“Twilight Zone” porn parody OK, but not a Serling achievement

The problem with this gig sometimes is that, if you don’t unabashedly praise certain porn directors as groundbreaking geniuses, you are a prudish and sex-negative square who doesn’t recognize porn for the art form it is. And if you criticize the acting, script, soundtrack, or continuity, you’ve got too much time on your hands, are a chronic masturbator, are jealous, and are really taking this thing way too seriously.

I’m not saying that Paul Thomas, the longtime and heralded former Vivid director now distributing his Cinnamon Films through Larry Flynt’s LFP imprint, would have so thin a skin as to react with hostility to constructive criticism, so I feel comfortable saying “The Twilight Zone: A Porn Parody” is a good movie flawed by a distracting lack of attention to detail.

Studio: Hustler
Director: Paul Thomas
Starring: Kimberly Kane, Evan Stone, Jessica Jaymes, Chayse Evans, Kylee Reese, Eric Masterson, Jack Lawrence

There’s a new couple in the neighborhood, and their sexually suspect ways threaten to tear the close-knit, God-fearing community apart. But before that can happen, “The Twilight Zone: A Porn Parody” almost derails itself.

Prim housewife Kimberly Kane is strolling through her peaceful neighborhood when (as the Rod Serlingesque voiceover says), “at the sound of the woman’s orgasm, it’s 7:43.” We think, “it doesn’t look that late. Look! The sun is too high in the sky for it to be 7:43, and the soundtrack birds are chirping the wrong way. Oh shit! I’m being taken out of the picture!”

Through the wide-open front door, she enters the house from which the moan emanated and introduces herself (with a last name that no one else says the same way throughout the rest of the movie) to stone-faced new neighbor Jessica Jaymes, who explains she was taking a bath.

Kane leaves the way she came and we hear the sound of a door closing behind her, although the door is still open, and Jaymes goes back to her bedroom, where she explains to husband Evan Stone that she just met the new neighbor. Stone, who has not left the bedroom and hasn’t met Kane, remarks that she seems delightful. Jaymes says Kane probably wouldn’t understand why they were having sex in the “middle of the afternoon.”

Three little nitpicky errors in the first three minutes of the movie don’t bode well, especially if there hasn’t been any sex yet.

Kane bumps into Reverend Morgan (Eric Masterson) and tells him she forgot to tell the new neighbors about church, and then goes home where her husband, Eric Swiss, is reading a cleverly-disguised Life magazine with Clark Gable on the cover, setting our time period to 1961.

Swiss says he’s reading about the sexual revolution, swinging, and oral sex. He can’t believe they print this filth.

That night-for-day, Rev. Morgan peeps on a nude Jaymes.

So far, this movie doesn’t seem like a “Twilight Zone” episode at all, more like the safe boilerplate late-nite cable porn attack on repressed mid-century American values, but for an easy Rod Serling voiceover wraparound.

But the movie gets better.

Later, the ladies’ sewing bee turns suggestive, with Kane and Jaymes exchanging glances over a pincushion and Chayse Evans and Kylee Reese squealing over a black dildo one of them bought at the “discount liquor store on the east side.” The latter two can’t help themselves, and treat themselves to a Sapphic session complete with boob jobs and tattoos, circa Cuban Missile Crisis.

Kane and Evans share a fun moment when, sneaking peaks at Reese’s son’s girlie magazine, Kane’s vibrator falls out of her handbag and whirs across the wooden floor. Then the guys’ poker night becomes fraught with portent when they discuss swinging with Evan Stone.

As it becomes clear that the new neighbors’ presence is causing a chain reaction through the street, “The Twilight Zone” becomes a little more like “Mad Men,” with Kane’s and Kylee Reese’s acting coming off as especially natural. Reese shares a scene with Jack Lawrence that reads like a value-added daytime drama.

“Maybe we both married the wrong person,” she says.

But even as the relationships in the neighborhood start collapsing, and even the Reverend succumbs to Jessica Jaymes (“that was unexpected,” says her husband), we just wish that opportunities to get jarred out of the movie wouldn’t keep presenting themselves. Why is there erotic statuary on Kane’s wall? Why does she let the Reverend talk to her as she’s getting dressed? Why does she mention Eisenhower when Kennedy is now the president? Why didn’t director Thomas get someone to pull all the anachronistic books off the bookshelf (like 1973’s “Sybil”) for fuck’s sake?

“It only takes an instant for a man to recognize evil,” says the Reverend, and it only took an instant for me to recognize “Sybil.”

It could be argued that the ending is reminiscent of “Twilight Zone,” but I have a strong feeling that this script was written as another movie entirely and a Rod Serling voiceover was tacked on either end at the last minute. Regardless, but for the minor annoyances, “The Twilight Zone” porn parody follows the theme of much of Thomas’ free love era-inspired ouevre: Sexual repression fucks people up.

As ambivalent as I felt about this movie, at least it made me think; it took me twice as long to write the review because I felt the need to track down that Life cover and “Sybil”‘s publication date.

Buy “Twilight Zone: A Porn Parody” here

Previously on Porn Valley Observed: “The New Neighbors“; Matthew, Mark, “Throat,” and johns
See also: Hustler