Review: “Pornography” Should be More Fun to Watch

Peter Scherer (left), Dylan Vox

With a provocative title like Pornography, the new film by writer/director David Kittredge won’t have any trouble getting attention for itself.

That’s probably a good thing for the filmmakers, because the word-of-mouth is going to be bad.

The movie is pretty clearly a “gay” riff on David Lynch’s deliberately obtuse Mulholland Drive, which I happened to love. Both movies shift storylines midway through, and the same actors play different characters.

There’s more to reality than just what we see with our eyes, both movies say.

Since Pornography depends on the surprise of these shifting storylines – and, apparently, differing realities – I don’t want to give anything away.

But suffice to say that the movie involves an ex-adult movie star in the past who disappears under mysterious circumstances, a man in the present writing a book on the history of gay adult movies, and another adult film star in the present who begins to write a “legitimate” screenplay based on these other storylines, not realizing that they “really” happened.

The movie kept my attention, more or less, until about the middle. It sets up a mystery, then gives us a protagonist who apparently sets out to solve that mystery. Along the way, the movie provides some mild chills and creepy characterizations, even if they’re sometimes too-archly acted.

 Walter Delmar (left), Matthew Montgomery

The first sign of trouble was when it became clear what the mystery was about. Since I still begin every movie I review hoping that I’m about to discover the next film masterpiece, I was thinking, “Every single thriller ever made about adult films is also about snuff films, so please don’t let this one also be about that oh-so-hackneyed premise!”

Yes, it’s about snuff films.

Even worse, the movie completely betrays the viewer by promising a mystery and a thriller (the movie’s subtitle is even “A Thriller”). But after a semi-intriguing set-up, it doesn’t deliver. At all.

Pornography is simply not a thriller. Instead, it’s an artsy film treatise on the "shocking" brutality of humanity and the shifting nature of reality.

Next Page! Why does Mulholland Drive work and this doesn't? Plus, watch the trailer.