Dana Vespoli hits a home run first time at bat with "The Devil Is in the Details", her first crack at directing a boy/boy hardcore porn feature, for the same parent company (Mile High out of Quebec) for whom she has shot scores of girl/girl films in recent years.
I was especially thrilled to see that Dana was working through the same signature themes of her boy/girl and lesbian films such as "Hollywood Babylon" and "Lesbian Stepmother" in this Gay Porn format. She is concerned with the decadence and cynicism pervasive in La La Land, seen from the perspective of a near-insider, from the Adult end of the Entertainment industry.
Naive and full of high hopes, our hero played by newcomer Andy Banks arrives in L.A. from a small town in the South with wife Penny Pax in tow, invited to a big-deal job interview at the law firm headed by Adam Russo. He lands the job specializing in copyright infringement and intellectual property rights with big salary and perks, but there's something odd about Russo's all-knowing, cynical spiel to him.
Smarmy co-worker Nick Capra tells the new employee "We function better as a boy's club" and it becomes clear that perhaps our green protagonist is getting in over his head. He witnesses his boss having sex in the office with bear of a colleague Billy Santoro, adding a homosexual connotation to the milieu.
Things come to a head, literally, when Capra rapes the young boy, though in a porn film this is played as consensual after the first few seconds. Turns out to be only a nightmare, as Andy wakes up in bed beside a sleeping Penny. I liked the touch that Nick is wearing only black sox in the dream, just like stag film players of old.
Throughout Dana stresses the growing disillusionment, as we see how crass and mean-spirited are these high-rolling guys, who seem to have no redeeming qualities. Makes me wish that she'll follow up with a dissection of those Masters of the Universe and hedge fund monsters in my neck of the woods, NYC.
I had christened the endlessly used porn shoot location as the "Immoral Proposal" mansion after seeing it in the Mile High release by that name (directed by Nica Noelle, who started this Gay label Icon Male that Dana's filming for), and what could be a more appropriate site for the film's key scene.
Boss Adam invites the boy to his mansion where he proposes the classic Faustian bargain to him. Yes, Adam is the devil incarnate, suggested more by the dialog than the very minor SPFX at film's end. He has Andy watch a weird ritual, as two guys (Vittorio Nexos and Jay Johnson) hump on an altar, with vestigial feathery wings on their backs, reminiscent of the "clipped wings" motif of the current TV series "Lucifer". Film inevitably climaxes with Adam humping Andy, completing his admission to the privileged class of cynical hedonists who legend has it populate the City of Angels. Adam's final line, proffered confidentially to the audience, is "Vanity, it gets 'em every time".
There is no screenplay credit displayed for this film, though I suspect Dana penned it and should be proud of herself. Acting is uniformly good, and though necessarily in a subordinate role Penny Pax adds dimension and a sympathetic character as the wife -always a useful element in Gay Cinema (dating back to Fred Halsted and Joe Gage classics in the '70s) rather than the tiresome all-male cast syndrome.
With Nica Noelle slaving away in New England directing the lion's share of these Icon Male sagas, it is exciting to see Vespoli picking up the slack on the West Coast, and also offering Nica some competition in training these male performers in a crash course of Stella Adler acting, something most of them missed out on in their apprenticeship as Gay matinée idols.
I was especially thrilled to see that Dana was working through the same signature themes of her boy/girl and lesbian films such as "Hollywood Babylon" and "Lesbian Stepmother" in this Gay Porn format. She is concerned with the decadence and cynicism pervasive in La La Land, seen from the perspective of a near-insider, from the Adult end of the Entertainment industry.
Naive and full of high hopes, our hero played by newcomer Andy Banks arrives in L.A. from a small town in the South with wife Penny Pax in tow, invited to a big-deal job interview at the law firm headed by Adam Russo. He lands the job specializing in copyright infringement and intellectual property rights with big salary and perks, but there's something odd about Russo's all-knowing, cynical spiel to him.
Smarmy co-worker Nick Capra tells the new employee "We function better as a boy's club" and it becomes clear that perhaps our green protagonist is getting in over his head. He witnesses his boss having sex in the office with bear of a colleague Billy Santoro, adding a homosexual connotation to the milieu.
Things come to a head, literally, when Capra rapes the young boy, though in a porn film this is played as consensual after the first few seconds. Turns out to be only a nightmare, as Andy wakes up in bed beside a sleeping Penny. I liked the touch that Nick is wearing only black sox in the dream, just like stag film players of old.
Throughout Dana stresses the growing disillusionment, as we see how crass and mean-spirited are these high-rolling guys, who seem to have no redeeming qualities. Makes me wish that she'll follow up with a dissection of those Masters of the Universe and hedge fund monsters in my neck of the woods, NYC.
I had christened the endlessly used porn shoot location as the "Immoral Proposal" mansion after seeing it in the Mile High release by that name (directed by Nica Noelle, who started this Gay label Icon Male that Dana's filming for), and what could be a more appropriate site for the film's key scene.
Boss Adam invites the boy to his mansion where he proposes the classic Faustian bargain to him. Yes, Adam is the devil incarnate, suggested more by the dialog than the very minor SPFX at film's end. He has Andy watch a weird ritual, as two guys (Vittorio Nexos and Jay Johnson) hump on an altar, with vestigial feathery wings on their backs, reminiscent of the "clipped wings" motif of the current TV series "Lucifer". Film inevitably climaxes with Adam humping Andy, completing his admission to the privileged class of cynical hedonists who legend has it populate the City of Angels. Adam's final line, proffered confidentially to the audience, is "Vanity, it gets 'em every time".
There is no screenplay credit displayed for this film, though I suspect Dana penned it and should be proud of herself. Acting is uniformly good, and though necessarily in a subordinate role Penny Pax adds dimension and a sympathetic character as the wife -always a useful element in Gay Cinema (dating back to Fred Halsted and Joe Gage classics in the '70s) rather than the tiresome all-male cast syndrome.
With Nica Noelle slaving away in New England directing the lion's share of these Icon Male sagas, it is exciting to see Vespoli picking up the slack on the West Coast, and also offering Nica some competition in training these male performers in a crash course of Stella Adler acting, something most of them missed out on in their apprenticeship as Gay matinée idols.