Fashion Underground (2006)

Paul Thomas is quite full of himself in the BTS short subject accompanying the feature "Fashion Underground", more or less claiming that he is the last real storyteller in Adult Cinema. Now that he's retired I guess that means that storytelling is officially dead, so all the gonzo fans can rejoice in their Pyrrhic victory.

Amidst the in-joking of Tony G.'s script, we have a rather pat and uninteresting satire of the mainstream fashion world, somewhat akin to Robert Altman's failure "Pret-a-Porter", a movie I greatly enjoyed despite its Harvey Weinstein-backed trendiness.

Since the beauties rounded up on screen are quite impressive, ranging from bombastic Vivid girls Tera Patrick (she gets a possessive "Tera Patrick's Fashion Underground" in the title, rather than PT the director), Mikayla Mendez and Lanny Barby to even Samantha Ryan in a small role, it is a shame that PT cast a bunch of schlumps in the main male roles.

Sure, Steven St. Croix camps it up as fey designer named LaCroix (magically anticipating his future fabulous co-star Remy LaCroix, who wasn't around when this was shot -too young) and other oddball types like Sir Nik as "ChiChi" adorn the screen -all a cliche-, but the main actors are terrible. PT milks to death a stupid conceit of the couple Marcos Leon and Faith as warring strangers who eventually have sex together in the hotel room they don't want to share, by spreading their sex over half a dozen reels, doled out randomly between other ongoing scenes as if we couldn't get enough. Leon is a lousy performer who has spoiled several PT movies including one of his finest, "Cry WolF".

Also poor as another designer is Trent Tesoro, lucky to get a threesome with Shy Love and Chloe Morgan, and final ruination is the forced casting of star Tera's main man Spyder Jonez as sort of the bad guy in a contrived melodramatic subplot. Best male choice is Jean Val Jean as the ultra handsome new partner in business for Tera, her character seguing from contract model to independent just like the real-life porn model Tera forming her Teravision label for Vivid release.

The movie was shot in 35mm as so many of PT's big-deal production, but much of the footage is shot on video, representing the POV of a TV crew interviewing everyone at the big fashion show. Interviewer played by Penny Flame steals the movie, giving it energy and life by sheer force of her personality. As far as any relevance to the REAL fashion industry, refer back to Altman rather than watch wannabe PT's parallel world exercise.