There’s no better way to start this review than with a quote from Ben, who, on leaving the cinema, said “It’s unusual to see so many walk-outs from a movie with tits in”. Sadly, that sums up this effort. I found it hard to credit that anyone could possibly be boring, with this subject, but the film-makers managed it.
Any documentary can be made interesting: even if the subject is train-spotting, there are ways of structuring a doco so as to maintain a coherent flow of subject matter and cover all the necessary information. Sadly, the film-maker here decided not to use these ways. Instead, he chose to scatter the pieces more or less randomly, and to avoid following up any slightly interesting comment from one talking head with more information from another. The purported sections, dealing with topics like censorship, output, and the like, were really just markers to indicate that we’d survived a certain number of minutes of footage, rather than clues to what was coming up.
Along with the talking heads, we were subject to several episodes of shooting on a particular film. While this might seem interesting, in reality it simply showed the utter boredom inherent in most film shoots, with added breasts and moaning. There was little attempt to tie in this ongoing shoot with the reminiscences of the various giants of the industry, or with the purported sections mentioned above.
Even when an interesting topic did accidentally come up, it was swiftly dropped in favour of one more boring. The issue of titles, which is one of the fascinating aspects of porn films, was mentioned more or less in passing and then forgotten completely. This was a pity, because it could have been the sole highlight of the film. Yes, they are chosen to be humorous, but that was about all that was said.
Overall, no startling revelations, no challenging of assumptions, and no real erotic content. A disappointingly limp effort.