Newseater - Adult Edition

“Despite the circumstances you found yourself in,” says the detective, “you still found pleasure in this vibrating machine?”

“Yes,” Roxy Deville says.

“So some good came of it.”

Rob Rotten’s “Texas Vibrator Massacre” is as good, if not better, than any American International Pictures release or Roger Corman movie, both low-budget drive-in fare to be consumed like popcorn, filled with summer scenes in natural lighting and lots and lots of skin. But “Massacre” is better, simply because it has more skin.

Fans of Tobe Hooper’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” already know the plot (and the twist ending) of this movie, and can probably guess what the application of the vibrator will be. If so or if not, a fan of one makes a fan of the other.

A gang of bickering California slackers gets lost on a Texas back road. We don’t know why Roxy Deville and Seth Dickens are a couple, because they sure act like an old married one as she nags and belittles him for getting lost. Meanwhile, two of their passengers have sex in the back of the truck.

They pick up a sketchy hitchhiker, who proceeds to stab the first sex-having couple, thus linking “Massacre” with every great slasher picture in that it makes sex punishable by death.

Deville escapes. She is wearing short shorts and no bra. Good. She makes it to a rustic cabin festooned with bleached cattle skulls, where she is immediately captured by a Leatherface-looking dude. Here her very credible wails and lamentations do her no good but, again, unlike this movie’s non-porn inspirations, the audience gets a better view of the heroine.

Dickens and the van’s other female survivor, Bella Lynn, make it to the cabin where they are greeted by Daisy Tanks and Jamie Elle, who are excellent as inbred tweaker sisters. Elle hypnotizes Dickens with her lollipop, and creepy Rob Rotten emerges to double team Lynn with Tanks.

Not all of the cast is up to the job, though, and when one performer phones in her lines, a la any other porn movie, it takes the viewer out of the scene. And so it is with Lynn. But she still looks good.

And she also pays the ultimate price; after her tryst with Rotten and Tanks, Leatherface grabs her and justifies the title. She is fucked to death.

At this point I thought about how much of this movie would have made it onto DVD if Rotten had brought the raw footage to Adam & Eve and its council of psychiatrists.

Meanwhile, Deville and Leatherface are heading into their endgame, but for one of them it goes horribly wrong. Deville is a great scream queen; America will love her because she is not afraid to get dirty.

The movie loses focus toward the end. Herschel Savage appears as a detective who debriefs a hospitalized Deville. We go through the whole movie again before Savage is revealed to not be on the right side of the law, again similar to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Aside from a spotty performance or two and the unnecessary wrap-up, “Texas Vibrator Massacre” is a really good B-movie. The title indicates something a little less substantial than the movie actually is and, unlike much of its competition gunning for mainstream respectability - whatever that is - Rotten’s movie wouldn’t be laughed down at, say, a horror festival.

- Review by Gram Ponante

. . .

The Texas Vibrator Massacre

Studio: Punx Productions/Metro
Director: Rob Rotten
Cast: Roxy Deville, Daisy Tanks, Ruby Knox, Bella Lynn, Jaime Elle, Rob Rotten, Herschel Savage, Seth Dickens

· Metro Interactive (metrointeractive.com)
· Rob Rotten (punxproductions.com)
· Buy “The Texas Vibrator Massacre” (gamelink.com)

Original post by Gram Ponante

Maybe you’re like me and thought “Runaway” was a Night Ranger song and had to be reminded that it was Bon Jovi who sang about how daddy’s girl learned fast all the things he couldn’t say.

But I don’t think Daisy Tanks has parents; I think she sprang fully pierced from the ground.

Read our review of the punk rock document “Little Runaway 2″ after the gap.

Little Runaway 2

Studio: Powersville
Director: Jim Powers
Cast: Daisy Tanks, Desire Moore, Scarlett Pain, Paris Gables, Holly Wellin, Rob Rotten, Drehyden, Jenner

Review by: Gram Ponante

One of my favorite directors is Jim Powers, whose punk rock and pop culture sensibilities always find a way into any movie he directs.

But he always stays removed enough so that his earnestness never backfires on him. In other words, he never succumbs to the notion that he’s making art when he’s in the entertainment business.

That is not to say that the non-porn elements of his movies aren’t compelling; in fact, they are usually the most watchable non-porn scenes in porn. They are just not redolent of the director’s need to justify his career in Filth.

Sometimes the pendulum swings so far back into the “entertainment” category that he leaves the camera on during painful backstage episodes. His Porn’s Most Outrageous Outtakes series captures many of these, but porn is such a playground of morbidity in general that there’s an undercurrent of it in every movie he does. If fans of mainstream porn call what he does exploitive, he might argue that all porn is exploitive.

So what does somebody like Powers do when he makes a movie around a subject — punk rock — that he genuinely cares about? Little Runaway 2 is definitely a dirtier, sexier movie — the sex scenes, anyway — than any of the altporn Powers compares it to in his press releases, although companies criticizing “Alt” at this point (Adam & Eve’s Independent Adult Cinema has been doing it recently) is like beating a dead horse.

A series of scenes revolving around last year’s Punkfest 2007, Little Runaway 2 features people with the hair and the wardrobe and tattoos that seem more integral to their personalities than the poseurware Powers et al have an issue with.

Daisy Tanks, Scarlett Pain, and Paris Gables really walk the walk and fuck the fuck, rutting in dirty warehouses, buses, and on questionable mattresses. The movie also features performances by several angrily aging punk bands, including Powers’ own, Killroy.

I could have done without these performances, but real fans of SoCal punk, especially those who wouldn’t normally buy porn movies, might well love this as a pretty reliable document. In the behind the scenes featurette Powers captures drunkenness and belligerence, as per usual, and Rob Rotten’s scenes with Daisy Tanks and Scarlett Pain made me think of alleys and back rooms of every dive-y, dangerous club I’ve ever found my feet sticking to the floor of. And that’s a good feeling.

But the “Clockwork Orange” riff at the beginning of the movie falls flat; I’m sure there was a reason to use those Kubrickian sets and costumes beyond their availability from The Violation of Chelsie Rae, but availability of the sets seemed the primary reason.

(And the droogs in the previous movie were women, which was a plus.)

In the end, Powers is filming his friends, with some sex representative of their lifestyle thrown in. In that I would want to do similar things to Scarlett Pain as Rob Rotten does, Little Runaway 2 reaches into my Gordon Lightfoot/Ronnie James Dio world and makes me regret tossing out that mattress I got scabies on.

· Jim Powers (mrfilth.com)
· Buy “Little Runaway 2″ (jerkoffzone.com)

Original post by Gram Ponante

When “Swallow My Children”’s Rob Rotten showed up last year dandling this lady, the Internet was atwitter. “Who is that girl?” the Internet squealed. Rotten was coy, as was the girl. Neither was ready to reveal her One True Porn Name. That changed when Rotten’s white trash blowjob epic surfaced in the summer, and the mystery woman was revealed to be Daisy Tanks. So now you know, too.

· Rob Rotten’s Punx Productions (punxproductions.com)

Original post by Fleshbot