Long Story Short

David Stanley is a fascinating filmmaker, little known beyond the inner circles of porn, but almost always inventive and worth watching. This mysteriously obscure Vivid release (despite Vivid's prominence as perhaps porn's most successful label I had to add it just now to the IMDb database decades late) is great fun to watch even though it is intentionally the most ephemeral of movies (I will give my theory as to why later on).

I mentioned the Coens in the review Summary line above because they have made a career out of writing screenplays based on the time-honored "shaggy dog" joke: rambling, pointless narrative that is amusing for its twists and turns playing upon audience expectations and precisely because it is pointless. Such is the scheme of Stanley, as he opens with Steven St. Croix in one doing a crazy and vengeful monologue that culminates with him cutting a piece of a beloved cherry pie.

He is interrupted by the appearance of damsel in distress Savanna Samson, before she became a superstar. She humps him and confesses she's a nymphomaniac.

The rest of the short (73-minute) feature consists of poor Steven attempting, with mounting frustration, to find out why Savanna was so distressed and who was giving her a life-threatening hard time. Her tales, illustrated for us on screen, are nonsensical and push the notion of shaggy-dog joke to its limits, so much that one expects smoke to be coming out of Steven's ears at any point listening to her.

Among the drivel she spouts is a tale of an untalented TV host who dresses up in a gorilla suit and makes dumb suggestive gestures in slapstick fashion. His show is named "It's Big Baloney Sandwich Time" and Stanley's depiction of it is beyond ridiculous. In the DVD's BTS short subject we find out the character is played by a WOMAN in a gorilla suit, named Sandra.

Some sexy actresses including Michelle Michaels, Alex Foxe and Nikita Kash show up in Sam's stories but it all predictably adds up to nothing. Final reel is loaded with black humor twists, some of them ingenious (and tying up to Steven's initial monologue prologue) and others n.s.g.

These older videos usually bear dates of shooting on the box or listed on screen to comply with the legal restrictions on performers under 18 not allowed to shoot porn. This one lists shooting dates ranging from October 2000 to June 2002, rather extreme for what plays like a one-day wonder. So I infer that frugal Stanley (and Vivid) took some unused and unreleased scenes, featuring the supporting actresses and built the Luis Bunuel-style loose narrative structure (see his classic: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeiosie or its followup Phantom of Liberty) featuring new talent Sam to concoct this most minor of features. It's rewarding viewing nonetheless.