Just when I'm looking back at his early career (directing for Vivid), I find myself regretting my interest in porn director B. Skow. His Girlfriends features in recent years were promising and fitfully entertaining, so I started studying the auteur's work, but bad habits and pursuit of the almighty dollar have him reverting to sub- standard, generic porn in such junkers as "Whorehouse Virgin".
He likes to put the appellation "A Gonzo Story" in front of the titles of such features, such as "The Mansion Family" and "Open House", as if to disavow the contents as mere gonzo porn. This tactic is self-defeating, as we live in a gonzo world as far as Adult Entertainment has evolved, and Skow's poor-quality emissions are poor however they might be packaged.
It takes over 3 hours to tell this non-story, which on paper (from its title) I had hoped would be a sarcastic Skow take on the classic Louis Malle film "Pretty Baby" starring Brooke Shields. But no, it's just mindless drivel set in a brothel, even harder to watch than the vanity flop "Love Ranch" starring Helen Mirren that pretty much put the final nail in the coffin containing Joe Pesci's career.
Instead of the biting, inverted-values contents that mark Skow's best work collaborating with scripter David Stanley, "Whorehouse" has no script credit. Its silly, sniggering premise is summed up in an opening scene where lovely heroine Iris Rose pledges to her step-dad Tommy Gunn that she will follow faithfully in the footsteps of her whore mommy, and humps lucky Tommy. Her refrain, eyes heavenward, "I'll make you proud" to her late mom is repeated often during the ensuing 3 hours, and that is the sum total of content. Desultory feature ends with Tommy picking her up after a hard day at the whorehouse, and she gives him a vaguely incestuous blow job as they drive off together into the sunset.
What happens at the brothel is consistently uninteresting. We get to see two other young whores for the jail-bait crew in the home video audience, Alexis Adams, who easily outshines our heroine, and poor Karter Foxx, who has no character name and is just there for porn filler and variety. Iris keeps on humping and even has a masturbation scene to kill time.
The "Virgin" of the title is nonexistent - unlike Brooke Shields representing that elusive virgin to be auctioned off in the Storyville den of iniquity in Malle's movie, Iris is just another working girl, young but hardly pure. Customers buy her body and it's all routine and frankly dear Mr. Skow, boring. A more truthful title would be "Skow Presents Generic Humping".
Girlfriends Films, once the leading voice for Lesbian Porn, markets this stuff and even puts trailers for Skow's features on its strictly lesbian content DVDs. They should know better and get some quality control going or all the good will they earned over a 15-year period will be lost, and soon.
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