sexual experiences and some of this is interesting and enlightening. I always love getting to know the performers better so this was the best aspect of the film for me.

I was hoping that the sex scenes would highlight their fantasies and “empowerment”, but only Ryan’s scene comes close to being empowering as she masturbates solo with a dildo and is in control of her own fantasy. Since she talked about lesbian encounters quite a bit in her interview, I was expecting a girl-girl scene with her, but unfortunately this was not the case. This is the only solo scene in the film, and most of the sex is girl/boy with two girl/girl/boy scenes that are more about the girls giving the guys double blow-jobs than about the girls getting it on together. So if you are hoping for a bit of lesbian/queer action, you won’t see it in this film.

Joanna Angel and James Deen have a lot of chemistry in their scene together and the sex is hot, with Joanna squirting several times. Lexi Belle, Lexi Bardot and Tommy Pistol romp and bounce in a bouncy castle, which was a novel idea and could have been fun. However, the atmosphere is ruined by the distracting music which drowns out any sexy nuances and moans it may have had. The sex is pretty typical and apathetic. Avy Lee Roth is a rock-chickita groupie who claims to be the daughter of David Lee Roth. She gets it on with a long haired guy in leather pants, but neither performance is especially amazing. Riley Mason is super hot and has a pool table scene with Daniel. This scene would have been great if the music wasn’t again so distracting, as Daniel is always fun to watch and such a pro. James Deen has another quick vignette with Joanna and Lexi Bardot as they compete to see who will get to suck his cock, and that’s about it.

The final scene is between Lexi Bardot and James Deen again and says it is shot with Infrared in total darkness. I’m not sure why they say this, as Infrared is not red (as the scene is) but B&W and highlights heat, not color. Usually people’s eyes glow and you can see their veins under porcelain skin with Infrared photography. Also, you can see shadows everywhere in this scene, which leads me to believe that it was shot with lighting and not in a pitch black room at all, as in blackness there are no shadows. So, not sure what they were trying to pull here, except they thought it would be a cool special FX for an Altporn flick? They do use a wide angle or fisheye lens to distort the image somewhat, but it does nothing to enhance the scene which is again ruined by the music.

There are just too many things wrong with this film to list how they may have improved it. Certainly having some connection between the interviews and the sex scenes would have helped with continuity and a connection to the stars. A girl-girl scene would have been fabulous to include and there could have been way more focus on the girl’s pleasure than the typical blow-jobs and facials. Also, the music should have been integrated much better into the overall soundscape. Finally, I’m not sure how well the final rendering of the film was, as my DVD set has a lot of pixilation in it throughout it. The New Romantix is an ambitious project for a first-time filmmaker that ultimately does not deliver. It is just the same-old, same-old, marketed with an alt-porn aesthetic, but there is really nothing new or interesting about it. I do look forward to seeing Ryan Keely in more films, as she was The New Romantix one saving grace. Hopefully, Max Royale will have a chance to redeem himself with future attempts.

Hospital (2008) is the latest film from Benny Profane who self-produced the gonzo-gothic series Psychocandy. I was interested to see what Benny Profane would do using a different, art-porn style like he has with Hospital.

The film stars Mandy Morbid and her real life partner Zak Sabbath. Mandy started off as a Suicide Girl under the alias Adria and transitioned into porn with her first non-sex role as a chorus girl in Bullets & Burlesque (2007), also directed by Profane. Since then she has appeared in two other porns doing sex scenes including Shades of Romona (2008) and Young Hollywood (2008).

In Hospital, Mandy plays Lucy, a punk chick who is admitted against her will into a creepy mental hospital where she is to undergo archaic treatments for her sexual deviancy. The film oscillates between the asylum and flashbacks of her life.

Hospital begins with a prelude with Lucy sucking a very huge cock (or at least it appears to be so with the morphed camera lens and stark spotlight halo that illuminates only her and said cock, with the background in blackness). A distorted electronic voice-over of a woman commences chronicling Lucy’s aberrant psychosexual behavior that is symptomatic “in its repetitive nature and inevitability”. She then awakes to find herself on a hospital gurney.

Lucy wanders the long, ill-lit halls and soon finds herself a voyeur to a naughty nurse scene between Caroline Pierce and Sochee Mala. Both girls have piercings and tattoos, but are not what I would describe as nonconformist or alternative. The performances lack enthusiasm using the typical type of girl-girl action: pussy licking, fingering and a strap-on. The scene ends, then Lucy undergoes a flashback.

Lucy and her boyfriend (Zak Sabbath) go to celebrate scoring some cash after a con-job on Kimberly Kane. This scene is hot as the couple fuck like pros and Mandy’s voluptuous body bounces with enthusiasm. Zak sports a wicked tattoo on the side of his head that was attacked by a zealous barber. The scene ends with a tit-fuck and then Jak pours candy hearts on Mandy’s sticky naked hot-bod. At one point during the scene there is happy Doris Day style music playing as they kiss and embrace in a mockery of “family values” ideology and the sweetheart candies are perhaps evocative of this.

Back at the hospital, Lucy is cuffed to the shower by one of the nurses and symbolically purified with a water torture treatment.

The scene then flashes back again as Mandy passes Marie McCray (both wearing identical Asian-styled dresses) in a stairwell where they pull a switcheroo and exchanges wigs. Marie then enters a room in an abandoned warehouse where Daniel is playing a video game. Marie removes her wig to reveal her strawberry blond pigtails and begins to seduce Daniel. There is nothing alternative about Marie, except for her striped stockings and funky shoes, but she is a pretty sweet. Daniel is a great performer and he has amazing stamina. He is genuinely passionate through-out his performance and seems to inspire the same in his co-star. I love the way he man-handles Marie with playful choking and spanking. The scene is shot from several great angles including high above which gives you a strange voyeuristic bird’s eye view of the action. Several times during the scene, it cuts back to the two nurses who are monitoring the action and taking notes.

The scene ends and we cut back to Lucy who has a strange spiked helmet on her head. She awaits her impending therapy, in which Dr. Profane intends to cut a hole in her skull to drain excess the blood. His attempt is halted by a pencil to the skull after Lucy untangles herself from white bandage bondage. She is rescued by Zak and Coco Velvett who speed her off to the nearest sleazy hotel and a fairly hot girl-girl-boy scene ensues.

Hospital is a good attempt at something different within the alt-porn genre. It is stylish with a good use of camerawork and sound elements. Profane doesn’t overuse “avant-garde” aesthetics like distressed film look, jump-cuts, white-outs, or excessive editing techniques that are typical of Eon McKai. On the other hand, it is not as “dark, squalid, and ominous” as I had hoped and there are many missed opportunities within the medical fetish genre that could have been utilized. No straight-jackets or medical paraphernalia to make for the atmospheric mis-en-scene I was hoping for. I was expecting dark and creepy, like Chad Michael Ward’s Pain Box series sexed up, but instead got Profane’s whacky alter-world with fairly standard porn. Mandy Morbid and Zak are hot, and Daniel is super-fantastic. This is a fairly decent art-porn and more significant (IMHO) than the Psychocandy series.

Director: Benny Profane
Cast: Mandy Morbid, Zak Sabbath, Caroline Pierce, Sochee Mala, Kimberly Kane (Non-sex), Daniel, Marie McCray, Coco Velvett, Benny Profane (Non-sex).

I’m doing something a little different with this review. Instead of, say, writing something properly, I decided to take running notes while I watched. It works out for both of us, because I get to be lazy and not really try, and you get to the experience of being there. Or not.

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I should first mention that I don’t watch porn for the plot, and I do not and in fact can not understand why anyone would. As you might have guessed, this porno has a plot, so that’s a pretty big strike against it right there. Fortunately, someone at VCA must agree with me, because one of the “bonus features” is a “sex only alternate version.” Someone deserves a little credit for thinking of that. At any rate, the regular version of the movie doesn’t have all that much of a plot, and the women featured here are all unbelievably hot. Allow me to repeat that: the women are beyond belief. I mention it twice since it is absolutely the only redeeming quality to the movie.

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Why do you watch porn? Is it for the plot? The acting? The (non-sexual) stunts? The dancing? How about car and motorcycle chase scenes?

What’s that you say? You watch porn for the sex?! You want to look at hot girls fucking in interesting ways, and maybe just relax for ten minutes and jerk off all over yourself? Yeah, me too! Unfortunately I guess that no one told Joanna Angel, the director and star of this movie, because she has some very strange ideas about what should be included in an adult movie. And how to film one. The sex here, what there is of it, is lifeless and dull, and the cinematography and lighting are fairly terrible and often utterly counterproductive and frustrating. If there is one thing that a porno should not be, it’s frustrating.

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If I were to wildly oversimplify things, I could put the kinds of content we cover at altporn.net into two camps: artsy erotica and bonerfying pornography. In reality most of it falls somewhere between the two, with sites like FatalBeauty.com floating over near planet Artsy Erotica, and movies like Joanna’s Angels in a shallow orbit around the celestial sphere of Porn.

Alter Ego, the new film from Carlos Batts, is very, very much in the artsy erotica camp; properly emphasized, the ARTSY erotica camp. AE is a carnival of sensuality and skin and bent gender in slow motion, reminiscent of David Lynch and, less frequently, Andy Warhol.

AE is Carlos Batts’ tribute to April Flores/Fatty D, the voluptuous erotic performer and “super muse” who slides effortlessly between phat azz lowrider chica, living porcelain doll, and deadly stitched-up horror vixen. Batts’ moody, ethereal imagery captures a wide-ranging series of Flores’ erotic experiences, some of them sexy, some of them disturbing. Slow-paced and set to a stew of electro and hip-hop, it’s the kind of thing you watch in a quiet room at 2am when no one’s awake.

The altporn scene is just taking off in the mainstream adult industry, and it’s likely that we’re going to get a lot more punk/goth porn vids on the market. I’m not complaining, because I dig watching punk rawk girls get it on bigtime, but films like Alter Ego are important contrasts to easier-to-swallow porn. We need works like this to remind ourselves of the wide-ranging possibilities of erotic art.

• Buy Alter Ego
• Carlos Batts
• April Flores

When I first watched Tristan Taormino’s House of Ass, all I could think was “How could you pack this much porn on one DVD?” With 2.5 hours of feature footage, 20 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage, 16 minutes of slide-shows, 16 minutes of bonus scenes, and about 15 minutes of trailers, it’s a supersized meal of naughty goodness. Plus, it gives the viewer some interesting insights into the lives and thoughts of adult performers.

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Watching the first DVD release from Sapphos Girls, I sorta felt like the white guy at the club wearing FUBU gear — it wasn’t made for me, but I certainly enjoy pretending it was. It’s a choice piece of independently-produced erotica by women, for women, with an emphasis on authenticity.

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Eon McKai finally brings us a professional hardcore movie that appeals to those of us who are not looking for standard porn stars.
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