DVD Review: “Silver Lake Scenesters”

I worried that this would be one of those "love letter" movies, like that awful "Tao of Steve" movie a few years ago that was billed as a "love letter to Santa Fe", but instead made me want to write my Congressman.

Would "Silver Lake Scenesters" guilelessly extol the virtues of one of L.A.'s great dark horse neighborhoods but do it in such a way that I would want to see it paved over for a Glendale extension? Find out after the gap.
- G. Ponante

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"Silver Lake Scenesters"

Studio: VCA
Director: Vena Virago
Cast: Daisy Marie, Delilah Strong, Faith Leon, Phoebe, Haley Scott, Veronica Jett

Review by G. Ponante

The film begins with a quick montage of Silver Lake landmarks, rendered in black and white to achieve a newsreel feel, layered over with colored titles by Virago. Delilah Strong and Marcos Leon briefly damn Silver Lake with faint praise ("Silver Lake has the hottest girls," Leon says, looking unsure of it), but then the two of them get down to business on a checkered kitchen floor, which is how Silver Lake's settlers did it, so the scene struggles back into authenticity.

When the scene is done, Leon delivers a Silver Lake Reservoir-sized load onto Delilah's back. Well done, scenesters!

The next sequence is "Nietzsche Bangers", the spec scene Virago delivered to VCA to impress them in the waning days of altporn wunderkind Eon McKai's time there. "Truth is Being!" intone Tyler Knight and Veronica Jett. "What the hell is this?" intone VCA executives.

Between yelps of "I am alive!" and 'zine reading, however, Knight and Jett perform a sweet little scene. Would a Nietzsche-penned porn script get sold today? Maybe to a director like DCypher. But would he understand it? Just kidding!

John E. Depth and Haley Scott come next. "How would I describe Silver Lake?" Depth asks. "Fuckable."

Depth wears glasses and his hair is in dreads, so he looks the most Silver Lake-y so far (if he was white and his hair was in dreads, the production would have to move to Venice Beach). He and Haley Scott make a cute couple.

Ball-balancing covergirl Daisy Marie comes next, with lollipop-eating partner Barry Scott, who gets points for wearing a Brite Spot t-shirt. He positions her with one foot on the dishwasher and does his best, but anyone who has ever worked at Pizza Hut knows that kitchens aren't the best place to have sex in. Still, Daisy squirts by the spice rack, and that has to mean something.

"As soon as I started cleaning out my thoughts," Scott says in the behind-the-scenes footage, "everything started working out for me." That's a Silver Lake ideal for you: thought-cleansing.

Finally, Faith Leon and Phoebe have a Sapphic interlude in a pleasantly-painted room which Tyler Knight mercifully interrupts ... because everyone who lives by that part of the 5 Freeway knows that nothing ends without a threesome.

· Order: "Silver Lake Scenesters" (Adult DVD Empire)
· Vena Virago (venavirago.com)
· VCA (vcapix.com)
· "Hanging out with Silver Lake Swingers" (interview @ gramponante.com)

Previously: Porn Valley Dispatch Archive