"All About Keri" is on paper one of those tiresome star showcases, quite popular 40 years ago to spotlight the talents of a Jennifer Welles or Annie Sprinkle, and now applied here to a Wicked contract star Keri Sable. There's even a scene where Keri as fictional character (with same name, of course) hopes for a label contract career with Wicked, and even winks at the audience.
But filmmaker David Stanley uses the occasion to walk a delicate tightrope of mocking the hand that feeds him, complaining about the lowly status of working in porn, while stressing thematically the need to dream and create. I enjoyed and admired the result, it somehow overcoming the many inherent contradictions of the material and often facetious approach.
Casting Evan Stone, wearing many different wigs, in a major role as the hero's nutty benefactor is the source of the show's comedy, or lack thereof as Stone's over-the-top (as usual) performance often provides longueurs instead of hilarity.
One of the best rom-com actors of the period Eric Masterson is well-cast as the hero, a TV commercials director (who shoots Stone the mad Russian in one of those harangue-the-audience pitchman spots selling discount electronics) who's writing a screenplay for his dream movie. Evan reads the script and offers to bankroll him, in exchange for putting his girlfriend (Sable) in the starring role.
Sable and Eric don't hit it off at first, making for the usual suspense of whether the two of them will ever romatnically hook up. Along the way Eric fantasizes Keri in sex scenes along with other beauties, which constitute the film's quite arousing XXX content for Wicked release.
Much of the self-reflexiveness here is more complicated than usual, say in a Woody Allen or Henry Jaglom opus to cite the two most similar mainstream practitioners. The issue of whether to make a real film or acede to Evan's wishes and crank out a porno is central, and though Eric achieves his goal, the irony is underscored by David Stanley's cameo as a porn actor Gerry who is genuinely disappointed to find out his sex scene with Keri has been written out of the script. Many films and comedies of this type have been made by R-rated directors from the opposite side of the fence, so the contraditions of Stanley's script & ideas with the final XXX product are a defect - he simply can't make an R-rated (only) Wicked picture. And as far as I know, he's never made a mainstream movie, by which one could judge the results without the crutch of XXX content to fall back on.
Diminutive Sable is appealing, though doesn't strike me as a porn star, her nearest equivalent being Chastity Lynn a decade later. The other girls are all talented and arousing, while Masterson is genuinely moving in the central part. How one reacts to Evan's unfettered antics is a matter of taste.
As in his more elaborate feature "Melt', Stanley includes some nifty special effects which add to the movie's overall impact. I hope to watch all of David's films, as he is one pornographer who is serious about his writing - a rare commodity in the Age of Gonzo.
