The redoubtable team of B. Skow and David Stanley, former enfants terribles, are now more of pranksters than serious filmmakers in the Adult industry, which has supplanted their narrative efforts with gonzo, gonzo, all the time gonzo of late. This 2014 release was out of step for its pretentious content, and catching up with it a couple of years late I was mighty horrified.
That's because Stanley is dealing with a painfully serious subject ("ripped from the headlines") of the cult-flavored kidnappings which have robbed young women of their adolescence and childhood. Elizabeth Smart is the most famous, and the threesome in captivity in Cleveland (rescued in 2013, likely prompting Stanley's pen to paper) still fresh in our memories. In a mainstream movie or TV-movie it is nearly impossible to convey the horror of the situation while maintaining acceptable "standards and practices" to use the current broadcast censorship euphemism.
Stanley and Skow, in their hundreds of porn features made separately or as a team, like to flout such standards and often comically mock good taste. It doesn't work at all here, just alienating the viewer, or conversely, putting the viewer in the position of a pervert for "enjoying" this sadistic exercise -typically the way many pornographers have behaved regarding their consumer base dating back to the '60s soft-core Friedmans and Novaks.
Heroine Jessie Andrews is subjected to over two hours of abuse, for fun and profit. It's one of her crummiest "story-line" roles, and would have been played over a decade earlier by the likes of Julie Meadows, or if Skow & Stanley had waited a year, by Piper Perri. She plays it mainly mute and passive, but I really hated what was being perpetrated on her - the narrative had to be stronger and more convincing to justify this exploitation (there's that abused word again).
Worse yet, Kurt Lockwood, sporting an amazingly ruddy tan which fits his title role as the metaphorical/literal "Gardener", hams it up insufferably, in order to remind us each and every nanosecond how evil he truly is. God forbid the Skow/Stanley team film a Charles Manson story -they are way out of their depth in depicting perversion other than endorsing it for a quick buck. (I note that Will Ryder, king of parody crap, has made a Manson XXX video already, using several of this film's cast members.)
Of course there are talented femmes doing the XXX thing including AJ Applegate, Karla Kush, Maddy O'Reilly (she gets a sloppy "Maddy O Riely" on- screen credit) and a miscast favorite of Skow's, Nadia Styles (way too old and unattractive for a kidnapee to replace Jessie), but that's not enough. Overlong feature's fatal flaw is that the action scenes are all clumsy beyond belief (backyard amateur filmmaking time) and the necessary violence suppressed out of a timidity borne by latter-day pornographers' fear of prosecution for mixing sex & violence in their work (BDSM excluded for some reason I can't fathom).
Having seen dozens of Stanley's films as writer and/or director (and planning to see them all eventually) I'm still stumped as to his level of seriousness and artistic integrity. For "Gardener" he falls back on a conclusion of corny, sickly sentimentality that doesn't fit at all with the 2-1/2 hours preceding. Is it tongue-in- cheek? Is it insulting? Or is it merely an "all's well that ends well" cop-out to a frankly disgusting excuse for porn "entertainment"? We'll never know because I wouldn't trust him to give a straight answer (or any answer) to that question.
As for Skow, he's moved on to commit himself wholeheartedly to gonzo content, and it's frankly terrible (based on my sampling of his various lame series like "A Gonzo Story", "Sexually Explicit", "1 Room 4 Girls" and self-perpetuating "New Faces"). The sloppy release of this Girlfriends Films picture has Eric John properly credited as "Clarence" (opposite Clover) in the Chapter Menu displays, but the end credits list Bruce Venture instead, clearly wrong as The Animal Bruce does not show up for work in the final print.
That's because Stanley is dealing with a painfully serious subject ("ripped from the headlines") of the cult-flavored kidnappings which have robbed young women of their adolescence and childhood. Elizabeth Smart is the most famous, and the threesome in captivity in Cleveland (rescued in 2013, likely prompting Stanley's pen to paper) still fresh in our memories. In a mainstream movie or TV-movie it is nearly impossible to convey the horror of the situation while maintaining acceptable "standards and practices" to use the current broadcast censorship euphemism.
Stanley and Skow, in their hundreds of porn features made separately or as a team, like to flout such standards and often comically mock good taste. It doesn't work at all here, just alienating the viewer, or conversely, putting the viewer in the position of a pervert for "enjoying" this sadistic exercise -typically the way many pornographers have behaved regarding their consumer base dating back to the '60s soft-core Friedmans and Novaks.
Heroine Jessie Andrews is subjected to over two hours of abuse, for fun and profit. It's one of her crummiest "story-line" roles, and would have been played over a decade earlier by the likes of Julie Meadows, or if Skow & Stanley had waited a year, by Piper Perri. She plays it mainly mute and passive, but I really hated what was being perpetrated on her - the narrative had to be stronger and more convincing to justify this exploitation (there's that abused word again).
Worse yet, Kurt Lockwood, sporting an amazingly ruddy tan which fits his title role as the metaphorical/literal "Gardener", hams it up insufferably, in order to remind us each and every nanosecond how evil he truly is. God forbid the Skow/Stanley team film a Charles Manson story -they are way out of their depth in depicting perversion other than endorsing it for a quick buck. (I note that Will Ryder, king of parody crap, has made a Manson XXX video already, using several of this film's cast members.)
Of course there are talented femmes doing the XXX thing including AJ Applegate, Karla Kush, Maddy O'Reilly (she gets a sloppy "Maddy O Riely" on- screen credit) and a miscast favorite of Skow's, Nadia Styles (way too old and unattractive for a kidnapee to replace Jessie), but that's not enough. Overlong feature's fatal flaw is that the action scenes are all clumsy beyond belief (backyard amateur filmmaking time) and the necessary violence suppressed out of a timidity borne by latter-day pornographers' fear of prosecution for mixing sex & violence in their work (BDSM excluded for some reason I can't fathom).
Having seen dozens of Stanley's films as writer and/or director (and planning to see them all eventually) I'm still stumped as to his level of seriousness and artistic integrity. For "Gardener" he falls back on a conclusion of corny, sickly sentimentality that doesn't fit at all with the 2-1/2 hours preceding. Is it tongue-in- cheek? Is it insulting? Or is it merely an "all's well that ends well" cop-out to a frankly disgusting excuse for porn "entertainment"? We'll never know because I wouldn't trust him to give a straight answer (or any answer) to that question.
As for Skow, he's moved on to commit himself wholeheartedly to gonzo content, and it's frankly terrible (based on my sampling of his various lame series like "A Gonzo Story", "Sexually Explicit", "1 Room 4 Girls" and self-perpetuating "New Faces"). The sloppy release of this Girlfriends Films picture has Eric John properly credited as "Clarence" (opposite Clover) in the Chapter Menu displays, but the end credits list Bruce Venture instead, clearly wrong as The Animal Bruce does not show up for work in the final print.