Geekscape After Dark Reviews: Scream XXX: A Porn Parody

I think the first big success in the current wave of porn parodies was “Not the Bradys XXX,” which was, at the time, a rather clever conceit. How many porn-fancying Gen-Xers, if they were honest with themselves, didn’t want to see Marcia and Jane getting it on? “Not the Bradys,” which could legally use all the famous names and iconography from their source material, provided they used the word “parody” on the box, became a massive success, and the porn industry reacted with aplomb. All of the pop culture sex fantasies you could imagine were finally at our fingertips, so to speak, as film after film hit the shelves of your local seedy adult boutique. In a production blitz the likes of which rarely seen, everything from “Batman” to “Star Trek” to “Scooby-Doo” started getting their own porn parodies, and it wasn’t long before the prolific industry started having to stretch to find pop culture iconography to mine. There are also porn versions of “Twilight,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “The Simpsons,” “Glee,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Fox News” (!), “Psycho,” “Deal or No Deal,” and, perhaps most disturbingly, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Indeed, the list can now extend into the hundreds. In a way, this wave of porn parodies can serve as a microcosm of the over-bloated and painfully uncreative Hollywood remake machine.

Here’s a great site that actually details all of them:

(I miss the days when porn companies would simply retitle popular movies with dirty names. Gone are the days of “The Wonder Rears,” “Cliffbanger,” “Forrest Hump,” and “Men in Black Men.” C’est la vie. So it goes.)

Now we have “Scream XXX: A Porn Parody” to contend with, and, like its namesake, it seems to have an intense desire to deconstruct and tear down, and perhaps eliminate, the popular film trends in which it exists. Which is not to say that it’s incredibly clever; pornography is, after all, not known for its wit. But it does bother to make some cute cognitive leaps in between its long, occasionally sexy sex scenes.

The conceit within “Scream XXX” is this: Axel Braun, the mastermind behind the porn parody trend, is producing a porn parody of “Stab,” the horror film franchise within the “Scream” franchise. See, so we’re already one step removed. “Stab XXX” follows a killer who is stalking and stabbing his victims with a steel dildo. One of the jokes of the film is that, since it was probably too messy and too expensive and too time-consuming to use, there was no blood in any of the stabbing scenes. Maybe Braun felt that bloody murders weren’t appropriate for pornography. The steel dildo they use, by the way, is not a cheap off-the-rack tool that can be purchased at your local smut shop; it looks to be a really classy and immensely expensive toy. You can tell because they clearly only have one, and they actually never use it for its intended function.

Anyway, on the set of “Stab XXX,” the actors, Scarlett Fay, Lily LaBeau, Jessie Andrews, Evan Stone, all playing themselves, begin to be picked off by the killer from the movie-with-the-movie. The killer is dressed in the same killer outfit from “Scream,” but wearing a clown nose and clown eyebrows. It’s a little odd-looking. Of course the studio has plenty of dark back corners that are good for boning. In a way, this porn version of a horror film shows us the actual sex that is usually covered up or edited away from in usual slasher films.

There is a Gail Weathers character, named Gail Storm, played by Zoe Voss, who, curiously, doesn’t have sex with the Deputy Dewey character. There is a metaphysical sex scene, however, where Gail Storm has sex with the woman who plays Gail Storm in “Stab XXX.” Following all this? Ron Jeremy also shows up, like an elder statesman of the industry, to, I suppose, give his blessing. I think he’s in a position where he has to give a certain number of porn film cameos in a year, or the entire industry will be cursed to fail.

Eventually the killer is revealed, and, to sustain any small amount of suspense there may be in a pornographic film, I will not reveal who it is. I will, however, say what their motivation is as it’s really kind of cute: evidently the killer was doing their dirty work to halt production of “Stab XXX,” and, my extension, “Scream XXX.” If people die on the set of a porn parody, then perhaps the industry will stop making porn parodies. “How long,” the killer asks of their final victim, “before they get to your favorite show? Is nothing sacred??”

That’s kind of brilliant.

Pornography, as we all probably are intimately familiar with, has grown to such a ubiquitous place in America that we have now entered a place where even porn needs to strain for creativity and compete all the harder for your attention. And while it’s fun and exciting and kind of goofy to see all you favorite films and TV shows pushed through an x-rated filter, there’s a weird kind of desperation to the trend. Like the producers are doing all they can to keep porn fun and relevant in a world where sexting and digital filming technology has turned every other randy couple, drunken teenager, coked-up celebutante, and cheating politician into an amateur pornographer. Perhaps we’ll come through on the other side wiser about sex, and more open-minded about sexuality.

Until then, we have clever and sexy films to keep us entertained and horny.