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 )

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"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 )

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"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 )

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"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 )

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"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 )

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"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 )

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"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 )

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"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 )

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"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 )

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"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 )

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"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 )

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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 )

Free the hand that rocks the cradle after the gap.

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Babysitters

Studio: Digital Playground
Director: Robby D.
Cast: Jesse Jane, Shay Jordan, Sophia Santi, Teagan Presley, Sasha Grey, Nikki Benz, Nautica Thorn, Gina Lynn, Tommy Gunn, Lexxi Tyler, Sammie Rhodes, Alektra Blue, Angie Savage, Ben English, Charles Dera, Jerry, Saascha, Scott Nails, Tony De Sergio, Tyler Durden, Jay Lassiter

Review by Gram Ponante

It's impossible, of course, to have babysitters without children, but it is absolutely verboten to have images of children in porn movies, so we see their diapers and tricycles and can only wonder at their parents' poor judgment in hiring Sasha Grey to babysit.

A loose network of babysitters and neighborhood families take part in interwoven stories in this movie that features many of Digital Playground's contract stars in roles that are smaller than would normally merit their inclusion on a boxcover, but it is a pleasure to see them anyway.

The thought of the above-named cast operating a babysitting collective (their uniform is usually a backpack) is more titillating, for some reason, than the same group on a cheerleading squad. It must be my biological clock.

Nautica Thorn seduces a dad without too much effort, mopey teen Sasha Grey goes, in one scene, from a frigid prude to a cock-smoking dynamo in the next. This is explained away when she shows up for a babysitting gig that has been canceled. "I would do anything for that money," she tells the dad (and his friends). Cue boning.

Elsewhere, dominatrix Sophia Santi has a party with the wives. Wielding a strap-on, she orders:

"Bitch? Spit on that shit! I'm gonna take this cock and go home." (Santi is an undertapped resource, in my opinion). We see the leonine Angie Savage atop a strap-on mounted to Alektra Blue's leg. Smart: this allows the use of the knee as a pressure point as well as full view of all the special parts.

Teagan Presley, looking splendid after her own maternity leave, returns as the unlikely babysitter of a boy whose legal-age brother waits upstairs, masturbating. The brother has a broken leg, which is perhaps how producers got around the conundrum of why the absent mom and dad would hire Teagan in the first place.

Then Shay Jordan and Scott Nails get it on in the movie's Most Likely to Happen in Real Life pairing: the babysitter's boyfriend comes over while the folks are out. That Shay J. is a yeller.

Then, horrors, Shay is caught by parents Gina Lynn and Ben English. Best scene in the movie. (Scott Nails beats it out the back door.)

Then the combination is repeated, this time with Tommy Gunn, Jesse Jane, and Nikki Benz. It is almost redundant to say that Jane is so practiced and gleeful with her sex kitten roles (and Digital Playground never makes the mistake of casting her against type) that she always ups the ante. Gunn, too, can be seen actually acting. The dialogue and the setups might be simple, but I never get the feeling that he's tuning out.

An unintentionally hilarious scene pops up between two porn dudes commenting on Sasha Grey's blowjob antics. Their scene is known in porn circles as the "High Five", in which two guys will high-five each other over the woman they've just unloaded on. In this case, the men are just watching from the sidelines, but still congratulating each other with pints of beer. Since both speak English with heavy Slavic accents, it is almost impossible to understand them.

While we can suspend our disbelief enough to imagine married mom of one Jesse Jane as a gum-smacking babysitter, these guys just look like they shouldn't be there, and wouldn't be saying those things if they were.

Writer/director Robby D., while he has Digital Playground's financial resources and talent pool to draw from, nevertheless also makes Babysitters a fast-paced, fluid, cheerful, well edited movie, down to characters from one scene reaching for a doorknob that opens a door to a new scene with different characters. This might not seem like much in mainstream terms, but any effort pays off in porn, and Babysitters, already ahead because of its cast, benefits from his direction.

· Digital Playground (digitalplayground.com)
· Buy "Babysitters" (gamelink.com)

Listen, we know that the iPhone won't be out until the 29th, and we further know that it is not any different to put porn on your iPhone than it is to put it on your iPod. But the important thing is that Digital Playground told us first that they would have content for the iPhone and it's not like they said they were releasing movies on Blu-Ray or that they were entering the celebrity sex tape business.

Plus, we have documentary evidence of both Shay J. and Jesse using Macs, so we're inclined to Think Different(ly). - GP

· iPod Porn from Digital Playground (digitalplayground.com)
· Dwnload Mobile Porn from Adult DVD Empire (adultdvdempire.com)
· Buy "Jesse's Juice" (gamelink.com)
· iPhone (apple.com)