Pleasureville: A Digital Playground XXX Parody

An intriguing premise, inspired by the mainstream fantasy "Pleasantville" (oddly "parodied" a full two decades late), is ruined by extremely poor writing and direction. Too bad Digital Playground didn't go for talented filmmakers and a bigger budget.

Instead we get four desultory scenes, with plenty of padding as the credits play over and over again on the DVD version, mixing black and white footage with color. Stars Chloe Cherry (née Couture) and Tyler Nixon move into a new house in the sticks and are magically transported into the 1950s by somehow entering their TV set while watching an old black & white porn DVD. Danny Mountain has a fleeting cameo appearance on the video, playing a milkman to a beautiful and busty actress who gets topless but goes uncredited.

As in the original movie, the characters (and rather sloppily, sometimes the backgrounds) switch arbitrarily from black and white into color. DP's new house screenwriter Della Darling has poor dialog and an idiotic theme supposedly about hate for the outsider (in this case "people of color"), but the show is simply an excuse to stage four lengthy sex scenes. Oddly enough, star Chloe only gets one XXX scene, while 1950s MILF in the supporting cast Alexis Fawx is assigned two, one each with the skimpy cast's quota of only two males.

Fawx especially is wonderful to see styled in 1950s hairstyles and outfits, while Cherry is unflatteringly photographed. Maya Bijou and a miscast (too old for the part) Penny Pax are along for the ride as teens who hump after gaining color.

Ruining the already fatally flawed project is Tommy Pistol as the nominal villain, attempting to rile up his neighbors with the central prejudice against "the other". His moustache and beard don't come close to being credible for the 1950s setting, unless one stretches (not merited) the premise and makes his character a beatnik, which it's not. His usual overacting is terrible too.