Future Darkly: Artifamily

Bree Mills confuses all sorts of topics, namely cloning, robotics and even creating androids and cyborgs in this loused-up episode of her and fellow director Craven Moorehead's "Pure Taboo" series.

By coincidence I had just viewed Yorgos Lanthimos's 2011 film "Alps" -he being the currently hot-hot-hot director of "The Favourite". It has the same premise as Bree uses here, but viewed from a psychological rather than sci-fi vantage point. "Alps" concerns a group who name themselves The Alps and make a living impersonating recently deceased relatives, paid by the survivors of the family, in order to ease the bereavement of those concerned.

In "Artifamily", Nina Hartley is a scientist, with cameos as her assistants by Bree herself and cameraman Billy Visual, who uses DNA to create a robotic clone designed to do exactly the same thing. While avant-garde Lanthimos was dealing with Theater of the Absurd and a critique of modern society, Mills is content to simply exploit a gimmick to indulge her patented brand of incest porn.

Killing off the show's potential immediately is casting of Tommy Pistol as the grieving father, his wife and daughter recently killed in an auto accident, in the year 2095. (Despite setting this way into the future, the main set depicting Pistol's home has nothing futuristic about it, could be from the 1950s even.)

Next plot gimmick is that a law exists that permits only one clone/robot per family, so Nina announces that due to greater DNA viability her team decided to clone only the daughter, not the wife, without even asking Pistol to confer. After this phony plot element, the show quickly devolves into sex, sci-fi no longer of much interest.

Cloned kid Jill Kassidy talks like a robot and immediately sets out to seduce Pistol, with all the requisite "Oh, daddy!" porn dialog of any role-playing saga. We are reminded he's merely the stepfather, crucial to Bree's fear of censorship (re: incest.) Pistol's exaggerated histrionics are pitiful to watch as he supposedly tries to resist, ultimately looking very scruffy, and dare one say, perverted. He gives in of course, and is soon into pornspeak and behaving as he does in countless BDSM titles for which he remains in high demand despite his acting shortcomings.

In addition to a crummy, cornball ending, this story fails to establish what sci-fi creation we are dealing with: human clone, robot, cyborg or android -take your pick.

Material was issued combined with another Pure Taboo sci-fi episode "The White Room" on DVD as "Future Darkly Volume 1". IMDb's current deconstruction of adult content in its listing to "scene"/"episode" basis has created several duplicate listings for these, virtually impossible to correct under the Submission rules the website maintains.