The Switch

B. Skow and David Stanley constitute a creative porn team but "The Switch" is way too silly to pass muster. Girlfriends Films apparently gives them a free hand, but this one should have been blue-penciled.

Stanley's rat-a-tat-tat script of supposedly hip references to the porno scene cannot disguise the incredibly cornball premise - yet another exercise in body-switching. I had just watched a far superior example of the same stuff, Stormy Daniels' "Switch", and any fair-minded comparison of the two features will have you scratching your head wondering what S & S were thinking.

Xander Corvus and Chad White are cast as the odd couple of buddies: Xander is a self-centered sex-obsessed porn actor while Chad is a nice guy, single dad with infant daughter.

Some truly awful attempts at low-brow slapstick commence immediately with White getting repeatedly splashed in the face in the opening scene with spurts of liquid. I've been watching way too much porn lately, because I assumed it was dreaded squirting on him from some off-camera girlfriend of the Cytherea or Adriana Chechik persuasion. No, it was merely representing his unseen infant giving him a Golden Shower.

First sex vignette has Xander having rough sex with "Lottie Libido", nicely essayed by Katrina Jade. He visits his bud White and comments on latter's cute baby sitter Mia Malkova, announcing his wish to bang her. The clash in attitudes and personalities is well-established, and might have made for an interesting little film.

Instead, we have Stanley indulging one of his more cockamamie concepts: In the bathroom both guys are peeing into the toilet and Xander announces that legend has it if they cross the urine streams and make a wish it will come true. Wish is to change places to see life from each other's shoes, and with hardly any SPFX that fantasy is accomplished.

The resulting sexual misadventures are predictable and stupid, quickly devolving into a mere gimmick to kill off two hours with gonzo sex content. Romi Rain is spotlighted as a porn star named Penny (though she is also called Romi at one point in the usual mistake by a cast member), and Xander (inhabited by Chad's spirit) humps her on set at "Hate/F*ck/Porn" studios, a supposed satire of the lowest of the low, though so much of porn is shot at that level it is an ineffective satire. Much of this content seems merely to be Stanley and Skow amusing themselves, rather than the audience. (Based on the 2-hour feature they handed in here to Girlfriends, they are almost the pot calling the kettle black.)

Corvus, supposedly stuck as "nice guy" under White's sway, overacts miserably, suggesting the excesses of solo Jerry Lewis at times. He's almost as bad (or worse depending upon your point-of-view) as "himself", rattling off knowing gibberish of a porn actor that is meant to sound knowledgeable and insidey but is merely asinine. One would be hard-pressed to find an equivalent mainstream junker to compare this to, but the content became so artificial and phony that all I could think of was the classic camp failure of the '60s: Don Knotts as "The Love God?" (impersonating Hugh Hefner!).

A boink on the head rather than the testicles returns the boys to their proper bodies, and all the wayward romance re: Rain and Malkova is sorted out in maximum-trite fashion. Picture ends not with urine squirt but rather with Hershey's chocolate syrup as the unseen daughter starts squirting fake feces all over the cast's faces. Hardy-har-har.