SugarBabies: A Cautionary Tale
- Video
- 2016
- 2h 9m
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Featured review
Think before you shoot
Evidently the first Stills & Mills production for the new Gamma label PrettyDirty, "SugarBabies" is an ill-conceived porn video that really misses the point.
Bree and Alan, both credited as writers though no scripted dialog is evident by the amateurish conversations we are treated to, base their story on the notion that "all whores were sugar babies once". This slippery slope argument, which conjured up the Roaring Twenties in my mind with flappers living off rich sugar daddies who look like the logo character of the Monopoly board game, is ridiculous.
But more significantly, in a poorly delivered (improv dialog) diatribe by male lead Jessy Jones angry at girl friend Penny Pax for attempting to pay her nursing school student loans with a sugar daddy check from slime-ball James Deen, makes the underlying theme crystal clear, though Mills, Stills and the cast seem not to have noticed it. He's all exercised because she "sold your body for sex", an inarticulate phrasing but still suggestive.
The fact is that if one is criticizing sex workers for their profession, even in this typically tongue-in-cheek, facetious fashion, what about the porn industry and its sex workers, call them performers or models or whatever euphemism is in vogue now that "actor" is no longer relevant in the age of gonzo, and the film's premise falls apart completely. We are spending two hours watching sex workers in porn hump each other, mouth inane platitudes thought up on the spot, and pretending it is a drama.
Pax unfortunately is called on to cry and whine and get all sentimental, way beyond her acting abilities. An idiotic notion dreamed up by Bree and Alan that she's saddled with is: why not try a sex change on the currently popular niche porn genre of Cuckolding, in which some guy, usually a nerdy white fellow, is forced to watch his wife humping some stud, often a Black dude, as humiliation that the target audience of lonely guys out there in video land can identify with.
So after Pax earns her tuition by humping Deen and his kinky, strap-on-dildo at the ready wife Chanel Preston at their mansion, the degraded young woman (you can tell she's suffered by her runny mascara) returns home to be abused physically and emotionally by boyfriend Jessy, who has spent the money he was saving to help her out on a hooker instead, statuesque Jaclyn Taylor. Pax must watch, tied up in bondage yet, Jessy humping bosomy Jaclyn, oh the horror! Scene doesn't play at all, because the notion of "female cuckold", while theoretically plausible, simply isn't' useful porno fodder.
Tiring of this junk, the second half of the film takes a nastier turn with cute Jade Nile, far more convincing as a youngster than Pax who has already graduated to mother of an adult child roles (see the execrable B. Skow feature "Mother's Little Helper"), having a sugar daddy of her own, rock star Xander Corvus. He's a nasty guy who like Deen needs fresh meat.
Texting Jade he insists she find him a virgin, or else. Without much deliberation, Jade decides her virginal sister Rebel Lynn, a lovely jail-bait actress, will fill the bill, but hearkening back to Stills & Mills' prime directive of promoting or shall I say exploiting lesbian sex, Jade insists on giving sis a trial run herself. It's crypto-incest, as in the Bree & Alan universe all sisters are step-sisters and all mommas are step-moms.
Xander is pleased with the nubile gift and feature ends in the most predictable fashion after he humps Rebel, which I will not disclose in the spirit of IMDb's spoiler policy. You figure it out.
All of this nonsense could have been avoided by hiring a professional scriptwriter, just like they did back in the Golden Age of Adult Cinema. But with gonzo ruling supreme in the 21st Century, who needs one?
Bree and Alan, both credited as writers though no scripted dialog is evident by the amateurish conversations we are treated to, base their story on the notion that "all whores were sugar babies once". This slippery slope argument, which conjured up the Roaring Twenties in my mind with flappers living off rich sugar daddies who look like the logo character of the Monopoly board game, is ridiculous.
But more significantly, in a poorly delivered (improv dialog) diatribe by male lead Jessy Jones angry at girl friend Penny Pax for attempting to pay her nursing school student loans with a sugar daddy check from slime-ball James Deen, makes the underlying theme crystal clear, though Mills, Stills and the cast seem not to have noticed it. He's all exercised because she "sold your body for sex", an inarticulate phrasing but still suggestive.
The fact is that if one is criticizing sex workers for their profession, even in this typically tongue-in-cheek, facetious fashion, what about the porn industry and its sex workers, call them performers or models or whatever euphemism is in vogue now that "actor" is no longer relevant in the age of gonzo, and the film's premise falls apart completely. We are spending two hours watching sex workers in porn hump each other, mouth inane platitudes thought up on the spot, and pretending it is a drama.
Pax unfortunately is called on to cry and whine and get all sentimental, way beyond her acting abilities. An idiotic notion dreamed up by Bree and Alan that she's saddled with is: why not try a sex change on the currently popular niche porn genre of Cuckolding, in which some guy, usually a nerdy white fellow, is forced to watch his wife humping some stud, often a Black dude, as humiliation that the target audience of lonely guys out there in video land can identify with.
So after Pax earns her tuition by humping Deen and his kinky, strap-on-dildo at the ready wife Chanel Preston at their mansion, the degraded young woman (you can tell she's suffered by her runny mascara) returns home to be abused physically and emotionally by boyfriend Jessy, who has spent the money he was saving to help her out on a hooker instead, statuesque Jaclyn Taylor. Pax must watch, tied up in bondage yet, Jessy humping bosomy Jaclyn, oh the horror! Scene doesn't play at all, because the notion of "female cuckold", while theoretically plausible, simply isn't' useful porno fodder.
Tiring of this junk, the second half of the film takes a nastier turn with cute Jade Nile, far more convincing as a youngster than Pax who has already graduated to mother of an adult child roles (see the execrable B. Skow feature "Mother's Little Helper"), having a sugar daddy of her own, rock star Xander Corvus. He's a nasty guy who like Deen needs fresh meat.
Texting Jade he insists she find him a virgin, or else. Without much deliberation, Jade decides her virginal sister Rebel Lynn, a lovely jail-bait actress, will fill the bill, but hearkening back to Stills & Mills' prime directive of promoting or shall I say exploiting lesbian sex, Jade insists on giving sis a trial run herself. It's crypto-incest, as in the Bree & Alan universe all sisters are step-sisters and all mommas are step-moms.
Xander is pleased with the nubile gift and feature ends in the most predictable fashion after he humps Rebel, which I will not disclose in the spirit of IMDb's spoiler policy. You figure it out.
All of this nonsense could have been avoided by hiring a professional scriptwriter, just like they did back in the Golden Age of Adult Cinema. But with gonzo ruling supreme in the 21st Century, who needs one?
helpful•10
- lor_
- Sep 6, 2016
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- Sugar Babies: A Cautionary Tale
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- Runtime2 hours 9 minutes
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