Models: The Truth Behind the Scenes

I don't know if filmmaker Kris Kramski has a following anymore (I missed his work when it was new two decades ago), but "Models" proves he's an auteur worth watching. This is far removed from the conventions of Adult films, and was most engrossing.

First off, Kramski creates and sustains a serious mood in which actual characterizations are developed, yet manages at the same time to have his players improvise and seem fresh in their talk and actions. It's quite a feat, given that Adult Cinema has generally veered between the two extremes of amateur-night, facetious "winging it" vs. mannered, pretend acting and pomposity.

James Bonn is an actor who does explicit porn rather than the usual porn stud who tries to act. He plays a cynical erotic photographer who clearly loves his work and life style but is world-weary nonetheless. With his photo assistant (Michael J. Cox) and make-up girl (the talented Tina Tyler), he mixes work with pleasure, the trio into free love. Quite different from the life-style porn of the master of the genre Paul Thomas, Kramski delves into the issues of oversexed people like these, a type that inhabits nearly every porn film or video but is more or less taken for granted given the "sex is all" mandate of the genre.

Photo shoots for various models, with explicit XXX poses and actual seguing into sex with the trio, makes of the episodic nature of the movie, shot on Fuji film stock rather than video (a big plus). One highlight is a two-girl shoot featuring one of Europe's greatest Adult actresses Anita Blond (her name misspelled and her featuring her usual black hairdo) and lesser-known blonde Diana Stevenson, who converse in untranslated Hungarian.

But the showstopper is a unique performer, sultry brunette Nancy Vee, who went mainstream one time for a bit part in Joel Schumacher's horrible "8MM" for Columbia Pictures. She plays a young woman who manages a rock band but needs a day job, hiring on as Bonn's secretary. Though a voyeuse, she resists his pleas to join the free sex club and make it a foursome at work, but her big masturbation scene is the stuff of legend.

Heading for the bathroom at Bonn's studio, Nancy uses a toilet brush's handle as a dildo and then adds the long handle of a toilet plunger into her posterior for a self-applied d.p. Tossing aside the brush, she applies herself whole-heartedly to the plunger, and I thought editing (with substitute size props) was being used to simulate her fitting its entire length into her asshole. But at the end of the scene, she removes it on camera and demonstrates that she had crammed over 2-feet of wood inside of her, followed by ATM action. This out-gonzos gonzo video yet is part of a story-line feature film.

Structure is interesting in that Nancy disappears from the movie, to run oversee her band full-time when they hit the big-time less than a week after joining Bonn's team, yet returns to say goodbye for the final reel and a satisfying four-person orgy (which the viewer had been expecting all along). Film ends with them celebrating by going off to a club to see her band perform, and their hedonistic life cycle applauded rather than given the expose treatment one would have expected from the film's full title.

Kramski also pays homage to a far more famous underground filmmaker Abel Ferrara in an explicit hypodermic injection scene recalling the breakthrough "shooting up" administered by Zoe Tamerlis/Lund in Abel's classic "Bad Lieutenant". Only this time it is germane to the XXX subject matter, as Tina shoots some substance on camera into the dick of scruffy model JD in order to artificially induce an erection in the hungover creep as he must get ready to hump Dru Berrymore for Bonn's still photo session. Kramski dedicates the movie to JD in honor of his going the extra mile of agreeing to this scene.

Berrymore is impressive in her anal sex scene, and another scene-stealer is Katie Gold, as a model who specializes in shots to please the jail- bait fan base, including a funny moment when Bonn rejects Tina's styling Gold's hair with pig-tails, afraid of censorship as that goes over his line in pretending to be way underage.