DVD: “Billy Glide’s XXX Adventures”

After AVN Expo weekend, I'm used to all the grandeur and pretense porn can attempt to throw at me. So the second volume of "Billy Glide's XXX Adventures" seemed like a real tough sell at first. But then I watched it as I would a Nova special on PBS—except with boobies and the air pungent with the kind of pot that white people buy—and it all clicked. Read our review after the gap.- G. Ponante

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"Billy Glide's XXX Adventures"
Starring Billy Glide, Taylor Rain, Cassie Young, Missy Monroe, Nadia Styles, Nick Manning

What is it like to hang around with Billy Glide? Watching this movie made me think of the first porns I'd ever seen: the gonzo-type loops that were shot before the term was attached to porn, with a videotape camera with a scratched lens.

Judging from the previews, Billy gets a bunch of girls together and heads to some location in Southern California, whether it be Big Bear or, in this case, Catalina Island, and spends the weekend with his buddies drinking, smoking, and fucking them.

This is a lifestyle I don't know. I don't wear a baseball cap. I was never a frat guy at a state school. There's something about Billy I don't trust.

But the guy has fun. What this and Glide's other movies have in common is a home video style that doesn't bother with standard porn conventions. The sound is bad, the camera work is bad, and there is no setup or narrative to speak of. It is hard to follow.

Despite all this, it seems real. Glide and pals fly to Catalina Island by helicopter to a beautiful rented house. The girls are impressed the way people who are impressed with that sort of thing are. It's real. So, though it takes about 15 minutes to get to the first "scene" with Nick Manning and Cassie Young on the kitchen floor (people walk in and out getting chips), one gets the feeling that that is how long it would actually take Nick and Cassie to get together.

After a barbecue the next day, the gang greets Nadia Styles, who just helicoptered in. I realize that what most people would use for Behind the Scenes footage Glide uses for his whole movie.

We follow the cast around the house. People appear on camera and we never see them again. It is as if household chores include washing the dishes, running the barbecue, and filming or appearing in scenes. That is how Taylor Rain comes to fuck Billy, how Missy Monroe and Nadia get together, and how the couch is used for a four-way. Anyone accustomed to traditional porn movies of the past seven years would find this difficult to watch. Instead, you should watch this movie like "The Real World: Catalina" except with better sex, no fighting, and a greater age difference between male and female cast members.

As a documentary of porn lifestyles (porn manager Harry Weiss appears as himself, as he does in real life), "Billy Glide's XXX Adventures" is almost flawless and lacks only suitcase pimps and bounced checks to be complete. As porn, it's caught somewhere between 1989 and Awful.

But then comes the Pizza Guy scene. Billy and Pals try to get Missy Monroe to give the pizza guy a blowjob. He declines, red-faced. I didn't know Catalina Island had pizza guys, for one, and it was the pizza guy who backed out—not Missy. That's gotta be a point in their favor.

In the end I realized I would like to hang out with Billy Glide and His Friends, even if they seem like the type of guys who would try to beat me up in high school. Things change, don't they? Can't they? I'm willing to take that chance of not repeating the pizza guy's mistake.

So watch it as a documentary—it works!

· Billy Glide (billyglidexxx.com)
· Order: "Billy Glide's XXX Adventures" (Adult DVD Empire)
Thumbnail: Missy Monroe

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Previously: Porn Valley Dispatch Archives