David Stanley is one of my favorite XXX screenwriters -and I knew personally (in NYC) some of the greats back in the day including Rick Marx. But his recent work like "Princess" (which he also directed) is embarrassing.
For much of its length, "Princess" is innocuous enough as a mediocre porn black comedy, its hook being a very poorly conceived "live again" fantasy element. Audiences apparently salivate at these lame wishful thinking premises, but this one made me gag.
Title role is ably filled by cute Karla Kush, who with the adjective spelled Kute could add it to her billing. She's kept in style by boyfriend Ryan McLane, a performer who is always giving off bad vibes to the viewer, sort of a subtle Snidely Whiplash.
He's introduced as weirdly neglectful of her, in an awful hurry to merely hump and run while she demands a modicum of affection. What's wrong here? Turns out the creep is a married man with kids, and merely pretending to be her would-be fiancé and benefactor presenting her with lavish home, car and all the accoutrements of high living.
After the opening hump scene by the duo, we see Kush drowning her sorrows with a bottle of wine as she lays in her bathtub, and then nearly drowns in a stupor. Waking her up is the 300-pound beautiful gorilla Karen Fisher, come to lecture our heroine from beyond the grave. Stanley turns his film on a dime into ridiculous fantasy and farce, but unlike his scripts of a decade or two ago (see: "Long Story Short", "Melt" and many others) this one is not clever but idiotic.
Fisher, a favorite of mine, only topped by Samantha 38G in the BBF sweepstakes, is about three times bigger in every dimension than Kush, is five inches taller and has a radically different-shaped nose but the fellow blonde is problematically cast by Stanley as Kush 10 years in the future.
She's arrived not merely to save Karla from drowning but to drop on her the news that McLane is a fraud and that he will kill her exactly 10 years from tomorrow on her birthday. "Her" being Fisher's incarnation of Princess. Karla's character is named Daphne while Fisher is named Darlene, but that intentional discrepancy pales next to the dozens of worse idiocies in Stanley's script. Fisher's immediate mission is to get Kush to kill Ryan (10 years early) to prevent him from killing her 10 years later. It makes no sense but then serious stories like "The Terminator" in this vein don't either.
As with his terrible "A Gonzo Story: Creampie Virgin", I lost interest after only a reel or two thanks to shoddy plot and structure. But for the record, the 131-minute tale plods on with situation comedy of the dumbest sort, and an ill-advised, full-speed- ahead performance by Casey Calvert's lookalike Danica Dillon as Marsha, the other woman.
Marsha is Ryan's wife, and it turns out the wealthy one at that - all the upkeep spent on Karla has unwittingly been embezzled from her. She gets angry when she finds out about Karla but Stanley confusingly has her ultimately sort of joining forces with Karla/Karen against their common male enemy, but the 10-year time-frame juggling is completely inept, and the twists and turns concerning the characters' fates never believable. You would need a full lobotomy to successfully suspend disbelief and grant the action spewed out by our condescending auteur.
The sex is okay but nothing to write home about, with Stanley's favored foot-fetish action thrown in. Oddest hump scene is saved for last, when Karen makes love to Karla, as the "logical" outcome of her admonition "Try to love yourself". So Kush makes love to herself as she would be 10 years later. Stanley thought this was cute, but just as in another recent junker, the lesbian saga "Project Pandora" in which Cherie DeVille makes love to herself, in a threesome yet, as personified by age 18 version played by Mia Malkova, it's dumb.
Putting all these negatives aside, Stanley's coup de grace is a cryptic, absurd finale that back in the day would have been a porn equivalent to those enigmatic "what the hell did that mean?" payoffs in such classic films as "Blow-Up" and other brilliant Antonioni head-scratchers. An annoying and idiotic supporting character played by Tommy Pistol freaks out with his food and seems to be changing places with McLane, while the actresses fight and end up in a swimming pool perhaps drowning or merely symbolic of what? I haven't seen such a pretentious and foolish ending in porn or mainstream cinema in many, many years -make that decades.
For much of its length, "Princess" is innocuous enough as a mediocre porn black comedy, its hook being a very poorly conceived "live again" fantasy element. Audiences apparently salivate at these lame wishful thinking premises, but this one made me gag.
Title role is ably filled by cute Karla Kush, who with the adjective spelled Kute could add it to her billing. She's kept in style by boyfriend Ryan McLane, a performer who is always giving off bad vibes to the viewer, sort of a subtle Snidely Whiplash.
He's introduced as weirdly neglectful of her, in an awful hurry to merely hump and run while she demands a modicum of affection. What's wrong here? Turns out the creep is a married man with kids, and merely pretending to be her would-be fiancé and benefactor presenting her with lavish home, car and all the accoutrements of high living.
After the opening hump scene by the duo, we see Kush drowning her sorrows with a bottle of wine as she lays in her bathtub, and then nearly drowns in a stupor. Waking her up is the 300-pound beautiful gorilla Karen Fisher, come to lecture our heroine from beyond the grave. Stanley turns his film on a dime into ridiculous fantasy and farce, but unlike his scripts of a decade or two ago (see: "Long Story Short", "Melt" and many others) this one is not clever but idiotic.
Fisher, a favorite of mine, only topped by Samantha 38G in the BBF sweepstakes, is about three times bigger in every dimension than Kush, is five inches taller and has a radically different-shaped nose but the fellow blonde is problematically cast by Stanley as Kush 10 years in the future.
She's arrived not merely to save Karla from drowning but to drop on her the news that McLane is a fraud and that he will kill her exactly 10 years from tomorrow on her birthday. "Her" being Fisher's incarnation of Princess. Karla's character is named Daphne while Fisher is named Darlene, but that intentional discrepancy pales next to the dozens of worse idiocies in Stanley's script. Fisher's immediate mission is to get Kush to kill Ryan (10 years early) to prevent him from killing her 10 years later. It makes no sense but then serious stories like "The Terminator" in this vein don't either.
As with his terrible "A Gonzo Story: Creampie Virgin", I lost interest after only a reel or two thanks to shoddy plot and structure. But for the record, the 131-minute tale plods on with situation comedy of the dumbest sort, and an ill-advised, full-speed- ahead performance by Casey Calvert's lookalike Danica Dillon as Marsha, the other woman.
Marsha is Ryan's wife, and it turns out the wealthy one at that - all the upkeep spent on Karla has unwittingly been embezzled from her. She gets angry when she finds out about Karla but Stanley confusingly has her ultimately sort of joining forces with Karla/Karen against their common male enemy, but the 10-year time-frame juggling is completely inept, and the twists and turns concerning the characters' fates never believable. You would need a full lobotomy to successfully suspend disbelief and grant the action spewed out by our condescending auteur.
The sex is okay but nothing to write home about, with Stanley's favored foot-fetish action thrown in. Oddest hump scene is saved for last, when Karen makes love to Karla, as the "logical" outcome of her admonition "Try to love yourself". So Kush makes love to herself as she would be 10 years later. Stanley thought this was cute, but just as in another recent junker, the lesbian saga "Project Pandora" in which Cherie DeVille makes love to herself, in a threesome yet, as personified by age 18 version played by Mia Malkova, it's dumb.
Putting all these negatives aside, Stanley's coup de grace is a cryptic, absurd finale that back in the day would have been a porn equivalent to those enigmatic "what the hell did that mean?" payoffs in such classic films as "Blow-Up" and other brilliant Antonioni head-scratchers. An annoying and idiotic supporting character played by Tommy Pistol freaks out with his food and seems to be changing places with McLane, while the actresses fight and end up in a swimming pool perhaps drowning or merely symbolic of what? I haven't seen such a pretentious and foolish ending in porn or mainstream cinema in many, many years -make that decades.