The BTS short subject directed by crew member Kristal Mosley proves to be more interesting than the "award-winning" (fake AVN accolades) "Afrodite Superstar", a banal success story whose hook is both Black and female empowerment. The auteur using "Venus Hottentot" as a stage name (or Venus Baartman as alternate, taken from famous exploited 19th Century African woman Sarah Baartman/Venus Hottentot) has concocted a clichéd script that fails to develop the relationships in a feature lasting little more than an hour including the XXX content directed by the late, great Candida Royalle. Slow, slow end credits pad out the running time.
Simone Valentino, who expresses credible apprehension at doing explicit sex in her BTS interview, is appealing in the title role, a rich girl who is given the Pygmalion treatment by hip-hop music label mogul Mr. Marcus to become an overnight success as rap star MC Dytie. It all predictably is revealed to be not a talent discovery but rather a gift engineered by her rich daddy who owns Marcus's label.
Porn veteran India is effective and upstages the heroine as her BFF who is also a budding rap singer and poet. Cast and crew protest defensively in the BTS how they want to avoid the Black stereotypes and clichés of porn, but unfortunately this film merely substitutes many familiar clichés of the rap/hip hop world. With condoms and zero money shots, Candida-staged sex scenes are effective but I failed to notice any real difference from those dreaded "exploitative" scenes familiar from mainstream porn -just leaving out the gonzo excesses doesn't constitute an improvement over the Romantic Couples content of so many earlier Adam & Eve releases.
The supporting characters are paper-thin, including a silly blond white boy (played by Jay Junker) as Road Dawg who is Afrodite's "dialect coach" (teaching her Ebonics replete with explanatory sub-titles) and gets to have an all-white sex scene atop a Humvee, or Liliana Velasquez as Kai, the stylist, who gets sack time with porn veteran Justin Long. Justin is named Criminal, a bald rap star who proclaims his four-year hitch in the joint which we find out comically is actually undergrad years at Yale, something he's ashamed of due to "Street Cred" topsy- turvy values (a comment on the whole "being Black" issue of avoidance of supposedly acting too "white").
So Venus and Candida earn many brownie points for attempting a sort of breakthrough, but I found it more revealing when in the BTS Candida admits to having wanted to make a film for "the ethnic market", more truthful and film biz-practical than all the do-gooder platitudes expressed.
