Porno is a 2019 American
comedy horror film directed by Keola Racela and starring Katelyn Pearce, Jillian Mueller,
Larry Saperstein
Laurence Benjamin Saperstein (born April 12, 1998) is an American actor. He stars as Big Red in the Disney+ series ''High School Musical: The Musical: The Series''.
Life and career
Saperstein is from Islip, New York, Islip on the southern shore ...
, Glenn Stott, Evan Daves, and Robbie Tann. The film premiered at the 2019
SXSW Film Festival in
Austin, Texas, and released to virtual theaters, due to Covid-19, via
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema
The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema is an American cinema chain founded in 1997 in Austin, Texas, which is famous for serving dinner and drinks during the movie, as well as its strict policy of requiring its audiences to maintain proper cinema-going etiq ...
and other theaters on April 10, 2020, and release to VOD on May 8, 2020. It is a
Fangoria Presents production.
Plot
Set in the early 1990s, five teen employees of a small town movie theater find a mysterious film reel and decide to play it after the theater closes. Watching the vintage X-rated film unleashes a
succubus
A succubus is a demon or supernatural entity in folklore, in female form, that appears in dreams to seduce men, usually through sexual activity. According to religious tradition, a succubus needs male semen to survive; repeated sexual activi ...
, who tries to seduce each of the five teens as they attempt to escape the theater intact.
The day starts off with two of the teens, Abe and Todd, outside of a house in the suburbs as they peep through a window, watching a couple have sex inside. Todd wants to leave and tells Abe they will get in trouble, so the two of them hop on their bikes and ride down the sidewalk to the theater where they work. Inside the theater, they and their fellow employees stand around in a prayer circle led by their boss, Mr. Pike, who tells them they can have a movie night after they close and clean the theater. As the teens fight over which movie to watch, ''
A League of Their Own
''A League of Their Own'' is a 1992 American sports comedy-drama film directed by Penny Marshall that tells a fictionalized account of the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). The film stars Tom Hanks, Geena ...
'' or ''
Encino Man
''Encino Man'' (known as ''California Man'' in France, Finland, Sweden, Great Britain, Asia, South Africa, and New Zealand) is a 1992 American comedy film directed by Les Mayfield in his directorial debut. The film stars Sean Astin, with a supp ...
'', they hear a noise inside the theater. A crazy old man is running around by the screen. They attempt to get him to leave, but he runs through a boarded up opening in the lobby. As the teens peer inside, they see that it leads to a basement.
The five of them decide to go down together to get the man out instead of calling Mr. Pike. Once down there, they find a room filled with old tin cans of film reels. Abe brings one of the reels upstairs, and they all vote to watch it for movie night, except for Jeff the projectionist, who worries that it might break the projector because it is so old. He is out-voted though, and they start playing the film, which is a weird pornographic film that unleashes a succubus named
Lilith
Lilith ( ; he, לִילִית, Līlīṯ) is a female figure in Mesopotamian and Judaic mythology, alternatively the first wife of Adam and supposedly the primordial she-demon. Lilith is cited as having been "banished" from the Garden of Ed ...
.
Reception
The film has rating on
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
, based on critic reviews. The site's consensus reads, "''Porno'' mines sexual repression to produce a laughably lurid - and genuinely scary - outing that should delight genre fans in search of a good time." Jude Dry of
Indiewire
IndieWire (sometimes stylized as indieWIRE or Indiewire) is a film industry and review website that was established in 1996. The site's focus was predominantly independent film, although its coverage has grown to "to include all aspects of Holl ...
gave it a B+. Chris Salce of ''
Film Threat'' gave it 8 out of 10. Trace Thurman of ''
Bloody Disgusting'' gave it two-and-a-half skulls.
References
External links
*
* {{Rotten Tomatoes, porno_2020
2019 comedy horror films
American horror films
Films not released in theaters due to the COVID-19 pandemic
2010s English-language films
2010s American films