Amateur Porn Star Killer. I like that title. The cover
depicts a beautifully sculpted female back, her hair up over her dog collar and
her hands bound at her buttocks. One assumes she’s one of the amateur porn
stars to be killed by a maniac hell-bent on working through the agonizing
memory of his father’s death at a porn star’s hands after a blizzard of
cocaine. Of course, it’s not fair to judge a movie on whether it matches my
expectations. It is fair to judge it on whether it’s even a real movie.
I received a signed copy of this non-epic from director
Shane Ryan and I’m saddened to dislike it so much that I’ve shifted my dislike
onto the director—who seems to be a very nice young man. I just don’t see
evidence of that in his movie. The plot is really provided by the text at the
beginning and end of the movie. A serial killer named 'Brandon' (Shane Ryan
himself) smooth-talks sluts into motel rooms where he browbeats them into
taking off their clothes and sucking his dick. For their efforts, he kills
them. The catch is that he records the murders on store-rented VHS tapes. But
only the most unrented, forgotten movies, like Meet the Deedles (1998), so the murders takes
forever to get discovered.
I think that’s a hilarious idea. I’d love to see Robert
Patrick’s multi-layered performance in Double Dragon (1994) interrupted by a snuff movie. But
that’s not really what we get in Amateur Porn Star Killer. The real action of this
movie is this: Brandon picks up an underage girl, talks to her from behind his camera
for fifty straight minutes until he finally gets her out of her clothes and
onto his dick. Then he kills her. To keep us from getting bored, I guess,
footage of him screwing some blonde girl keeps getting superimposed over the
footage of him trying to screw the brunette.
This is actually how a lot of semi-amateur porn starts. Some
douchebag picks up a girl in public, takes her back to a room somewhere, and
talks down to her for a few minutes. With real porn, they cut the crap and get
her naked as quickly as possible. Ryan drags it out, but the result is the
same. He really does pop his dick out on camera and she really does suck it on
camera.
The problem here is the ambition to make anything more than just
amateur porn. There are attempts to make this gritty, like the snuff footage in
8mm (1999). Of course, this is supposed to be shot on VHS, so it makes no sense to
digitally add celluloid deterioration. Magnetic tape does not deteriorate like
that at all. Moreover, the superimpositions of the other sex footage suggests
that it’s being recorded over something else. But, again, this is supposed to
be recorded over Weekend at Bernies II (1993), not his home sex tapes. The other sex
scene, incidentally, does not even end in murder!
The worst offense of all for any attempt at pseudo-snuff is
that the murder doesn’t actually happen on camera. What kind of self-respecting snuff film doesn't have the murder happen on camera? Ryan has no problem getting
his dick sucked on camera or fucking this girl on camera, but when it comes to
splashing around a little stage blood, he gets squeamish.
Amateur Porn Star Killer seems like an excuse for Ryan to
bang co-star Michiko Jimenez and show it to his friends. Judging from the interview
included on the DVD, I think he put in way more effort than was probably
required. Amateur Porn Star Killer 2 and 3 are more of the same. And, like the
first in the series, Ryan credits the girls he screws as co-writers. In the
third, moreover, his co-star is Regan Reece, of Cum Drinkers 3 (2006) and Stairway to Anal (2010) fame.
The point is that this is really just poorly-lit home sex tapes with some text
thrown in to tie it into some vague plot. It is amateur porn. It’s more Max Hardcore than
Vincent Gallo. There’s nothing wrong with that, other than most of it is
chit-chat and not actual porn. If you want to make porn, just make porn.
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