Cry Wolf

As I did last year, I am taking a look at the winner of Best Film at the Adult Video News Awards, presented annually in January in Las Vegas. As with last year it went to a Paul Thomas film from Vivid, the Miramax of the porno business. They are one of the few companies that continue to produce plot-driven porn, and chase the awards.

The winner this year is Cry Wolf, and as with last year's winner, Layout, it's a decent film, relatively speaking. The script could be reworked into that for an actual movie (albeit a movie for late night on basic cable), and the acting is competent to good. But there are elements of it instantly categorize it as a porn flick (besides the hard-core sex, I mean). It isn't particularly well-directed. In an attempt to be artistic, Thomas has flash-forwards and flashbacks that just muddle things more than necessary, and there's some continuity problems that crop up in a lot of adult films--one second a girl is having sex barefoot, then she has shoes, then she's barefoot again--that sort of thing.

The story begins with Marcos Leon as an former child pop star who has hit hard times. He's brought home a girl, Monique Alexander, and with faint echoes of the Phil Spector case things go wrong. He calls his friend, Mr. Marcus, to help him out of a jam, but it turns out that Alexander and Mr. Marcus are in a relationship, and are running a con on Leon.

The secondary plot involves a drug dealer, Steven St. Croix, who has a stable of coke whores at his command. In one scene he plays a salacious game of Simon Says with a trio of girls. The misogyny in this film is pretty thick, as St. Croix's lifestyle is clearly something we are to admire (especially when Alexander leaves the decent Mr. Marcus for St. Croix at the end of the picture). If that weren't enough, there's a scene of anal rape, which is certainly edgy for an adult picture, because the nature of pornography is that it's created for titillation purposes, so those who are getting off to a scene of rape have some issues.

The main difference between plot-driven porn and porn without plot seems to be that the movies with plot have scenes that depict sex as unpleasant, while "gonzo" porn tends to portray sex as the most fun a human being can have. I prefer the latter interpretation.