Studio: Wicked
Director: Brad Armstrong
Cast: Kaylani Lei, Shyla Stylez, Victoria Sin, Mikayla, Devon Lee, Jennifer Dark, Brad Armstrong, Tommy Gunn, Deep Threat, Niko, Barrett Blade, Derrick Pierce, Marcus London
Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot
“Some say the path we take is guided by Fate or unseen forces,” intones Lei in the voiceover, which is immediately reminiscent of the sort of stylish, formulaic, safe, and empty Skinemax porn Wicked produces so well
How does one become a hooker accidentally? Well, if you looked like Kaylani Lei and you were walking down Hollywood Boulevard dressed to enhance all your Kaylani Leitude whilst absently sucking your soft drink from a straw, it would be within reason for the common passerby to at least hope you were a hooker.
And the passerby would be right, because hooker Lei is en route to an interview about how she became a hooker accidentally. Turns out she met a dude, Marcus (Armstrong), online who wasted no time sampling the goods once they finally met.
“He didn’t seem to be an axe murderer or anything,” Lei recalled. Waking up alone, Lei was surprised to find $500 by her bedside.
Was she a hooker? Who knows. Marcus invites her to L.A. and at the airport she is greeted by a limousine containing not Marcus by instead a man named Deep Threat.
“Little did I know that it would change my life – ” says Lei in the voiceover.
(wait for it)
” – forever.”
“I realized I crossed a line,” she says.
(wait for it)
” – that could never be uncrossed.”
Also:
“I had changed – “
(wait for it)
” – and this was only the beginning.”
Lei begins a crazy joyride of sex for money, immersing herself in “the life,” in which intimacy, commerce, and hedonism coexist in an uneasy colloidal stew – forever. She fucks other women, rich swains at the opera, guys at the car wash, couples, anything that pays.
Wicked cannot solve this problem, but in the scene with Shyla Stylez and Tommy Gunn as the couple Lei beds, the movie falls victim to something that happens in porn all the time: Stylez looks more like a hooker than the person playing a hooker. It’s like the Monty Python “Bicycle Repair Man” sketch, where everyone is a superhero.
But the highs become fewer and farther between.
“Every once in a while you ask yourself, ‘What am I doing?'” Lei tells her interviewer.
“Why don’t you just stop?” he asks.
“That’s easier said than done,” she says, blowing cigarette smoke. “You can’t just walk away. It’s in your blood. It’s what you know. It’s what you are. No matter how hard you try, you het sucked right back in. You’re in for life. And sometimes? That feels like an eternity.”
I hand it to Wicked for yet another unflinching look at the world of high-priced call girls this summer, the other being Latina Hollywood Hookers.
But just when you condemn Wicked for padding the script, you realize that all those (or most of those) sodden sentences work up to a twist ending reminiscent of that Tom Cruise Isn’t Gay Enough movie.
Like M. Night Shyamalan movies, the twist endings over the years have yielded diminished returns since The Sixth Sense. But this is porn, so we’ve got at least ten more years of them. So I’ll leave it to you to decide if the twist redeems the movie.
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