DVD Review: “Prisoner”

Brittney Skye plays a drug-addled, whorish dreamer in my kitchen in "Prisoner", writer/director DCypher's fleshy and engaging AVN award contender that eschews the usual turgid brand of porn dialogue ... for voiceovers! Smart. Very smart.

Read our review after the gap.- G. Ponante

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"Prisoner" is told in flashbacks, through letters written over several years by Charlene (played by Brittney Skye), who is incarcerated in a braless womens' prison, to her daughter Chloe.

Abuse of eclectic substances—long the backbone of the adult industry—plays a part in the film from its opening scenes, in which Skye smokes a bong and is tied up by a cigarette-smoking boyfriend by a coffee table littered with fast food detritus and alcohol. Of low-life boyfriend Victor (Steven St. Croix), Skye writes, "I could tell he had something that I needed" ... as she blows him for a toot of sweet booger sugar.

"All this girl does is lie!" DCypher (no one knows how to spell his name) told me at the fabulous eight-night press junket Metro sponsored for the film. "We see what she's actually doing but what she's writing to her daughter is completely different."

The first adjective that comes to mind when describing Charlene is sordid. She even snorts coke from a one dollar bill! Showing her steely single mother grit, however, she manages to get it all done with her eyelashes intact.

After she and Victor kill her husband for drug money, Charlene ends up in a minimum-security prison. They let her keep her porn nails and rings, and allow Justine Joli to continue coloring her hair.

Our nation's womens' prisons would be a lot less horrific if the heavies looked more like Nina Hartley and less like Evan Seinfeld. Hartley surprises Joli in the shower and shows her some hard female justice. Joli doesn't protest. "Has someone claimed your sweet hole, Cupcake?" Hartley asks.

"This could be your daughter ... this could be your daughter!" I kept muttering to Hartley, while rocking back and forth and not fast-forwarding through the rest of the scene.

Being a guard at Hot Womens' Prison is also something worth checking into. Guard Barrett Blade takes an interest in Charlene while his colleague Tommy Gunn services Charlene's cellmate Rosa (played by Hailey Paige) on a table full of just-folded laundry. Rosa explains to Charlene that affairs with guards make life on the inside a lot easier.

Charlene receives a letter from Chloe's foster parents, explaining that they think it's best Chloe not see or hear from her mother after witnessing her father's death. "We couldn't very easily put a child in the room of a murder scene in a porn film," DCypher told me, "So Chloe isn't shown until she's an adult."

We do see Chloe (played the other Violet Blue) in the end, when mom screws things up again by trying to escape and taking down Barrett Blade in the process. Charlene has been sentenced to death by lethal injection (trivia note: that's director DCypher playing the priest who reads the last rites) and not even an ass-loving governor will give her clemency. Chloe, finally allowed access to her mother's letters, has hooked up with an older man (Randy Spears), who looks a bit like Victor. And the cycle continues.

So what are my issues with the movie? Justine Joli is tasty and all, but (alas) she's not the star of the show. "Prisoner"'s boxcover should depict a taut prison laundry scene instead of a Joli glamour shot. And there are factual discrepancies as well: since I am writing this from prison, I can tell you for a fact that none of the screws wear (much let us wear, all the jewelry these inmates are carting around.

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· Metro Pictures (metrointeractive.com)
· Order: "Prisoner" (Adult DVD Empire)

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Previously: The Porn Fork, Porn Valley Dispatch Archive