DVD Review: “No Man’s Land: Asian Edition 6”

With a high-numbered and wordy title like this one, you wouldn't expect to have to put your thinking cap on, too. But Lana Croft's plight in this Porn Valley House of the Spirits is something to puzzle through even as the drool flows freely.

Read our review of "No Man's Land: Asian Edition 6" after the gap.

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Studio: Metro
Director: David Aaron Clark
Cast: Lana Croft, Kina Kai, Kalyssa Kye, Leilani, Ange Venus, Kitty, Jandi Lin

Review by: Gram Ponante

"They say this house is haunted. But I know all the ghosts by name. At least the most important ones. Without them, I might end up lonely."

Poor angelic Lana Croft. The Porn Valley McMansion she rattles around is lousy with memories. Luckily for us, they are sexy, sexy memories.

Porn directors who've been around long enough know there are several ways to coax a narrative out of performers unequal to realizing the non-sexual aspects of their vision. David Aaron Clark chooses the millennial version of the silent film dialogue card to telegraph Lana Croft's thoughts as she clatters around the rented Encino home of a Persian dentist in his latest, which he describes as a "hardcore fever dream filled with broken angels and insatiable demonesses."

Croft is haunted by visions of a dead lover and her own sister, whose relationship with a "Korean bitch" sundered the siblings. The sex scenes in No Man's Land: Asian Edition 6 are both flashbacks and hallucinations, but the result is clear: grief and resentment strips us of our divinity, and not even Red Bull can get our wings back.

Croft stubs out her cigarette on the framed photo of her sister (Kina Kai who, like Croft, is Filipina) and the aforementioned Korean (Kalyssa Kye) who broke up their family, and we know that Croft chose to have the photo framed only so she could stub out her cigarette thusly again and again.

Then we meet Leilani, Croft's true love who, tragically, died in a plane crash, just like Col. Henry Blake.

"I've got no quarrel with Mclean Stevenson," said Clark. "But I accept all interpretations of my work."

In the final sequence, Croft reads a manga illustrated by Michael Manning. The pages come to life in a scene with Ange Venus, Jandi Lin, and Krissy as demonesses who complete Croft's transformation. Well, she had a good run.

More space is needed to adequately describe the thought process that governs the committing to film of a fantasy that must be carried out with a limited budget. There is a lot going on in this movie, which is far weightier than one would expect from a high-numbered porn series. We watch as beautiful tableaux are created but wonder if anyone gets it but the director.

It doesn't matter. It's delicious to watch.

"This is how we make fine cheese," Clark said.

· Metro (metrointeractive.com)
· David Aaron Clark (davidaaronclark.com)
· Buy "No Man's Land: Asian Edition 6" (gamelink.com)

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Previously: David Aaron Clark Returns to "No Man's Land", Popshots of the Week!