DVD Review: Digital Playground’s “Babysitters”

Round about the time I thought I'd get a super-secret copy of "Pirates 2", "Babysitters" arrived, a less ambitious but ultimately more compelling idea. Even Jesse Jane in her Behind the Scenes interview admitted that, when she was little, "I wanted my babysitters to double-team me."

Free the hand that rocks the cradle after the gap.

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Babysitters

Studio: Digital Playground

Director: Robby D.

Cast: Jesse Jane, Shay Jordan, Sophia Santi, Teagan Presley, Sasha Grey, Nikki Benz, Nautica Thorn, Gina Lynn, Tommy Gunn, Lexxi Tyler, Sammie Rhodes, Alektra Blue, Angie Savage, Ben English, Charles Dera, Jerry, Saascha, Scott Nails, Tony De Sergio, Tyler Durden, Jay Lassiter

Review by Gram Ponante

It's impossible, of course, to have babysitters without children, but it is absolutely verboten to have images of children in porn movies, so we see their diapers and tricycles and can only wonder at their parents' poor judgment in hiring Sasha Grey to babysit.

A loose network of babysitters and neighborhood families take part in interwoven stories in this movie that features many of Digital Playground's contract stars in roles that are smaller than would normally merit their inclusion on a boxcover, but it is a pleasure to see them anyway.

The thought of the above-named cast operating a babysitting collective (their uniform is usually a backpack) is more titillating, for some reason, than the same group on a cheerleading squad. It must be my biological clock.

Nautica Thorn seduces a dad without too much effort, mopey teen Sasha Grey goes, in one scene, from a frigid prude to a cock-smoking dynamo in the next. This is explained away when she shows up for a babysitting gig that has been canceled. "I would do anything for that money," she tells the dad (and his friends). Cue boning.

Elsewhere, dominatrix Sophia Santi has a party with the wives. Wielding a strap-on, she orders:

"Bitch? Spit on that shit! I'm gonna take this cock and go home." (Santi is an undertapped resource, in my opinion). We see the leonine Angie Savage atop a strap-on mounted to Alektra Blue's leg. Smart: this allows the use of the knee as a pressure point as well as full view of all the special parts.

Teagan Presley, looking splendid after her own maternity leave, returns as the unlikely babysitter of a boy whose legal-age brother waits upstairs, masturbating. The brother has a broken leg, which is perhaps how producers got around the conundrum of why the absent mom and dad would hire Teagan in the first place.

Then Shay Jordan and Scott Nails get it on in the movie's Most Likely to Happen in Real Life pairing: the babysitter's boyfriend comes over while the folks are out. That Shay J. is a yeller.

Then, horrors, Shay is caught by parents Gina Lynn and Ben English. Best scene in the movie. (Scott Nails beats it out the back door.)

Then the combination is repeated, this time with Tommy Gunn, Jesse Jane, and Nikki Benz. It is almost redundant to say that Jane is so practiced and gleeful with her sex kitten roles (and Digital Playground never makes the mistake of casting her against type) that she always ups the ante. Gunn, too, can be seen actually acting. The dialogue and the setups might be simple, but I never get the feeling that he's tuning out.

An unintentionally hilarious scene pops up between two porn dudes commenting on Sasha Grey's blowjob antics. Their scene is known in porn circles as the "High Five", in which two guys will high-five each other over the woman they've just unloaded on. In this case, the men are just watching from the sidelines, but still congratulating each other with pints of beer. Since both speak English with heavy Slavic accents, it is almost impossible to understand them.

While we can suspend our disbelief enough to imagine married mom of one Jesse Jane as a gum-smacking babysitter, these guys just look like they shouldn't be there, and wouldn't be saying those things if they were.

Writer/director Robby D., while he has Digital Playground's financial resources and talent pool to draw from, nevertheless also makes Babysitters a fast-paced, fluid, cheerful, well edited movie, down to characters from one scene reaching for a doorknob that opens a door to a new scene with different characters. This might not seem like much in mainstream terms, but any effort pays off in porn, and Babysitters, already ahead because of its cast, benefits from his direction.

· Digital Playground (digitalplayground.com)

· Buy "Babysitters" (gamelink.com)