Harder

I suppose I'm the only one here in Video Land who cares, but this extremely poor Inari Vachs "comeback" vehicle, shot in 2010 after the superstar's 5-year hiatus from the porn wars, garnered 3 AVN nominations for the year, including an accolade for best director to the thoroughly incompetent "Joshua". So A & E money evidently changed hands to effectuate such nonsense.

Instead of award-caliber entertainment, one gets a half-baked, seriously undernourished attempt at pantomime sci-fi. As "Joshua" tells us in the BTS short subject, Vachs portrays a test subject for a scientific experiment, in which she enters an all-white set (recall George Lucas's classic debut feature "THX 1138") in which she sequentially enters doors numbered 1 through 5 in a cube-shaped environment, and humps the folks inside. That's it -no sci-fi, no dialog, no nothing. "Joshua" sums up his high-concept: it starts with lesbian sex and ends with a d.p.: the sex getting HARDER.

As a card-carrying Vachs fan who watches virtually everything she set to celluloid, I was glad to see her, up to a point. I kept waiting for something to happen beyond witnessing for the umpteenth time her skills in the sack and trademark soft moans of pleasure that are to subtlety what Teri Weigel's artificial shrieks are to excess. But after the second or third scene it became apparent that "Joshua", far from the walls of Jericho but instead in some cramped Chatsworth studio, had nothing up his sleeve and was prepared to grind out generic porn till the cows came home.

So, regardless of what AVN's scribes voted 6 years ago, Inari's three- way with a thoroughly bored duo of Tommy Gunn and Jack Vegas is 100% dullsville, and even her Sapphic tryst with new contract girl Teagan Presley is merely mechanical sex, lesbo division. It all ends with Vachs looking up toward the ceiling and then staring knowingly into the camera, perhaps pondering if A & E brass have cut her paycheck yet so she can cash it and head home in a hurry like a good little trouper.