One Eyed Monster (3¾ Stars)

I promised in my tribute to Charles Napier that this month I would buy one of his films that I hadn't previously seen. I picked "One Eyed Monster" because it seemed like his biggest role in recent years. The scenes with Charles show off his talent, but it isn't as big a role as I expected. The film's main role is played by Amber Benson, who is best known for her role as Tara in "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer". She survives to the end, Charles gets killed early on.

In February 2007 ten people went into the remote mountains of northern California to shoot an adult film. Then something happened... something no one expected, but everyone saw coming.

This identifies the film immediately as a cabin-in-the-woods genre movie, except it's a cabin on a high snowy mountain. Instead of horny teenagers we have horny porn stars. Some of them are teenagers anyway; one of the stars is a 19-year-old stud who's making his first porno. Laura the make-up girl, played by Amber Benson, is probably a teenager as well. Ron Jeremy and Veronica Hart play themselves as the veteran porn stars in the cast. They are ridiculed by the younger guys, because (as Veronica puts it) "being a 47-year-old porn star is like being 103 in any other job". Laura doesn't join in the ridicule because she has a crush on Ron.

The filming doesn't go as planned. The film crew get caught up in an alien invasion. An alien being possesses Ron's penis. The penis detaches itself and begins to kill all the crew and actors by entering them and burrowing through their bodies. The only help is from Mohtz (Charles Napier), the inhabitant of a nearby cabin, an ex-soldier who has already met killer penises while serving in Vietnam.

This isn't the first film with this topic. "Pervert", made in 2005, featured young women being stalked by a killer penis. This looks like the beginning of a new genre, dicksploitation films. I thought that I'd invented the word, but I found that it's already been used to describe films that show penises being cut off. Okay, in those films the penises are dead meat and in these they're living creatures, but in both cases it's about detached penises, so let's share the word. I issue a challenge to my readers: how many dicksploitation films can you name? It can't be something that just happens in passing during a film, it has to be something that either happens repeatedly or if only once as the main attraction of the film. It has to feature complete penis removal, castration isn't enough. Probably the first ever dicksploitation film was Marco Ferreri's "The Last Woman" (1976), in which Gerard Depardieu cuts off his own penis with a chainsaw.

Ron & Veronica then

The DVD contains a few extras, the best of which is a conversation between Ron Jeremy and Veronica Hart in which they reminisce about the good old days of porn. Evidently the pay for porn stars hasn't kept up with inflation over the last 30 years. In 1980 porn stars were paid between $300 and $600 per sex scene, whereas today the pay is between $800 and $1000, slightly more for anal sex. It was particularly "cute" to hear Ron and Veronica talking about their first meeting in 1981. They met in a restaurant. Veronica asked Ron if it was true that he could suck his own penis. Ron took her into the bathroom for a demonstration. Veronica loved it so much that she joined in, double fellatio on his penis. Ron says that it was the sexiest thing that he ever did, and he's never repeated it since.

Ron & Veronica now