“Nina Loves Ron,” But They Can’t Commit

Nina Hartley and Ron Jeremy are such talented kids; why couldn't "Nina Loves Ron" give them the star vehicle they deserve? It's still good, but it could have been pretty awesome.

Nina Loves Ron

Studio: Hustler
Director: Axel Braun, John Leslie, Henri Pachard, Wes Emerson
Starring: Nina Hartley, Ron Jeremy, Selena Steele, Alicia Monet, Jay Lassiter, Jon Dough, Tom Byron, Crystal Wilder, Renee Morgan

Review by: Gram Ponante

Instead we get a sweet opening scene featuring Nina and Ron as randy AARPers meeting through video personals. Directed by Axel Braun, both Hartley and Jeremy talk through their sex scene, as the loquacious pair are wont to do anyway. This is nice because neither is dipping into the bag of standard-issue porn ejaculations. Further, we believe Hartley's character (why they aren't called "Nina" and "Ron" is unnecessarily protective of the audience's suspension of disbelief, which doesn't exist) might find something appealing both in Jeremy's charm and sexual mastery, even if he isn't a glabrous hardbody with a CrossFit membership.

Jeremy woos the lovely and sun-dappled Hartley with flowers, etchings, and cunnilingus, and we think this is the start of a walk down memory lane.

But we're wrong. Instead, "Nina Loves Ron" pulls five more scenes from the catalog of VCA Pictures, which Hustler acquired back in 2003. We watch the two performers working with other people from as far back as 1988, but we never see Hartley and Jeremy together again.

We tumble into the rest of the movie with no transition, making "Nina Loves Ron" a compilation with one original scene and no wraparound.

First up is an unusual choice: a threesome featuring Hartley, Selena Steele, and the late Jon Dough from 1990's "Oh What A Night." The trio fucks in front of an audience, including director John Leslie, in a scene that has Hartley looking boyish and Dough looking sweaty. There's some great haircuts in the audience, however, and we can imagine the effect the Meese Commission Report had (or didn't have) on Porn Valley.

Then comes a very cute interlude from Henri Pachard's 1988 "Outlaw Ladies 2" in which Nina, in drag, dons a strap-on to distract the lovely Alicia Monet as the latter fucks a young Tom Byron. I liked this scene because I really understood the pixieish appeal of younger Hartley; now I know her as a wise and witty lady, like Glenn Close in "Dangerous Liaisons"—back then she was Uma Thurman all the way.

It's also easy to forget how long Tom Byron has been in the business, simply because men in porn get to have a variety of roles not available to women (the tradeoff is that women make more money, but most men can stay around longer). When his character sees Nina's appear with the strap-on, his facial expression is pretty funny.

The last of Hartley's scenes is from 2009's "More MILF Please," also directed by Braun and featuring Jay Lasseter. This clip is too close in age to the movie's one original scene, so I would have liked to have seen something from earlier in the archive. It is by no means a bad scene, but if this compilation were truly "35 Years in the Making" (which it wasn't), a curious public deserves some deeper cuts.

Then we join Jeremy for a pair of scenes from 1990. Again, the oldest scene in the movie was from 1988, which by my reckoning was only 24 years ago.

Jeremy sodomizes the blonde Crystal Wilder in a bathroom in 1993's "Hard to Stop." I have heard good things about this movie, all because star Nikki Dial is kind of an iconic figure.

Jeremy's scene with Wilder is no slouch, though. I like sex-in-bathroom interludes because, Hey, your junk is out anyway.

What's notable about this scene, though, is that Jeremy misses Wilder's face in the popshot.

Finally, Jeremy teams with the beautiful Renee Morgan in 1990's "Playin' Dirty." Morgan was then 35 and she looks great. We/I tend to think that there were no "older" women in porn between "Aunt Peg" and the recent cougar/MILF resurgence, but this movie suggests otherwise.

So we understand that Hustler owns the VCA archive. With help from the great Internet Adult Film Database I found several movies in which Jeremy and Hartley had worked together, including another 1990 VCA movie, "California Taboo."

I guess I can understand why this movie is no longer available. Unlike many other porn "incest" movies, in which the taint of biological relationship is whitewashed by stepfathers, adoptees, and the like, we've got mom and dad Nina Hartley and Joey Silvera doing all sorts of inappropriate things with their grown (?) kids. This movie features two women, the juicy Christen Carson (wearing what seems to be an adult undergarment on the cover) and Lacy Southern, for whom this was their first and last porn movie. Was it the incest that did them in?

Hustler would not have lasted so long if it did not have a sharkpool of a legal team, so it is understandable that "California Taboo" (clearly an appropriation of the incestastic Kirdy Stevens movies starring Kay Parker) might have been quietly shelved in the VCA acquisition. But Hartley's scene with Jeremy in this movie was only of the Wife Doing Husband's Best Buddy variety; it would have been cool to see this scene show up in "Nina Loves Ron," and it wouldn't have been hard to weave a throughline between the two films and all those other scenes.

Hell, Steven Soderbergh did that with Terrence Stamp's early movie "Poor Cow" in "The Limey"; not breaking a sweat as he tied those movies together over 32 years. Then he worked with Sasha Grey.

I ask you, Hustler: How difficult would it have been to make "Nina Loves Ron" a coherent movie, where the title is justified and the audience is taken on a worthwhile journey? It almost seems like a conscious decision to miss these opportunities.

Ask me next time: I won't break your budget.

· Hustler (hustler.com)
· Buy "Nina Loves Ron" (tlavideo.com)