The Virgin

Billy Visual, aka Billy Da Kid, is a Digital Playground director who I'd written off as another hack, but for the first few scenes of "The Virgin" I sensed some talent in his work. But once the story took hold, it was almost as if the auteur looked at his watch and decided he'd better get tons of sex footage in the can or else, narrative be damned.

Jade Nile is cast as the young schoolgirl Jamie, which by my reckoning (she's not going to college) should be underage, but that would be a porno no-no these days. She narrates from time to time, expressing her wish to go from shy virgin to uninhibited slut, and by the time Billy has wrapped up this overlong opus, she can proudly claim her sluthood.

Nile's winsome smile is very attractive, and the corny story might have worked had the tension been maintained and sexual tease sustained. But instead, we have her losing her virginity painlessly to cad of a boyfriend Tyler Nixon in a poorly staged scene, followed by her impromptu subjecting herself to not one but two gang-bangs. In the BTS Nile declares she's never done what the trade calls a BBG scene (with two men, called boys in the industry's infantile terminology), but you'd never know it watching this. That's the trouble -acting, that forgotten element of Adult Cinema in the 21st Century, requires some semblance of believability. If Jamie is already a slut at the beginning of the film, then you've got no film.

A more interesting wrinkle is Alicia Moore as her single mom. Moore is rather dowdy, not unattractive, but not porno actress material either, so I pegged her for a non-sex role early on, bossing Jade around. But it turns out Moore was 30 when she shot this, has hundreds of mainly all-sex videos under her belt, and is 8 years older than Jade. She's hot in her sex scene with sleazy boarder Tommy Pistol, and in the BTS she takes a tumble in the bathroom that fortunately didn't injure her -such being the perils of porn.

Pistol, fast becoming my least favorite porn actor currently active, consistently overplays his Snidely Whiplash role and thereby ruins both Moore's and Jade's sex scenes with him. Apparently casting directors and untalented auteurs call on him as first choice when the role says slime-ball, rather than being a tad artistic and fooling the audience for a while by casting a presentable guy who turns out to be a slime -that's what makes for drama -they assume all the fans are hard of hearing.

Scarlet Red and big-dicked Clover provide significant extraneous sex as Jade's neighbors, and Cassidy Klein (looking like an understudy for the lead role in case Jade also had a pratfall like her film mom on set) guests delivering a blow job to Nixon in yet another bathroom for story purposes.

Besides ruining all credibility to Jamie's character, second half of the film takes a U-turn into trendy BDSM lite, as if the Digital Playground honchos sent Billy a memo for the second or third day of shooting to deliver some "50 Shades" content, story be damned. Pistol does his tired spanking/slapping nasty routine, and then takes Jade to a BDSM club where she has her second threesome and lots of semi-nude extras in fetish gear get to pick up a paycheck.