The Penultimate GeniusThe Penultimate Genius

Pirates of the Caribbean 2? Ohh, Yeah...

Yeah, it was a no-brainer.

So, based soley on the fact that it is supposedly the most expensive porn movie ever made, I bought Pirates, no trench coat and baseball hat required, thanks to on-line outlets. Just click the link already and buy your own copy. I had to own a copy of it just because of what I'd read about it, and I'm glad I did. If only for historical purposes...

Anyway, the wife and I sat down and pressed play around 11 p.m., poured some Captain Morgan's into some glasses (hey, it's a pirate movie) and watched. First off, there are actual sets, not your normal warehousey-looking "sets." That is, this movie does not in any way have the look of any of the porn movies I've seen in my life, and I'm going to guess I've seen maybe 40-50 in my life, 37-47 of them in college after dinner in the frat house, when Daddy-O [real nickname] used to fast forward through the exposition so we could only just watch the sex scenes. And then in reverse.

This movie looks like a real movie, albeit a B-movie, but, still, that's a plus.

Then, there's attempted acting. You have to give them that, too, because in most porn movies the "acting" is little more than five minutes of lame set-up between sex scenes, with tons of innuendo and overture. Some of the actors can, actually, act, especially Evan Stone, who has a sense of comic timing perfect for the role of Capt. Edward Reynolds. And Steven St. Croix does a good job of acting, too, in the role of Marco, the man who lost the love of his life, who just happens to be sex-crazed sex-addict first mate of Reynold's ship, Jules, played by porn-starlet-of-the-moment Jesse Jane. Sadly, most of the females can't act anywhere near the level of the men, which is odd, since you'd think in the porn business, it'd be the girls who are better at faking it. But, then, it's the men have to deliver the goods at the end of a scene, so...

If there's any actual problem with the movie, it's the fact the actors take their roles so seriously - and this movie is low camp, on purpose, so it's supposed to be tongue-in-cheek funny [and it is], not accidentally funny - it's sometimes distracting to see these porn stars swinging for the fence in each scene. The dialogue is all written in current-day English, i.e., the stuff of this blog or your latest conversation with whoever, but many of the actors try to deliver their lines as if they were speaking Victorian English, minus the Brit accent, and that is a weird thing to get used to.

And there's a plot that's carried forward by a decent script. In short, some guy named Manuel gets kidnapped by the bad pirate Victor Stagnetti because Victor believes Manuel is of the blood line capable of releasing the magical something from the hands of some Incan god statue. Or something like that. So, Reynolds and crew set out to rescue Manuel from Victor.

And the story is actually pretty good. Okay, so the movie starts out and the wife and I start critiquing as it's going on ["Those are fake", "Do you want a pair like that?", "Well, of course. Do you want me with a pair like that?", "I wouldn't complain about it"], and at about the 2 minute mark, the two characters on screen disrobe and go at it, being newlyweds on a voyage to the Caribbean for a reason I can't remember ["This is her first time and she's doing that to him?", "Well, she's experimental and uninhibited by the social mores of the times, maybe", "That hurts the first time you do it", "Maybe she just assumes some level of pain is the price of admission"]. Then the pirates board the ship, kidnap the dude and toss the girl overboard to drown or get eaten by sharks ["Why wouldn't they keep her as a sex slave or something?" "Maybe they already have one"]. Then the pirates blow up the ship in a digital effects shot that lasts several seconds, and right there you know you're not watching a normal uninspired porn film but something aiming to be something else, namely, a real movie which just so happens to show the sex instead of cutting to the curtains. [Or, perhaps, a film with sex that on purpose has a story?]

Then the good captain's ship arrives on screen, rescues the girl, learns her husband was kidnapped, and decides to rescue him. So, first up, an investigation of the island of bad guys who know information about the bad pirate, some more sex, if I remember correctly, and then something came up and I missed the middle 40 minutes of the film.

Then there's the tracking down of the bad pirate on, I think, another island, the female first officer of the bad pirate ship ordering the evil captain to perform various and sundry sex acts with her ["Hey, the actor is probably secretly thrilled he gets to sit in a make-up chair each day and gets a sex scene in that costume", "You're probably right"], followed by a chase onto the mystery island with the kidnapped dude to see if he can free the artifact from the statue. Oh, and somewhere in there, there's a swordfight or three. And some more sex, if I recall.

The bad pirate gets the artifact, raises some skeletons from the ground to fight the good guys, I won't ruin the battle for you, but I will let you know that the entire fight is done in a digital environment, so you know they spent money on this film, and then I lost track of what was going on for about fifteen minutes before watching the end of the film, whereupon the wife and I agreed it was a damn good porno. And we've seen three in the seven years we've been married, so we know of what we speak.

Now, if you chopped out the sex scenes, you'd have a rather standard-issue B-grade movie along the lines of what you get each week as the SciFi channel's movie feature. And, yes, I'm serious. Watch any of SciFi's creature-of-the-week "thrillers," and you'll get noticeably better acting and exactly-the-same set/script/effects quality. But no sex.

So, if you're curious about the movie but not the sex, see if you can't get one of those Christian film editing groups to cut you a copy without the gratuitous sex. [Heh, I'd like to see the way they'd manage that]

Take this all with a caveat, however, that I didn't actually see the entire movie, so I have to re-watch it for the scenes I missed. They may make it better or worse, so I might be updating this review in a week or month or year. Or two. Or at 11 p.m. tonight...

The Penultimate Genius

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Saturday, December 03, 2005

"The Only Way Out Is Through"