Love Is A Battlefield: Wicked’s “Coming Home”

If treated thoughtfully, even the weightiest and unsexiest subjects can be plots for porn movies. Why? Because people are thinking about having sex all the time. The trouble is that most porn movies can't handle weighty, and just end up looking dumb. We're sorry to begin our review of the excellent "Coming Home" with "We're surprised it didn't suck", but jeez; we've been burned so many times before.

Read the review after the gap.

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Coming Home

Studio: Wicked

Director: Brad Armstrong

Cast: Kirsten Price, Shyla Styles, Barrett Blade, Scott Lyons, Vanessa Lane, Savannah Stern, Gianna Lynn, Chris Cannon, Christian, Tyler Knight, Brooke Banner, Jada Firte, Kayla Carrera, Mikayla, Derrick Pierce, Marcus London

Review by Gram Ponante

Poor Brian Parsons (Brad Armstrong) is called to serve his country in Iraq, lamenting the U.S. Army's lack of 18-year-olds. Luckily, porn has 18-year-olds in spades, so Brian's girlfriend (Kirsten Price) makes his last week stateside one to remember.

Brian asks his buddy Jimmy (Barrett Blade) to take care of his girl while he's away. I feared the worst.

"If that was me," Jimmy's girlfriend says, "I'd keep you to myself for a week."

The two couples get together at the same bar from Porn Valley. There are a thousand stories there.

As his departure grows nearer, Brian receives a creepy farewell from Charlie, his boss at the garage. "I always felt you were the son I never had," Charlie says. This has to be in the top ten, at least, of Quotes Inappropriate for a Porn Movie.

I wondered how the movie would squeeze sex into the boot camp and Iraq scenes, but with the help of dream sequences and the presence of female soldiers (like Hawkeye and Lt. Dish), that problem was taken care of easily.

Unfortunately, Brian doesn't make it. His small town thinks the worst of Jimmy drying the widow's tears. Brian's brother accuses Blade and Price of not mourning long enough when he finds them at a drive-in together.

"Stop stirring the pot, you little shit!" Jimmy cries.

For the hundredth time I wondered if Wicked's Real Movies But With Sex m.o. was an effective strategy, but the drive-in scene was pretty cool.

Meanwhile, Brooke is getting suspicious of Jimmy and Kirsten. And for good reason!

Brooke retaliates. She calls Jimmy a "fucking dummy" in a monologue that I think prospective porn talent should memorize for auditions.

"Coming Home" is a movie that drops its cliches as it goes, so by the end it really forgets it's a porn film and becomes something else, something heartfelt. Could that be good? I don't know. It is difficult for a porn movie to sell tragedy, though plenty of them attempt it. This is a porn movie that ends sadly, and there is logic in the sadness. But "Coming Home" is not the movie to watch if one is already guilty about jerking off to porn.

Director/writer/star Brad Armstrong has improved on "Flashpoint", the reissue version of which I reviewed here recently. "Coming Home" features only strong performances (save for the garage manager) and the story is much tighter. It also makes a play for some of the biggest consumers of porn, the U.S. military, and doesn't do soldiers a disservice, even on a porn budget.

· Wicked (wicked.com)

· Buy "Coming Home" (gamelink.com)

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Previously: Porn Reviews Archive