I enjoyed a well-cast Nina Hartley giving a flamboyant XXX-rated performance of the Bette Davis role in Mankiewicz's classic "All About Eve". Julie Rage as Eva Marlowe is less successful (in the Anne Baxter role), permitted or encouraged to overact by director/co-star Rod Fontana.
Features opens with Mike Horner as emcee at an AVN Awards show in Las Vegas, setting up a false dichotomy regarding Adult Cinema and mainstream films. The tongue-in-cheek and sarcastic screenplay by producer Bobby Rinaldi (who also has a couple of cameo appearances here) is preposterously self-serving: postulating the AVN awards as legitimate and "crucial" to the Adult industry (they wish!), as opposed to those phony "other" awards (Oscars, Golden Globes, etc.).
This is of course true regarding the Golden Globes, which 25 years later have been thoroughly discredited, but clearly the AVN awards are patently phony, not worth discrediting. To watch the video one has to put that to the side, though this phoniness rears its ugly head at the end of the show, too.
Plot adapts Joseph Mankiewicz's original to fit porn, with heavy emphasis on the "I'll do anything" cliche of porn, recited by Rage when she approaches her idol played by Nina in flashback and gets hired as her makeup girl in exchange for lesbian sex with Hartley. No surprise at all this is repeated at movie's end with Alyssa Allure mirroring her shtick once Rage has reached the top of her profession.
Hartley is betrayed by her fiance Peter North, who's caught humping Nina's friend Shanna McCullough by Julie, leading her to blackmail Shanna into helping her replace Nina on a big movie.
But a couple of key scenes are bungled. Julie changes from the obsequious kid to a nasty, creepy schemer unconvincingly, extremely overplayed. And the ending has a blooper retained in the final print: Alyssa Allure pops up in Julie's dressing room as Rage talks to herself in the mirror, gloating at her treachery that won her the phony AVN award, and AA introduces herself: "My name's Jane", then a pause for six seconds, she says: "My name's Joan, Miss Marlowe", fixing her flubbed line. Both remain for us to enjoy thanks to shoddy filmmaking.
Before this fiasco, we get to see Nina's birthday party, with cross-cutting among a series of extraneous sex scenes, all cliches: Tony Montana humping ultra-busty Harley Raine on a pool-table, T. T. Boy f*ckig a Stockard Channing lookalike named Holli Woods in the kitchen, and Rage masturbating like crazy in the bathroom. All that's missing is a pizza boy or a pool boy.
And Julie's big speech accepting her award is phony as hell, designed to mock mainstream award acceptance speeches (way over-written by producer Rinaldi, who not coincidentally is shown in the audience as one of the folks she's thanking) but merely underscoring the shameless self-plugola of what we've just sat through. Not just Rinaldi, but the video's production company Tight Ends Productions is prominently featured in Julie's casting couch scene where she wins over director Rex Sterling, played by the video's director Rod Fontana.
So it's up to Nina Hartley to save this one, and she does.
Features opens with Mike Horner as emcee at an AVN Awards show in Las Vegas, setting up a false dichotomy regarding Adult Cinema and mainstream films. The tongue-in-cheek and sarcastic screenplay by producer Bobby Rinaldi (who also has a couple of cameo appearances here) is preposterously self-serving: postulating the AVN awards as legitimate and "crucial" to the Adult industry (they wish!), as opposed to those phony "other" awards (Oscars, Golden Globes, etc.).
This is of course true regarding the Golden Globes, which 25 years later have been thoroughly discredited, but clearly the AVN awards are patently phony, not worth discrediting. To watch the video one has to put that to the side, though this phoniness rears its ugly head at the end of the show, too.
Plot adapts Joseph Mankiewicz's original to fit porn, with heavy emphasis on the "I'll do anything" cliche of porn, recited by Rage when she approaches her idol played by Nina in flashback and gets hired as her makeup girl in exchange for lesbian sex with Hartley. No surprise at all this is repeated at movie's end with Alyssa Allure mirroring her shtick once Rage has reached the top of her profession.
Hartley is betrayed by her fiance Peter North, who's caught humping Nina's friend Shanna McCullough by Julie, leading her to blackmail Shanna into helping her replace Nina on a big movie.
But a couple of key scenes are bungled. Julie changes from the obsequious kid to a nasty, creepy schemer unconvincingly, extremely overplayed. And the ending has a blooper retained in the final print: Alyssa Allure pops up in Julie's dressing room as Rage talks to herself in the mirror, gloating at her treachery that won her the phony AVN award, and AA introduces herself: "My name's Jane", then a pause for six seconds, she says: "My name's Joan, Miss Marlowe", fixing her flubbed line. Both remain for us to enjoy thanks to shoddy filmmaking.
Before this fiasco, we get to see Nina's birthday party, with cross-cutting among a series of extraneous sex scenes, all cliches: Tony Montana humping ultra-busty Harley Raine on a pool-table, T. T. Boy f*ckig a Stockard Channing lookalike named Holli Woods in the kitchen, and Rage masturbating like crazy in the bathroom. All that's missing is a pizza boy or a pool boy.
And Julie's big speech accepting her award is phony as hell, designed to mock mainstream award acceptance speeches (way over-written by producer Rinaldi, who not coincidentally is shown in the audience as one of the folks she's thanking) but merely underscoring the shameless self-plugola of what we've just sat through. Not just Rinaldi, but the video's production company Tight Ends Productions is prominently featured in Julie's casting couch scene where she wins over director Rex Sterling, played by the video's director Rod Fontana.
So it's up to Nina Hartley to save this one, and she does.