MicroCinema Scene

After sitting through the intriguing endurance test that was Alter Ego’s Big Boobs, Blonde Babes, Bad Blood, I came away with the impression that Shane Ryan, Alter Ego’s main auteur, is a fearless, charismatic moviemaker and a talented editor. Afraid that any precious footage of a failed project may go to waste, he’s recycled more than one submarined movie attempt into a rash of short film work that’s sometimes compelling, sometimes lazy and often challenging. So it’s no surprise then that Ryan’s first “feature-length” effort, Amateur Porn Star Killer leads me to the same conclusions. Ryan, a good-looking, charismatic guy in his early twenties, likes to make movies that test the boundaries of taste and proper cinematic conduct. His friends trust him enough that they get lead into some pretty creepy, scary places, especially Michiko Jiminez who picks up here where she left off with Ryan in his sex-fueled short The Cold Heat. But unlike the occasionally compelling testing-of-limits that happens in his shorter work, here the experiment crashes and burns in a flurry of narcissism, supposed edginess and violent porn masquerading as a narrative. While all involved certainly give their all (and bare their all) for the sake of realism, at the end of the picture a viewer wonders why and no matter how strong the performances may be, they struggle for a point.

Alter Ego Cinema wants you to believe this is a movie. Perhaps to some it is. To me, it’s an episode of The Bang Bus or Net Video Girls gone wrong. Unfamiliar with the references? Both are supposed “reality porn” sites that find guys soliciting sex from “real” girls who get picked up on the side of the road (Bang Bus) or who are “auditioning” for a photo calendar (Net Video Girls.) In both cases, women are degraded and treated as whores, performing all manner of sexual acts, specifically really long bouts of oral sex.

Yeah, I’ve seen it and I suspect plenty of others have to, including Shane Ryan, who does an off-kilter version of Net Video Girl’s first-person camera person/porn star. Ryan’s camera jockey “seduces” an 18, no 16, no 13 year-old(!) girl in a seedy hotel room using - get this - ageism of all things as the dramatic logic for why the girl stays in his room while he molests her. Yeah… sick stuff indeed, and certainly not for the faint of heart, although I suspect not too many “faint-of-heart” types are going to check out something called Amateur Porn Star Killer, eh? While Ryan’s “Brandon” character chides Michiko Jiminez’s “Stacy” into stripping and then performing oral sex, we’re treated to several pseudo flashbacks of one of “Brandon’s” previous victims in seemingly private boudoir footage that looks like a bald-headed Ryan getting it on with a girlfriend. This footage more echoes the “reality porn” approach, with the fetching blonde lass all too ready to strip down and get raw, and interestingly, we never see her tragic end although it’s assumed by the title and a brief epilogue card that she fares no better than Stacy. What happens to our thirteen year-old heroine? After silently submitting to “Brandon’s” persuasion, she is suffocated with a pillow and then punched to death. I don’t think I’m ruining the ending. It is called Amateur Porn Star Killer after all.

If you want to spend time considering what it all means, those looking for a good reason why this “movie” exists could argue that Ryan is condemning the “reality porn” world and drawing a possible, frightening road map to where it may lead. I’ve often wondered myself just how far porn will go until it makes a complete metamorphosis into violence, and the increasing popularity of movies like House of 1000 Corpses and the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre indicate a society that’s becoming more fascinated by the taboos of torture and violence than those associated with sex. Here we see a version of “reality porn” that, albeit stylized to echo the cliché vibe of a snuff film, attempts to be a cinema verité serial killer movie. But it doesn’t work because the narrative’s intentions are too muddied, the movie is too long, and the motivations too illogical. The end result is something so close to true “reality porn” that it could be wack-off material for a new generation of people cherishing sadism more than the peepshow. And if that’s what this is, then the day of “violence as porn” has truly arrived and Shane Ryan’s standing on the front lines.

I started MicrocinemaScene in part to chronicle the trends that permeate the no-budget moviemaking world, and more and more I see indicators that much of what’s out there is thinly disguised girl-next-door voyeurism, usually wrapped in horror conventions. Attention to the grammar of cinema and the ethics of storytelling are being discarded perhaps because people are too lazy to learn them or because they’re too hard to follow on no budget or because they truly are trying to do something new and follow a ground-breaking muse. With Amateur Porn Star Killer, the intentions simply aren’t clear and the result is certainly not entertaining, titillating (at least in a conventional sense) or worthy of most movie viewers’ time. It’s a garbled, quasi-one take mess with Michiko Jiminez and unnamed others blindly playing Chloe Sevigny to Ryan’s baring-it-all-proudly Vincent Gallo. Perhaps as narcissistic and masturbatory as Brown Bunny, Ryan’s movie could be far more dangerous than Gallo’s love letter to himself. It’s a shame too, because I believe Ryan could be a great voice for cinema if he reigned himself in and went into his productions not for the shock value, but for reasons that are more identifiably honest. 

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