Little Runaway 2

Studio: Powersville
Director: Jim Powers
Cast: Daisy Tanks, Desire Moore, Scarlett Pain, Paris Gables, Holly Wellin, Rob Rotten, Drehyden, Jenner

Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot

One of my favorite directors is Jim Powers, whose punk rock and pop culture sensibilities always find a way into any movie he directs.

But he always stays removed enough so that his earnestness never backfires on him. In other words, he never succumbs to the notion that he’s making art when he’s in the entertainment business.

That is not to say that the non-porn elements of his movies aren’t compelling; in fact, they are usually the most watchable non-porn scenes in porn. They are just not redolent of the director’s need to justify his career in Filth.

Sometimes the pendulum swings so far back into the “entertainment” category that he leaves the camera on during painful backstage episodes. His Porn’s Most Outrageous Outtakes series captures many of these, but porn is such a playground of morbidity in general that there’s an undercurrent of it in every movie he does. If fans of mainstream porn call what he does exploitive, he might argue that all porn is exploitive.

So what does somebody like Powers do when he makes a movie around a subject – punk rock – that he genuinely cares about? Little Runaway 2 is definitely a dirtier, sexier movie – the sex scenes, anyway – than any of the altporn Powers in his press releases compares it to, although companies criticizing “Alt” at this point (Adam & Eve’s Independent Adult Cinema has been doing it recently) is like beating a dead horse.

A series of scenes revolving around last year’s Punkfest 2007, Little Runaway 2 features people with the hair and the wardrobe and tattoos that seem more integral to their personalities than the poseurware Powers et al have an issue with.

Daisy Tanks, Scarlett Pain, and Paris Gables really walk the walk and fuck the fuck, rutting in dirty warehouses, buses, and on questionable mattresses. The movie also features performances by several angrily aging punk bands, including Powers’ own, Killroy.

I could have done without these performances, but real fans of SoCal punk, especially those who wouldn’t normally buy porn movies, might well love this as a pretty reliable document. In the behind the scenes featurette Powers captures drunkenness and belligerence, as per usual, and Rob Rotten’s scenes with Daisy Tanks and Scarlett Pain made me think of alleys and back rooms of every dive-y, dangerous club I’ve ever found my feet sticking to the floor of. And that’s a good feeling.

But the “Clockwork Orange” riff at the beginning of the movie falls flat; I’m sure there was a reason to use those Kubrickian sets and costumes beyond their availability from The Violation of Chelsie Rae, but availability of the sets seemed the primary reason.

(And the droogs in the previous movie were women, which was a plus.)

In the end, Powers is filming his friends, with some sex representative of their lifestyle thrown in. In that I would want to do similar things to Scarlett Pain as Rob Rotten does, Little Runaway 2 reaches into my Gordon Lightfoot/Ronnie James Dio world and makes me regret tossing out that mattress I got scabies on.