Jailhouse Jinx

Whenever I read about what viewing modern "pornography" means to the mainstream press I'm always confronted with the same old line-up of usual suspects: lousy acting, cheesy non-stop music, hilariously inappropriate dubbed moans and indifferent sex acts between two people just going through the motions. My normal reaction to reading this kind of stuff is: "When's the last time this clown sat down and actually watched one of these things? Don't they realize how times have changed and how far porno has come along from that raggedy cliche?" Well, ladies and gentlemen I must stand corrected, for I have finally found the piece of video all these writers must have seen that, until now, I had not.

The video is JAILHOUSE JINX, which the alluring cover art of Summer Cummings and Skye Blue almost fitting into their prison wardess outfits is quick to point out is directed by someone named John Dragon. You will find nobody else credited for anything on the cover (save the performers, pity them all), and if you survive viewing this disc all the way through you will discover absolutely no credits whatsoever save the opening title itself. Think of it as pride in craftsmanship in reverse amongst the almost-competent technicians who worked on this particular title as you question the sanity of a director who would want their name associated with offal like this. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's discuss the video at hand before I condemn it, for (with all due apologies to Shakespeare) I have come to praise John Dragon, not to bury him...

The supposed jailhouse set where the action begins (the iron bars of which are made out of a new kind of metal riddled with knot holes) is instantly drained of any verisimilitude or mood by the Miami Vice-lite music that kicks in and does not let up. When I say that someone has hit the play-button on a CD and walked away, I'm not kidding; each selection plays out until completion, complete with a three-second break until the next piece of completely inappropriate music starts up again.

Anyway, enter beefy Summer and demure Skye (an honest-to-goodness Betty Boop come to life!), who spend the next ten minutes undressing each other through the prison bars as said musical wallpaper continues to drone. Part of the boredom factor here is that we can't hear what they are saying to each other over the alleged music, which is sad as they verbally spar quite well in many of their other videos I have seen. When we finally do get to some action between these attractive but far-too-surgically enhanced ladies (does anyone really like breasts that large?!), it's not bad at all. A rather clever moment has Skye pulling a large dildo out of the cell's toilet tank, putting it on the end of her and penetrating Summer with it. Being a real-life couple, they generate what feels like some honest heat as they stuff each other with more dildos and a nightstick that ends up in Skye's pussy and her ass (though an abrupt music edit makes me wonder if something unsavory has been removed here?). The ladies are so energetic and crazy with fuck-energy they even climb onto the bars and screw each other while still dangling a few feet off the ground in various impressive positions. Pity the cameraperson can't get decent coverage of unique moments like this.

Finally going at each other with considerable heat, Skye handcuffs her foot to Summer's hand and...and...and we suddenly fade to black at the 39-minute mark of an 90 minute video. Huh?! Then we then fade up to an entirely new location with a woman we've never seen before (a generic trollop named Meridian, as the DVD cover kindly informs us), as she descends a spiral staircase into a beautiful medieval castle motif living room (complete with thick red carpet). Hmmm. Okay. So I'm now I'm waiting for Summer and Skye to show up and arrest her, but no such thing happens. Wondering how I got from there to here, I try to clear my mind and get back into the video and see where it'll take me next.

15 minutes later, after Meridian gets undressed and masturbates with some toys, we fade to black again, and this time fade up to find Meridian and Peter North walking outside of a faux castle tower. They walk through this lovely house for far-too-long a while (a cool view of the Hollywood sign in the distance) clearly having a conversation, but there is no production audio here, only more of the same music we've been enduring for the previous 55 minutes. Out on a balcony, the two of them put on a broad-daylight free show for the entire California Valley below, a strictly-by-the-numbers fuck and suck session that achieves all the standard positions with none of the possible thrills. Absolutely dead average at best, and that's not good. Even the brief tush tunneling and obligatory cumshot are yawn inducing contractual obligations. Since no live audio was used even for the sexual activities, we are treated to a couple of poorly dubbed moans that sync up with nothing in particular, making lip-reading of such things as "Yeah, fuck my ass" one of the few pleasures left to indulge at this point.

What can I say about a video like this, where competency is the highest goal set by those involved, and even that lowly mark is not achieved? To call a crass venture like this "average" gives this soulless piece of junk too much credit; it gives "average" a bad name, and those who have perpetrated this would be all too proud to have it raised to the level of being an acceptable, run-of-the-mill porno video.

Alas, I shall give them no such satisfaction. In keeping with the overall quality of the disc (the image is riddled with the occasional video dropout which cruelly reveals its Betacam origins), there is a menu choice of other available titles that reveals two other Xplicit releases; or their DVD covers anyway, as putting actual trailers might have revealed their similarly lacking content.