Hospital

Studio: Vivid-Alt
Director: Benny Profane
Cast: Mandy Morbid, Zak Sabbath, Caroline Pierce, Benny Profane, Sochee Mala, Coco Velvett, Marie McCrae

Mandy Morbid wakes up, pantsless, in a hospital to which she has been committed, she later learns, for her sexual deviance and drug addiction. But the lunatics are running the asylum and, though she would probably benefit from some eclectic therapeutic milieu, her current managed care environment is not salutogenic.

For one thing, the nurses Morbid spots upon waking (Caroline Pierce and Sochee Mala, who observes of Pierce’s mesmerizing [parts collection: “it looks like a hot pie cooling on a window seal”) are engaged in some item-stacking exercise that seems pointless unless the goal is to look up each other’s skirts, which they do, and more. Morbid can’t help herself as she watches. She needs to rub one out. WHAT IS HAPPENING TO HER?Then they force the already-clean Morbid into the shower, where she is obliged to writhe.

When the mad doctor Benny Profane arrives, he suggests a session of trepanning to cure her of her ills – and Morbid’s hairdo certainly suggests that a pre-trepanation shaving won’t be necessary – but she manages to escape.

Along the way we get an idea through flashbacks why Morbid was sent to the hospital. She and her hoodlum boyfriend, Zak Sabbath, scam people like Kimberly Kane out of cash and into thinking that Morbid is pregnant. As the movie was released during the Sarah and Bristol Palin pregnancy controversy, Hospital could not be more timely.

The movie has its ahare of sight gags and memorable bits of dialogue. Marie McCrae seduces the affable Daniel as the latter appears to be playing a videogame but is actually staring into a burning television. Profane helps himself to an excellent monologue before he is put out of commission by a pencil, and the rescuing Sabbath utters a line familiar to anyone eager to jump off the wagon: “Looks like you’re about to have a relapse.”

When Morbid escapes from her bonds she quickly and joylessly leaps back into the very behavior that sent her there, but what did you expect? It’s not like she stayed long enough for Profane’s course of treatment to work.

Even though porn never really had a soul, the so-called altporn movement defined itself in contrast to what was quickly becoming a standard issue Porn Valley style of bleached and augmented porn performer. People like Matt Zane and Benny Profane, as well as websites like BlueBlood.net, championed the type of porn girl who didn’t come off as addlepated and accessible as her Porn Valley counterpart. Instead she was pierced, tattooed, kohl-eyed and actively post-feminist.

Profane’s Psychocandy series, which he sold from the back of his car, was a textboook example of DIY porn filmmaking from the attitudes of the models to the barebones filmmaking and distribution.

But when altporn began to be heavily commoditized in the past few years, many of its filmmakers forgot that bigger budgets required the production to look more competent. Back when the movie was being made out of some garage it was allright if it looked all Dogma ’95, but when Vivid purchased a strain of VCA altporn in 2005, people began to wonder where the larger budgets were going, because they certainly didn’t show in some of the films.

Profane’s Hospital at first seemed like an unholy union of his talent with a label known for its poseur aesthetic but, like Winkytiki’s ReBelle Rousers and Dave Naz’ circa ’82, Hospital succeeds because it is its own thing, a movie that doesn’t really owe anything to anyone.

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