Join us after the gap as America's Beloved Porn Journalist Gram Ponante takes us through this year's Dirty Dozen ... in no particular order.

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"Upload"
Sex Z Pictures

Of all this year's big budget award contenders, "Upload" took the most risks with some intense hardcore scenes and a bleak futureworld storyline that would be right at home on the Sci Fi channel (minus the intense hardcore scenes). We loved Julie Night and Sandra Romain and Kylie Ireland and Hillary Scott in this movie, but it was Eva Angelina who really made us believe a world in which federal employees have sex.
(Buy it here )

. . .

"Spunk'd"
6969 Productions

Director Justin Kane's first porn movie features Nick Manning in one of several scenery-chewing masterpiece performances this year, this time as Gashton Cootcher, host of a reality prank show that requires loads to be dropped on its celebrity foils. Silly and smart, "Spunk'd" features Penny Flame, Katie Morgan, and Aurora Snow among many others in this list's only independently-produced movie.
( Buy it here )

. . .

"Naughty Flipside"
Naughty America

A vignette film presenting San Diego studio Naughty America's take on The Girls of Alternative Porn Casting, "Naughty Flipside" is an unabashedly fun porn movie that features a tapdancing Pinky Lee and some equally fancy footwork from Dana DeArmond. Adrianna Nicole and Lorelei Lee have a hoedown with Tommy Pistol and Sasha Grey makes her first of many appearances on this list as a mopey teen.
( Buy it here )

. . .

"The Skin Trade"
Bad Seed

Sasha Grey plays a mopey teen who blows off Brian Surewood's head in Joe Gallant's peyote-porn about the dark side ("as a matter of fact, it's all dark") of sex for money. If "The Dharma Bums" was about an acid trip sex/killing spree instead of whatever it was about, Joe Gallant would need to direct it. Until then, watch "The Skin Trade".
( Buy it here )

. . .

"Broken"
Teravision

Sasha Grey plays a mopey teen who blows off Dave Navarro's head in Dave Navarro's L.A.-porn about the dark side ("as a matter of fact, it's all dark") of sex for money. There is nothing fancy about this movie, which is nevertheless just a bit precious at times, but first-time director Navarro looks at the standard moody porn scene a different way and the movie benefits from it.
( Buy it here )

. . .

"InTERActive"
Hustler/Teravision

You carry on a secret affair with neglected mob housewife Tera Patrick and together you choose your own adventure. Shot over four years, "InTERActive" features cameos from Jessica Jaymes and Hillary Scott, but the big star is Tera, who brings to the screen an accessibility that her in-person fans know but that doesn't as often show up in her movies. More please.
( Buy it here )

. . .

"Swallow My Children"
Loaded DIgital

Rob Rotten put together a gang of greasers, longhairs, and the homeless and paired them with a really delightful gang of badass punk girls for a blowjob vignette movie that for once features Sasha Grey as a non-mopey teen sans shotgun.
( Buy it here )

. . .

"Ibiza Sex Party 2"
Private

I just flew in from Barcelona and I've paid a little extra for the hooker to smile at me every now and then, for Christ's sake. There's coke on my dick and house music playing - loud, I don't care how much this vacation is going to cost. This is that movie!
( Buy it here )

. . .

"Babysitters"
Digital Playground

Everything you might want from a Digital Playground movie is here, for a fifth of the price of "Pirates" (remember "Pirates"?) - and we don't mean "Babysitters" will cost you a fifth of the price of "Pirates", just that it cost Digital Playground a fifth of the price of "Pirates". This movie showed up when we expected to see "Pirates 2" but, frankly, we found this much more accessible and less fraught with high expectations, which means that it arrived without hype. "Babysitters" also has the largest amount - four - of Digital Playground's contract girls in 2007.
( Buy it here )

. . .

"Amy Fisher Caught on Tape"
Red Light District

Maybe in future iterations of Fleshbot's constantly-changing page layout we will get a sidebar. If so, this movie would be in its own category under "Best Celebrity Sex Tape". No great shakes as compared with other standard-issue porns, "Amy Fisher" is nevertheless hands down the best celebrity sex tape this year. Why? Well, there's sex in it, for one, and Fisher is the embodiment of the Long Island hot MILF aesthetic. Watching this movie you will say, "I could shoot Amy in the face - but not with bullets."
( Buy it here )

. . .


"The Pleasure Principle"
Wicked

Wicked has had a lot of expertly-directed, slickly packaged movies this year, including "Operation Desert Stormy" and "Coming Home", but Carmen Hart was adorable in this modest "It's OK to Enjoy Sex" movie for couples. Of all the contract girls, Hart is the most reminiscent of the groovy porn stars of antiquity, like Marilyn Chambers, Seka, and Christy Canyon.
( Buy it here )

. . .

"The Intern"
Lucas Entertainment

The second sidebar would be The Best (And Only) Gay Film Straight-Tagged Fleshbot Watched This Year. I have evidence that that people who watch a lot of gay porn liked this breezy comedy set in a New York gay studio too, and I performed due diligence by asking around if all gay-themed porn was as good as "The Intern", and was told that No, Breeder, It Is Not. So I lucked out. Buy this for your girlfriend, Girlfriend, and show her that you're not threatened by the size of Ben Andrews.
( Buy it here )

. . .

BAKER'S DOZEN:

"Porn's Most Outrageous Outtakes 2"
JM Productions

Director Jim Powers narrates an often chilling backstage look at some of his sets with a combination of weariness and glee. While Powers usually directs rougher fare which you might expect to spawn breakdowns, tears, regret, and fights, his sardonic humor has a place in each porn company. This movie reminds us that for every high-gloss example of empowerment through porn, there are fifty times as many stories that confirm porn's detractors' worst suspicions.
( Buy it here )

Borrowing a little from bleak science fiction like "The Matrix", "Minority Report", "Strange Days", "eXistenZ", David Bowie's "Space Oddity" (with Hillary Scott as Major Tom) and, for some reason, selections from the score of "American Beauty", "Upload" integrates very dirty sex plausibly into a compelling, challenging script by Alvin Edwards and director Eli Cross.

Read our review after the gap.

Upload

Studio: Sex Z Pictures
Director: Eli Cross
Cast: Eva Angelina, Hillary Scott, Derrick Pierce, Trina Michaels, Sandra Romain, Bryn Pryor, Kylie Ireland, Evan Stone, Adrianna Nicole, Marco Banderas, Tee Reel, Brian Surewood, Alex Sanders, Julie Night, H.M. Smith, Michelle Aston, Delilah Strong, James Deen, Madison Young, Lorelei Lee, Aiden Starr

Review by: Gram Ponante

Most dramatic porn requires a suspension of disbelief. We watch performers play-acting serious dialogue like they are trying on strange clothes in an 80's montage sequence. And why should we expect more? When they're having sex on film, is that the way real people do it?

But "Upload" clicks each time, and just when you start worrying that a performer has bitten off more than he can chew, when you think, "Uh oh - ," the movie takes a corner.

Eva Angelina plays Cassandra Cray, an agent with the top secret, licensed to kill Digital Security Agency of the Homeland Security Department.

"I don't have to make you an enemy combatant to make you disappear from the planet," she says during an interrogation.

Angelina is on the trail of Tesla (Hillary Scott), a gal who records her sexual escapades onto a chip, or SIM, that allows others to experience what she does. She is, in the world of the movie, a SIMwhore, and that's illegal enough to attract Cassandra's attention.

But Scott isn't carrying any SIM. The data encoded on the chip Scott is protecting is a little more dynamic, and presents a threat to national security.

Other people's sex on a chip planted into one's own neck provides ample opportunity for relevant sex scenes. We watch what turns on Hillary and Eva as well as what passes through the minds of male leads Derrick Pierce and Bryn Pryor.

The movie is told in flashbacks. Angelina is brought before an Internal Affairs psychiatrist (Pryor) and she recounts the sordid tale of how she tracked down Tesla, what Tesla's interrogation revealed, and why love, when reduced to ones and zeros, might be worthwhile if there are enough of them to make the relationship interesting.

So the story is ambitious. "Upload" is not the first porn movie to shoulder a weighty script, but it does it more effectively than any porn movie I've seen. It trusts the audience to follow it along, doesn't overexplain, and has the admirable quality of joining scenes toward the middle of the action and leaving them before it's obvious they're through.

One example comes early in the movie. Angelina explains to Pryor how she first became aware of a new wrinkle in the local SIM-trafficking market. We follow her as she gets promoted past disgruntled wannabes in line at a club. She meets underworld types Evan Stone and Sandra Romain. Here warning bells rang. Why was Stone wearing sunglasses in the club? Was he a Terminator? No matter. As Angelina explained to her interrogator, she got her information not from an exchange of money, but -

- the scene shifts to the three of them fucking the shit out of each other, the demonic Sandra Romain slapping Angelina's pussy and face in rapid succession as Stone fucks the good agent. Clearly Angelina works in unorthodox ways.

But, she points out, in "Upload"'s filth-positive context, "I wasn't molested by my father, my Uncle Ronnie didn't touch me...wanna hear how my Dracula doll tied up and raped my Barbies when I was five?" Sometimes people feel dirty for no reason at all.

Eva Angelina is fantastic. "Upload" takes two discs to unravel and she is in almost every scene. Her character sometimes takes things lightly, sometimes hates herself, sometimes is inappropriate. In other words, she's in a porn movie but she has a character.

"I think you fantasize about being that agent that was taken captive," Pryor declares, after Angelina paints a vivid (but not Vivid) picture of the torture of tasty torturebait Julie Night by Adrianna Nicole and Alex Sanders, who growls over a dildo he is about to shove up Night's ass:

"Get it wet or I'm gonna stick it in you dry."

Angelina and partner Pierce become targets when they get too close to the identity of Gagarin, the man poised to take over the world's digital grid and, knocked out, Pierce has his own fantasy about being a 30's private eye, complete with black and white interludes with juicy femme fatale Kylie Ireland and willing secretary Delilah Strong.

"Upload" has planty of scenes that might not please timid couples. There is fisting, pissing, lots of anal, lots of choking, torture, rape, and running around topless while drinking. There is even an orgy scene in hell which, compared with the numbing effect of some of the other scenes, didn't make hell look that bad.

Standout scenes include the three-way with Stone, Romain, and Angelina, a glorious gang bang with Scott and five guys, including Brian Surewood in one of his final performances for awhile, and a dusty desert menage a trois featuring the objects of Angelina's (and my own) fantasy: Adrianna Nicole, Lorelei Lee, and Madison Young.

"Upload" comes in a four-disc set with lots of extra features, most of which I didn't watch. A 12-minute sock puppet interpretation of the film, Laundry Load, is included on disc four and is a goofy but very faithful primer on the movie.

The people who make porn that seeks to be something more than Just Porn have the odds stacked against them. No one wants to believe it can be done, not because it can't, but because it often isn't. Even the unfortunate public relations department of producer Sex Z Pictures can't fathom having released a good porn movie. Here's the headline of a recent press release:

Seriously: Upload Is Great

"Upload" tries, and it succeeds. This is the type of movie performers like Angelina and Pierce, who have together been in hundreds of scenes, can be very proud of. It is certainly the best porn movie I've ever seen, and I usually can't stand the stuff.

· Buy "Upload" (sexzpictures.com)

Previously: Porn Of The Moment Archive