Have you ever been talking to someone and halfway through what you were saying, you forgot the point you were trying to make? That's what this movie is like. It starts out as the story of a socially dysfunctional young man turning to porn to try and find normalcy but then turns into an Afterschool Special on the evils of XXX entertainment.
Paul (Michael DeGood) has a problem. He's so incapable of relating to women in any normal way that he substitutes porn and prostitutes for healthy romantic relationships. He has a massive collective of porn tapes he keeps in a locked cabinet, is a regular customer for a local call girl (Kelly Stone) and frequents strip clubs to such an extent that he's on a first name basis with every girl who works there.
One day, while returning some XXX tapes to the video store, Paul complains to the clerk about the quality of the porn. The clerk tells him that if he doesn't like them, Paul should make his own. A light bulb practically goes off over Paul's head, and he decides to make his own amateur pornography. He hires his regular call girl and her friends, but Paul doesn't film himself having sex with them. He genuinely wants to be behind the camera and hires a pot head named Tom (George Hertzberg) to sexually perform with the whores while Paul tells them what to do, like a little girl playing with her Barbie and Ken dolls. Except these dolls are life-size and have working genitals.
Making these videos consume Paul's time and energy and they're good enough, by porn standards, that he's able to catch the interest of Mr. Spano (Craig Wasson), the head of an actual porno movie company. Spano says he can make Paul a professional director of adult films, as long as Paul can bring him a new, fresh faced girl to be in those films.
Now, up to this point in the movie, The Pornographer was kind of interesting. It's one of these painfully cheap films that get made in a couple of weeks and outside of Craig Wasson, none of the cast can really act. However, there's actually something to this story. It's about a guy trying to find where he fits in the world (which is not a double entendre because this story is about porn) and I wasn't sure where the film was going to go. Was it going to be provocative and have Paul find fulfillment in this denigrated subculture? Was it going to be moralistic and show Paul finding nothing but betrayal and cruelty in the world of adult videos? Was it going to go in a completely unexpected direction? I had no idea and somewhat mildly wanted to find out.
But then everything established in the movie is abandoned without a backward glance. The story ceases to be about Paul and his search for contentment and instead becomes a litany of the clichéd evils of the adult industry. We see the aging porn star who's been hardened by her years in the business, the young porn star reduced to the gutter, the struggling young actress tempted by the money and emotionally manipulated into doing porn. There's even a scene where a character rattles off a bunch of anti-porn statistics. It ceases be about Paul and his inner conflict, which was the only noteworthy thing in this whole production. It's almost as though writer/director Doug Atchison wrote the first half of this script, stopped and forgot about it for a few years, then wrote the second half of the script without remembering or bothering to re-read the first half.
There is some okay nudity and a few sex scenes in The Pornographer, but not nearly as much as you'd expect given the subject matter. The acting, as mentioned before, is almost uniformly poor and the dialog is undistinguished. The first half of the film does have a few scenes where Paul's emotional and sexual frustrations are explored with a nice touch, but then all that is discarded and there's nothing of interest that replaces it.
You'd think a film called The Pornographer would make a big impression on you, either for good or ill. But this movie never amounts to anything of consequence, either positive or negative. Unless you're friends with one of the people who made this film, I can't think of a reason you should watch it.
Paul (Michael DeGood) has a problem. He's so incapable of relating to women in any normal way that he substitutes porn and prostitutes for healthy romantic relationships. He has a massive collective of porn tapes he keeps in a locked cabinet, is a regular customer for a local call girl (Kelly Stone) and frequents strip clubs to such an extent that he's on a first name basis with every girl who works there.
One day, while returning some XXX tapes to the video store, Paul complains to the clerk about the quality of the porn. The clerk tells him that if he doesn't like them, Paul should make his own. A light bulb practically goes off over Paul's head, and he decides to make his own amateur pornography. He hires his regular call girl and her friends, but Paul doesn't film himself having sex with them. He genuinely wants to be behind the camera and hires a pot head named Tom (George Hertzberg) to sexually perform with the whores while Paul tells them what to do, like a little girl playing with her Barbie and Ken dolls. Except these dolls are life-size and have working genitals.
Making these videos consume Paul's time and energy and they're good enough, by porn standards, that he's able to catch the interest of Mr. Spano (Craig Wasson), the head of an actual porno movie company. Spano says he can make Paul a professional director of adult films, as long as Paul can bring him a new, fresh faced girl to be in those films.
Now, up to this point in the movie, The Pornographer was kind of interesting. It's one of these painfully cheap films that get made in a couple of weeks and outside of Craig Wasson, none of the cast can really act. However, there's actually something to this story. It's about a guy trying to find where he fits in the world (which is not a double entendre because this story is about porn) and I wasn't sure where the film was going to go. Was it going to be provocative and have Paul find fulfillment in this denigrated subculture? Was it going to be moralistic and show Paul finding nothing but betrayal and cruelty in the world of adult videos? Was it going to go in a completely unexpected direction? I had no idea and somewhat mildly wanted to find out.
But then everything established in the movie is abandoned without a backward glance. The story ceases to be about Paul and his search for contentment and instead becomes a litany of the clichéd evils of the adult industry. We see the aging porn star who's been hardened by her years in the business, the young porn star reduced to the gutter, the struggling young actress tempted by the money and emotionally manipulated into doing porn. There's even a scene where a character rattles off a bunch of anti-porn statistics. It ceases be about Paul and his inner conflict, which was the only noteworthy thing in this whole production. It's almost as though writer/director Doug Atchison wrote the first half of this script, stopped and forgot about it for a few years, then wrote the second half of the script without remembering or bothering to re-read the first half.
There is some okay nudity and a few sex scenes in The Pornographer, but not nearly as much as you'd expect given the subject matter. The acting, as mentioned before, is almost uniformly poor and the dialog is undistinguished. The first half of the film does have a few scenes where Paul's emotional and sexual frustrations are explored with a nice touch, but then all that is discarded and there's nothing of interest that replaces it.
You'd think a film called The Pornographer would make a big impression on you, either for good or ill. But this movie never amounts to anything of consequence, either positive or negative. Unless you're friends with one of the people who made this film, I can't think of a reason you should watch it.