Alpha 15: Reform School Girls

Studio: VCA
Director: Cat P.
Cast: Justine Joli, Jezebelle Bond, Vanessa Lynn, Daisy Layne, Hailey Young, Jayna Oso, Gia Jordan, Genesis Skye, Hollie Stevens

Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot

Hot on the heels of the dispiriting news that Pluto is no longer a planet did Alpha 15: Reform School Girls arrive in my inbox. Why was Jezebelle Bond on the cover if Justine Joli was the star? Why had the name been shortened from its Alanis Morrisette-worthy length to describe Alpha 15 as a reform school when the opening sequence calls it a prison?

More to the point: Why was the movie so bad?

The Ron Royster era at VCA was a heady time, filled with intrigue and shenanigans. Royster put together an earnest, hard-working crew and produced three movies: Atomic Vixens, Benny Profane’s Barbed Wire Kiss, and finally, Cat P.’s Alpha 15.

From the beginning, there seemed to be an Artists vs. Corporate America vibe in the Royster camp, and LFP decisions like changing the cover model and the title would seem to bear this out, but this movie is a train wreck from start to finish, and LFP is only at fault insofar as it released it.

From the comma-filled expository roll that lets us know we are both in a futuristic society and that it is the year 2969, to the poorly-lit prison scenes with the sounds of the director in the background, to the deliberately unsexy (and why would you do that in a porn movie?) images of “Big Sister”, the movie didn’t seem directed and produced as much as it appeared scraped off the windshield.

Cat P. shot behind-the-scenes footage for other Royster movies, including an informative, heavy-handed, and earnest documentary about her introduction to the porn business. This movie, on the other hand, does a backhanded service to porn in general by proving that making a good adult film isn’t as easy as picking up a camera and getting $25k for locations, cast, and salaries.

It is a monumentally bad movie. You should watch it just to see how bad it is.

Now the good parts:

The cover. Whenever a porn movie is shot, there is a professional on-set photographer who is usually independent of the film crew. Fotog Kaden took this tasty but, in the context of the movie, unrepresentative shot of Jezebelle Bond.

The cast. This was clearly a movie for which the first thought was, “I’d like to see {insert name} naked; how do we make that happen?” Joli, Bond, Hollie Stevens, Genesis Skye, Hailey Young, and Jayna Oso look great.

Joli’s scene with Genesis Skye in the shower. Probably because there was a light on in the room.

The rest of the movie. If you liked the night-vision, done-in-secret aspect of auteur Rick Solomon’s “1 Night in Paris”, this movie is for you.

The bonus disc. Antonio Passolini’s Lezbo a go-go is worth the price of admission, in the same way the best thing about King Kong was the Spiderman 3 trailer.