Studio: Wicked
Director: Brad Armstrong
Cast: Alektra Blue, Randy Spears, jessica drake, Kaylani Lei, Mikayla Mendez, Kirsten Price, Marcus London, Brad Armstrong, Jayden Jaymes, Kayla Carrera, Barrett Blade, Tommy Gunn, Eric Masterson, Alexis Texas, Rocco Reed, Tory Lane, Janet Mason, Mick Blue, Jerry, TJ Cummings, Bill Bailey

Review by: Gram Ponante

The screenwriter goes uncredited, but the story of "2040" has bits of everything from "Pinocchio" to "The Velveteen Rabbit" to "Blade Runner": Love something enough and it can become human.

We meet Ryan Spears (Randy Spears), who is a porn performer, just like his dad, the porn actor Randy Spears. Ryan's job is similar to his father's, but he must perform it clandestinely because of (as the voiceover tells us) the porn tax of 2015, the porn police, and because porn companies are now "corporate entities traded on the open market."

(Like in the original "Blade Runner," we can do without the voiceover.)

Not only that, but Spears must also fuck robots.

Spears and company deliver a lot of inside references and product placement to the benefit of the Real Doll company, Wicked Pictures, and AVN, whose 55th annual awards show is presented complete with bad band and fucking in the bathrooms.

The first scene, as carried off by Spears and the faulty robot Alexis Texas, is very funny and more than reminiscent of certain porn sets I've attended.

The Alexis Texas robot blows a fuse, you see, and the crew and Spears have to wrestle her to a squatting position so that Spears can aim a load into her R.O.C., or removable oral cavity. The sight of Texas kneeling there, mouth open, eyes glazed over, and bolt-ons perpendicular, is both chilling and familiar (Texas is acting, of course, like she just came off a Max Hardcore shoot).

With the Texas "doll" or "mecha" out of commission, the production enlists a robot that looks just like Alektra Blue. Her name is Mira.

But Spears is dismissive.

"She's a toaster," says Spears. "You fuck one mecha, you've fucked them all. And they all taste like toast."

But Mira is not your ordinary frakking Cylon. She sweats! Her skin reddens with whipping! And her vagina is adjustable!

Spears is amazed. Could he be falling for a toaster? And, since he is Mira's "first," she imprints his data in her "memory banks."

What follows is a lot of exposition, some corporate intrigue and skulduggery, sex for no reason (but we're happy it happened, don't get us wrong), the conspicuous absence of Stormy Daniels and, sprinkled throughout, some poignant moments in which Mira comes to terms with her blossoming personhood.

The problem with "2040" is that, in trying to be Wicked's epic for the year, a movie that would have worked better small became instead top-heavy. There were plotlines and actors who didn't need to be there, like a community theatre production in which everyone who auditioned got a part. At the heart of the bloat that is "2040" is a really good porn movie that no one believed in enough to let stand on its own.

That said, the people the movie is about, Spears and Blue, are fantastic. While he can ham it up with the best of today's porn dudes, Spears also has a gravitas that no one in the porn world can touch. And Alektra Blue does great work as a living doll; I wish she'd been allowed to do more. (If RealDoll.com has an Alektra Blue model, I bet it's awesome.)

"2040" has a happy ending and I bet you can guess what it is. There is an uplifting message for couples that almost sounds like Stay Monogamous. (The underlying message, though, is that Mira has the intellect of a child but a vagina like a 320-hp engine, therefore it's easy to stay monogamous...the outlook is dire for human women.)

People must be buying these feel-good, trying-too-hard slogs, because Wicked keeps making them.

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House of Wicked

Studio: Wicked
Director: Brad Armstrong
Cast: jessica drake, Stormy Daniels, Alektra Blue, Mikayla Mendez, Kirsten Price, Kaylani Lei, Johnny Castle, Tommy Gunn, Barrett Blade, Marcus London, Danny Mountain, Derrick Pierce, Rocco Reed, Kris Slater, Alan Stafford, Deep Threat, Brad Armstrong

Review by: Gram Ponante

What's more, each of the vignettes features the performer in what we are led to assume is her own element - therefore no naughty nurses, babysitters, cheerleaders, or - God forbid - pirates. Instead director Brad Armstrong puts Wicked's moneymakers in a much more European setting befitting the company's porn chicks with gravitas image (except for Stormy; the darkest Wiucked performer of them all here plays a cowgirl. Go figure).

"House of Wicked" is known in porn parlance as a high-end gonzo, or wall-to-wall. That means the movie is all sex with limited setup and no dialogue. But that doesn't mean we don't get to know the stars' personalities.

Kirsten Price, for example, is a saucy student. She takes on a couple of dudes in what appears to be the classroom of her Rhodes fellowship. Then jessica drake has a foursome in a fetish den, Kaylani Lei plays to type (she takes one for the team here) as a tough Asian with a taste for motorcyclists, Alektra Blue plays a skatepunk girl, and then Mikayla Mendez shows up as a club vixen.

In each of these scenes there is no angle from which each precious Wicked performer looks less than stunning. In fact, the whole movie seems branded with Wicked iconography. Furthermore, if anyone is made to look a little like a prop in this movie it is the guys, who outnumber their female counterparts by almost two to one, and whose costumes look less believable (Tommy Gunn and Barrett Blade as sk8r dudes with sideways hats, etc., seems a little Chippendales to me).

Which makes me think that "House of Wicked" is a fantastic couples' movie. Each of the women is far more mature and glamorous than bubbleheaded and accessible, each appears to have the reins tightly in hand of who gets to take a poke at her, and that it is the girls who have the pick of the eye candy should make female fans reluctantly agree that there is twice as much for them to gawk at than their boyfriends.

The final scene features every woman (but Stormy, who was probably campaigning) in a civilized and elegant Sapphic hoedown, proving that, at the end of the day, they just wanted to be together.

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. . .

Fallen

Studio: Wicked
Director: Brad Armstrong
Cast: jessica drake, Jenna Haze, Brad Armstrong, Shyla Stylez, Angie Savage, Ryder Skye, Jennifer Dark, Jada Fire, Lana Croft, Gianna Lynn, Michelle McLaren

"Yes. Right in that little fuckhole," says Jenna Haze in the opening scene of Fallen, a guardian angel-out-of-grace tale from Wicked. But I don't think it's relevant to the story.

drake plays Haze's guardian angel, and when Haze dies in a freak elevator crash, drake feels guilty for screwing up at work. You see, Haze's boyfriend, played by Armstrong, was going to ask her to marry him that night, but Haze decided to go home instead—via elevator.

While it is not lost on this turtlenecked cineaste that Haze dying while going down is a metaphor for angels in general and the state of porn in particular, what is odd is that drake, a supernatural being, gets stuck behind a locked apartment building door.

"It was my job to protect her," drake says, a feather falling to her pointy white angel boots. "And I failed."

This was four years ago, and drake has been fired. Still immortal, she drifts toward the dark side, feeling no love "from above."

Can she be redeemed? Will she turn her back on heaven? That is the theme of Fallen, and not the theme of Dirtpipe Milkshakes 2.

drake visits the seedy, smoky, and dimly lit (a Wicked trademark) fleshpots of Los Angeles after musing prettily atop a building with the L.A. skyline behind her.

Poor drake. Now that she is no longer an angel, the cops think she is a hooker. But then she meets Armstrong, the former boyfriend of dead Jenna Haze. He is a bike messenger now, and they bump into each other when he spills coffee on her. Another metaphor for what he will eventually spill on her? You're goddamn right.

But lonelyhearts Armstrong is the innocent side of drake's new life. She still needs to purge herself of the fleshly temptations she has enjoyed since her wings were clipped. She stops by Jennifer Dark's house to watch her getting reamed.

Finally she goes on a date with Brad. At his house she notices a photo of Haze, her lost charge. She freaks out.

"I took the stairs for months after that," Armstrong says. "Even after they fixed {the elevator}."

The coincidence is all too weird for the fallen angel. She returns to a life of debauchery, blowing Herschel Savage on his cab, inserting things into Angie Savage, and saying things like "it's all too weird."

Fallen sometimes bows under the weight of its own earnestness, and the dialogue at times falls flat, but both drake and Armstrong acquit themselves nicely to a script that leaves lots of room to make her look glamorous, him look sensitive and easygoing, and us believe there is a God who lets His ex-employees go to orgies and stick dildoes in Angie Savage.

The movie resolves in a twist ending. I don't know if couples actually watch porn together or if that is a myth, but Fallen proves itself to be a satisfying and well-shot high-end porn with a moral: don't step into an elevator after saying "fuckhole."

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. . .

"Some say the path we take is guided by Fate or unseen forces," intones Lei in the voiceover, which is immediately reminiscent of the sort of stylish, formulaic, safe, and Skinemax -ready porn Wicked produces so well, or at least so frequently.

How does one become a hooker accidentally? Well, if you looked like Kaylani Lei and you were walking down Hollywood Boulevard dressed to enhance all your Kaylani Leitude whilst absently sucking your soft drink from a straw, it would be within reason for the common passerby to at least hope you were a hooker.

And the passerby would be right, because hooker Lei is en route to an interview about how she became a hooker accidentally. Turns out she met a dude, Marcus (Armstrong), online who wasted no time sampling the goods once they finally met.

"He didn't seem to be an axe murderer or anything," Lei recalled. Waking up alone, Lei was surprised to find $500 by her bedside.

Was she a hooker? Who knows. Marcus invites her to L.A. and at the airport she is greeted by a limousine containing not Marcus but instead a man named Deep Threat.

"Little did I know that it would change my life - " says Lei in the voiceover.

(wait for it)

" - forever."

"I realized I crossed a line," she says.

(wait for it)

" - that could never be uncrossed."

Also:

"I had changed - "

(wait for it)

" - and this was only the beginning."

Lei begins a crazy joyride of sex for money, immersing herself in "the life," in which intimacy, commerce, and hedonism coexist in an uneasy colloidal stew - forever. She fucks other women, rich swains at the opera, guys at the car wash, couples, anything that pays.

Wicked cannot solve this problem, but in the scene with Shyla Stylez and Tommy Gunn as the couple Lei beds, the movie falls victim to something that happens in porn all the time: Stylez looks more like a hooker than the person playing a hooker. It's like the Monty Python "Bicycle Repair Man" sketch, where everyone is a superhero.

But the highs become fewer and farther between.

"Every once in a while you ask yourself, 'What am I doing?'" Lei tells her interviewer.

"Why don't you just stop?" he asks.

"That's easier said than done," she says, blowing cigarette smoke. "You can't just walk away. It's in your blood. It's what you know. It's what you are. No matter how hard you try, you het sucked right back in. You're in for life. And sometimes? That feels like an eternity."

I hand it to Wicked for yet another unflinching look at the world of high-priced call girls this summer, the other being Latina Hollywood Hookers.

But just when you condemn Wicked for padding the script, you realize that all those (or most of those) sodden sentences work up to a twist ending like that Tom Cruise Isn't Gay Enough movie.

Like M. Night Shyamalan projects, the twist endings over the years have yielded diminished returns since The Sixth Sense. But this is porn, so we've got at least ten more years of them. So I'll leave it to you to decide if the twist redeems the movie.

Review by: Gram Ponante

. . .

The Accidental Hooker

Studio: Wicked
Director: Brad Armstrong
Cast: Kaylani Lei, Shyla Stylez, Victoria Sin, Mikayla, Devon Lee, Jennifer Dark, Brad Armstrong, Tommy Gunn, Deep Threat, Niko, Barrett Blade, Derrick Pierce, Marcus London

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