Psychocandy IV

Welcome to the fourth installment of Benny Profane’s DIY porn Psychocandy, in which women Benny thinks are cute get invited to his house over the course of a year when funds allow, Rilke is quoted, and Transformers are fetishized as much as the usual suspects.

Watching a Benny Profane movie is like patronizing a Mom & Pop(shot) store; there’s things in there you won’t find anywhere else, but you have to get used to the fact that everything isn’t where you expect it.

For those of you who’ve wondered how sex bloggers do it, wait no longer. East Coast intellectual Audacia Ray stops by Profane’s place and she fucks him, Viagra-free, with her glasses on and her hair in her trademark sensible bun array. She’s pale and full-figured by porn standards, and looks like a woman who got a job at the library while her dungeon was being painted.

The final shot of their scene made me vaguely uncomfortable in the way all gratuitous cum-consumption shots do; after the popshot, well framed on Ray’s belly, the camera edges in closer and closer until all we see is a viscous, bulby landscape of pubes and semen. What is Profane trying to tell us?

“The Plasma Twins”, a section featuring Profane and an uncharacteristically brunette Zoe Matthews, is notable not only for its “Bolero” soundtrack but also for Matthews’distinct resemblance to the missing porn link. She looks partly like the proto Eon McKai model but partly like a real-live girl. She wears fishnets and heels, sure, but maybe it’s dress-up day at the Costco where she works.

This scene is particularly poignant. It is the oldest of the scenes and is the least practiced. There’s a lot of laughing from both performers.

Caroline Pierce’s “Geisha Mermaid” scene was shot around the time she appeared in Profane’s VCA movie Barbed Wire Kiss. Aside from themes of heroin use and the Tarot, this scene might have been part of Barbed Wire Kiss – it was shot by the same camera person, too.

Except in Psychocandy 4 the scene between Pierce and Profane seems to have more feeling. There’s more hugging going on. Pierce smiles a lot. What’s refreshing about the movie thus far is that the only person who does any sort of porn star mugging is, of all people, Audacia Ray, who hadn’t performed in a porn scene before.

Throughout the movie, which was filmed over two years, there are random mid-scene lighting adjustments and camera flashes. As Profane appears to prefer women whose pallor matches his own, there is also a problem with frequent oversaturation.

This didn’t matter to me; I think it made them all look like angels.

The final, Moria-themed scene, moved to a second disc due to the longer-than-standard duration of each of the previous vignettes features Sexy Lexi. Lexi is like all the female performers on the previous disc Brundlefly’d together. She is pale, heavier than porn standard, bespectacled, and tattoed. Her tattoo? A horsie. There’s also a butterfly.

Lexi’s scene is anticlimactic, however, in that it lacks the fun of other pairings. Bonus scenes with each of the girls, mostly shot in Profane’s kitchen, are all about the director worshiping his castmates.

In addition to his website, Profane sells these movies out of the back of his car. They are like folk art. Let’s hope enough people support their local pornographer so that the next Psychocandy doesn’t take two more years to arrive.