Name: Backstage: The Movie
Genre: Adult
Duration: 3 h 3 min
Cast: Lena Frank, Claudia Rossi, Katy Caro

Ebullient cast in a high-energy approach to gonzo

Gonzo porn, legacy of the hissable Max Hardcore and dating back to the early '90s, is my enemy, as I continue to search for credible and laudable Adult Cinema tucked away in the morass of junk and generic filler. The prolific and talented Brit pornographer "Gazzman" is a guy who can effortlessly deliver XXX videos worth watching, and in "Backstage" almost rehabilitates the gonzo genre.

His secret weapons are a delightful cast of femmes, and a life- affirming, liberating approach light-years distant from the Earthly anti-pleasures of Chatsworth bottom-feeders. The 3-hour video demonstrates, almost in a hippie-era "all you need is love" (free love, that is) manner that an intense concentration on sex, sex, all the time sex, need not be morbid like the Left Coast pornographers insist, but can be pleasant. I know that's a dirty word to people living on the dark side, but so be it.

With icon Poppy Morgan as chief cheerleader, we watch folks evidently in off hours on a porn set (they seem to be shooting nearby in a mansion one of Gazzman's Dora Venter vehicles, perhaps in his classic "F*ck Me" series), not just doing pranks and kidding around but also humping for the camera in a manner worthy of preserving on film (video of course nowadays or 10 years ago as here) for posterity.

The resulting threesomes and group sex interludes are all smiles, as the cast blurs the line successfully between performer and simply oversexed individual. Some are breaking boundaries, as uncredited (on screen and DVD box) Ben Kelly submits to pegging at the hands and dildos of Poppy and her partner in sex-crime Franki. This sequence is fairly amazing and beyond the pale for most fans, though in recent years Evil Angel (which previously distributed Harmony features like this one for the British label) has made similar content respectable.

The cast abuses but consensually femmes like Brazilian bombshell Julie and especially superstar Claudia Rossi, and the bloopers bonus content on the DVD comically shows that the successful double-anal we see is not so easy to achieve in practice. There are over-the-line moments, notably Julie uncontrollably squirting what seems like excrement on the camera lens at one point, to the hilarity of all concerned, but one comes away impressed at how these Brit & European sex workers seem so at ease with their work/life balance, compared to the overheated and frankly phony approach of our Chatsworth roster of hump-for-pay critters. Gazzman's contribution is to lend a semblance of professionalism to what seems like unedited cutting-room filler when directed by a U.S. "visionary".

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Backstage: The Movie

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