Rina Ellis Saves the World: A XXX 90's Parody

The crummy Digital Playground compilation of series material from its website begins with four trailers for "Rina Ellis...", serving merely to pad the running time (123 minutes total, low for a DP or sister label Brazzers miniseries release) and spoil the one decent surprise.

Dick Bush provides merely adequate action/gore scenes to buttress the four XXX sex vignettes, and uses lousy practical sets just as in the equally disappointing "London Knights" cosplay exercise a year earlier. Diminutive Korean actress Rina Ellis in the title role as audience surrogate (like a Hitchcock "ordinary person thrown into extraordinary circumstances" heroine) was in "Knights" and does a poor job in this would-be star-making vehicle, failing to impress as either actress or sex performer.

The script is loaded with groaner one-liners and forms a wobbly structure on which to mount the costumed characters and their routine sex bouts.

General thread of a story has bored, pot-smoking Rina Ellis (character name using her stage name) arguing with her boyfriend Ash (Luke Hardy, doing a very poor job listlessly reciting his dialog) who complains of her couch potato status. She's addicted to watching '90s action movies on TV, so when she falls asleep on the couch she dreams up the four episodes of her being thrust into an adventure with her '90s action heroes.

As a tribute to that genre, which one trailer here proclaims that the '90s is the greatest decade of all time, Dick Bush's film falls woefully short. When I was a Variety newspaper reviewer back in the '80s and '90s I saw all these famous pictures and reviewed nearly all of the B action movies, fun stuff with Cynthia Rothrock, James Ryan (of the South African genre), Wings Hauser, Michael Dudikoff and Don The Dragon Wilson, and a hip tribute would have gone after them. But DP & Bush do a lousy job of imitating the familiar targets from blockbuster hits instead, lazy and pointless. (Clearly Ellis could have played one of Rothrock's characters such as China O'Brien.)

It's a lucid dream and Rina keeps whining about it, reluctant to enter into the derring do in earnest. She first encounters Leeloo in the form of Alessa Savage, mimicking the memorable "Fifth Element" heroine for Luc Besson. She's fighting British porn stud Marc Rose as "The Terminator" and before they hump the plot is spit out about getting the Necronomicon (see H.P. Lovecraft's mythos) tome to defeat arch- villainess Santanico Pandemonium (Anissa Kate) and her Army of Darkness (Sam Raimi land).

Plenty of uncredited extras as zombies are offed along the way with cheesy special effects and okay makeup effects. The book gets to Lara Croft (busty Rachel Starr, an excellent choice) who has sex with of all people Snake Plissken (American import for the British production: Erik Everhard hiding behind a crummy wig), who takes his snake out of his pants to service her in her mansion's lavish indoor swimming pool. This scene is poorly edited with Rachel missing in action (not enough coverage footage shot apparently) when she figuratively passes the baton to Rina to take over saving the world.

Along the way we get stuck claustrophobically, cheaply and unimaginatively in some bricked/concrete underground corridors, in which the husband/wife team of Ryan Ryder and Jasmine Jae pop up as Maximus from Ridley Scott's "The Gladiator" and another Raimi creation Xena: Warrior Princess. They have a sword fight and then rough sex with JJ providing the video's quotient of anal action. She rightly criticizes her husband at the end for overacting, as he turns to the camera after depositing the film's second cream pie, shouting at the viewer: "Are you not entertained?".

Finale perks things up a bit in the form of Anissa Kate, glorious with huge (and heavy-looking) snake around her shoulders as the strip act that would conquer the world. It's based on Salma Hayek in "From Dusk Till Dawn", her character duly named after a crummy 1975 Mexican nuns- themed horror film. Other phony stretches of the parody's premise include Ash from not "Evil Dead" at the beginning of the '80s but instead alluding to end of trilogy in 1992's "Army of Darkness"; Snake Plissken not from the classic "Escape from New York" of 1981 but supposedly the weak 1996 followup "Escape from L.A."; "The Terminator" not being the 1984 version but rather supposedly the 1991 big-budget sequel; "Gladiator", not released until 2000; and even Lara Croft, a '90s video game but not a movie with Angelina until 2001.

Ms. Ellis finally gets to strut her porn actress stuff in a three-way sex scene with Kate and a nightmare-version of Luke as Ash, leading to her saving the day, waking up and setting up a dreaded sequel with a lousy ending. As stated, the surprise of seeing the NonSex (thus far) heroine putting out in the form of a patent-leather outfitted Trinity from "The Matrix" is spoiled by the DVD's teasers. Her promised kung fu action skills are poor.

Failing as both sex film and action film, "Rina Ellis..." would qualify as a Hollywood disaster if only it had a big-budget like "Water World" or "Cutthroat Island" or even Besson's recent mega- flop "Valerian". But after doing a fab job on a large-scale with the porn series "Monarch", Bush and Digital Playground have adjusted to the dwindling market for large-scale porn and chosen to drastically and detrimentally cut corners.