Sex Sells: The Making of 'Touché'

I recently watched Sex Sells (2005) on Tubi. The storyline follows a veteran porn director looking to make one final film while a documentary crew captures the process, interviewing the cast and crew to provide insight into the industry.

Written and directed by Jonathan Liebert (You Snooze You Lose), the film stars Mark DeCarlo (Fifty Shades Darker), Priscilla Barnes (Jane the Virgin), Jack Kyle (Intolerable Cruelty), and Lisa Jay (Creepies).

As expected, the film is filled with nonstop nudity from start to finish. The opening android scene is a highlight, as are some of the behind-the-scenes stories about the adult film industry. The mother-daughter subplot feels unnecessary, but the rest of the content does enough to hold your attention. The comedy is cheesy and rarely as funny or clever as intended, but let's be honest-that's not the main reason anyone is watching this.

In conclusion, Sex Sells isn't a good movie, but if you're looking for nudity and softcore content, it delivers. I'd score it a 4/10.

This is a neat little movie. My friend brought it back from a trip to England, along with another gem called Late Night Shopping. Sex Sells is the story of some porn actors living and working in California. There's not much of a story. It's more about getting to know the actors and the director. Everyone we meet is funny and weird and very likable. The basic message seems to be that everyone is the same, no matter what occupation you work in. About half way through the film I realized that the main actress is Terry from Three's Company! I guess she wanted to do something different from the goody-goody image from TV. She's great, but she talks and swears like a sailor in some parts. This isn't a movie for kids, but the sex isn't too nasty.

This is a bad B movie masquerading as a mockumentary. The porn documentary filmmaker in the movie has almost as much screen time and dialog as any other character. That completely destroyed any "documentary feel" that they may have wanted to create.

The fact that the film is not actually a mockumentary is the least of it's problems. The film is not funny. The film is not sexy. The film doesn't have anything insightful to say about the porn business. It's not even particularly salacious. While there's simulated sex, the amount of nudity is mild for an R rated film.

Someday, someone will make a good mockumentary about the porn industry. This is not it.

Spinal Tap was funny because if you knew a little about heavy metal, you saw in-jokes all over the place. If you know anything about porn, this mock documentary will leave you cold. Everything in it rings false.

Spinal Tap was funny because it took a familiar world and pushed it over the top. This film is decidedly not funny because it paints a picture of how porn is made that bears no relationship to the real world.

The acting here is uniformly awful, but that would not matter much if the core idea of the movie were good. But it's not.

First off, I've been a cameraman in both porn and mainstream films since the 70's. I've seen it all, so is Sex Sells an 'authentic' look at adult films? yes and no. It nails the ordinaryness of production and and people involved, and it's pepered with nice insider details, like the adult movie award on the director's desk and the porn lingo (gonzo, wall to wall, pop shot, etc). In one sex scene, there's even a bored grip eating a sandwich while holding a c-light! Now that's funny. (funny to a porn cameraman or grip, anyway. No one else would know wha the hell it was) A c-light, by the by, is used just to light up the 'crotch' area so it shows up on film. Obviously someone involved in the movie worked in porn to get these things right.

However, it's also loaded with absurd and unrealistic stuff: a guy with a 3 foot c@ck, sex scenes being shot on film with 2 cameras, a woman reading Shakespere at an audition, etc. That stuff just doesn't happen, so if your looking for a hard hitting and revealing expose on the adult industry, this isn't it. Instead what you get is a very funny and good natured lite harted comedy. The humor is tongue in cheek, the acting is good (especially for a low budget indie) and unlike most movies about this industry it manages to portray people in a positive light.