“Grindass House”: No Cum-Shooting Machine Guns, No Giant Mustaches

After this long in "the biz" (as we in "the business" call it), we like to think we know a little something about porn. But for the life of us, we still don't understand why studios feel obliged to crank out titles that riff on mainstream films. Sure, occasionally something good will come of it (the gold standard being "Edward Penishands"), but mostly not: "Betwinked" and "The DaVinci Load" may be funny in theory, but after about five minutes you start to wish they'd just abandoned the high concept and focused their energy on shooting some plain old-fashioned fucking instead.

We wish we could say that something different happened with "Grindass House". We were willing to overlook the unwieldy title (did no one suggest "Bump and Grindhouse", at least?) because we're marginally smitten with the original and looked forward to a Rose McGowan-esque character sporting a traffic cone-sized dildo in place of his right leg. But alas.

Judging from the trailer, what we get instead are unremarkable scenes of garden-variety gay sex. The directors think they can get away with cheap sets, clunky plots, and cheesy dialogue by being all meta and claiming that the video's a camp send-up of 70s porn ... but honestly, doesn't pretty much all porn involve cheap sets, clunky plots, and cheesy dialogue? Besides, something tells us these children wouldn't know camp anyway even if Dame Edna hummed a bromeliad at their lily white asses. But we're just cranky that way.

Still, we hate it when porn doesn't live up to its potential. Don't you?

· "Grindass House" (DVD info + trailer @ DirtyBirdPictures.com)