“Rice Rockets” Comes With Hot Sauce (No Substitutions!)

A lot of stuff crosses our desks here at Fleshbot Central: media alerts, DVD screeners, flying staplers, fists. We're happy to get most of it (flying staplers excluded) but we were especially stoked to receive a press release about a new DVD called "Rice Rockets" featuring a cast full of (surprise!) cute Asian guys. Not that we have anything against mainstream, middle-of-the-road, white guy stuff--but as Auntie Mame's friend Roberta once said, who wants to spend an entire lifetime downing vanilla ice cream when there's a pupu platter on the menu?

Then we got a look at both sides of the box cover, and now ... well, we're kinda divided. Here are some of our pros and cons so far ...

. . .

PRO: The stylist gets total props for the cover shot. Everybody's rockin' the same Pete Wentz look (except for that guy on the far right who's giving us full-on BadPuppy-circa-1999). Everyone's either shaven or naturally smooth. Everyone's mostly hard. All in all, it's very consistent. The unfocused and lackluster contestants on "Project Runway" this season should be taking notes.

CON: There's not much variety of "type". Which isn't too big a deal; heck, Bel Ami and practically every other porn studio out there have built empires on exactly the same strategy. But would it have killed 'em to throw in one hot daddy to keep those boys in line?

PRO: Lines like "Harder than Carbon Fiber!"--which, if it isn't the official tag line for the movie, certainly ought to be. We can't read Japanese, but we're going go out on a limb and assume that that's what the text on the bottom of the cover says--after all, it's the last thing in the press release, and it's both clever and funny! Er, isn't it?

CON: That back cover in general. We haven't gotten any detail images from the company, but what we can see of the action via those teeny-tiny thumbnails--are those pasties?--leaves us confused. And slightly flaccid.

DIVIDED: The title proves that some porn studios still have a sense of humor. Also that some porn studios still resort to racist clichés when marketing their wares. Some folks will take more offense than others; we're just hoping some pornic visionary out there is working on an Asian import flick that doesn't involve the word "rice" in the title. (But then, what did you expect from a studio called "Third World Media" anyway?)

• "Rice Rockets" @ ThirdWorldXXX.com