Watching this latter-day Vivid release from David Stanley (whose career peaks at Vivid and later Wicked came many years before) it's clear why his career went into a tailspin. All of his faults and none of the virtues of this former wunderkind are on display in a tedious and self- indulgent venture into a hodge-podge of sub-genres: Counterculture (what used to be called alt-porn) milieu; incest; interracial sex, and of course, everybody's favorite pastime: tattooing.
Under the moronic BTS questioning of flunky Ralph Long (fortunately NOT in the cast this time), we learn of the intricate story-line David has concocted. During the film proper, there are several tedious expository monologues to ram home the dumb back stories for the Lower Depths characters, plus moronic montages of their past doings. It's exceedingly condescending and pretentious - Stanley trademarks, but absent the surreal black humor that makes his vintage Vivid Video features worth watching (at typically half the running time of this bloated DVD).
Briefly, Skin Diamond and Asphyxia Noir portray a married interracial Lesbian couple operating a tattoo parlor that is half-owned by Skin's ex Tommy Pistol. All 3 sport impressive tattoos, natch, and a strange early scene has customer Mason Moore (the big-bust lady in the cast, likely a Vivid stipulation) getting a groin-area tattoo from Noir that sends her into a paroxysm of orgasm, punctuated with massive squirting that only messes up the leather tattoo chair.
Xander Corvus rolls into town from NYC like a bad penny, ending up staying with the battling lesbian couple (with poor continuity it's made clear at the outset that they're on the verge of breaking up, but I couldn't follow the time frame of the jumbled scenes that follow). It turns out that Xander is Skin's step-brother (a red flag to porn fans that crypto incest is on the way) who she hasn't seen for over 3 years.
He's in L.A. to become chef for his ex, lovely but mean Brooklyn Lee, who has fun with a poorly written role. Big deal premise is that Skin has always had a hankering for sex with her brother, left unrequited when he split, and ready for fruition in the final reels.
But not before a series of idiosyncratic and idiotic sex filler ensues, not just between our lovely if overly decorated heroines. Anthony Rosano appears as a submissive flunky working for dom Brooklyn, who humiliates him in front of Xander. Later on he reappears wearing a baby's diaper, a typically goofball Stanley fetish which emerges as merely a momentary sight gag (badly photographed in extreme long shot of zero impact) rather than the dreaded 20-minute long role-playing sex scene which I imagine ended up on the cutting room floor.
Pistol gets to hump Skin, who earlier had violently rebuffed his sexual harassment with a knee to the groin, in a sudden and utterly phony tossed-in sex scene, after which his overacting is on full display, and Xander even gets to hump horny Asphyxia in a nonsensical late night booty call on her part while her wife Skin sleeps soundly. Nearing the end of her career, a physically bloated Jada Fire has sex with Xander but appears stoned throughout and even her trademark teeth-braces are missing (about time at age 34). Stanley inelegantly posits her as giving (off-screen) hitchhiker Xander a ride, then sex, making it clear he didn't waste any precious time en route to the unemployment line in performing necessary rewrites on this lame script.
The finale is an absurd three-way sex scene for the principals that is utterly unbelievable and out of character, with the three performers turning on a dime into sex workers plying their trade rather than the fictional characters we'd been watching for 2 hours. That's all in service of a sarcastic "one happy family" excuse for a happy ending, Stanley flipping his finger at the patient viewer as is his wont.
Real-life lovers (at the time, as documented in their sincere comments in Girlfriends Films' docu-style "Lesbian Sex Volume 3") Skin and Noir both turn in contrastingly poor performances: Noir reciting her dialog in amateurish, uninflected monotone while Skin over-emotes at the drop of a hat. Xander is pure stereotype in a role and look he's done scores of times before and the rest of the cast is merely along for the ride.
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