Welcome back to B-Movie Enema!

It’s Friday the 13th! As is the case commonly over the last few Friday the 13ths, I am totally fumbling the bag on what I’m reviewing. Oh, sure, I could surely find another outing from good ol’ Jason Voorhees to write about. That Jason Goes to Hell is a shitfest, but it’s a shitfest I take no pleasure in watching. So, instead, I’m going to celebrate Friday the 13th with a movie from 2013 that features something that we all like watching… found footage!

What, did you think I was going to say porn? I dunno about you, but I’m strictly anti-porn. Who on Earth would possibly want to watch succulent naked bodies doing things to give themselves pleasure with toys or digits or appendages or, I dunno… cucumbers or something? No sirree… I do not condone sexual gratification.

Nah, I’m fuckin’ with ya. Porn is great… in moderation. And pornography is at the heart of the movie getting reviewed this week, 2013’s Lucky Bastard from director Robert Nathan. Nathan got his start in media as a novelist, most notably for writing the political thriller The White Tiger, which was set in China back in Mao’s rule. In the 90s, Nathan started writing a ton of episodes for Law and Order. Lucky Bastard is the only film he wrote and directed aside from a TV movie the same year called The Grim Sleeper.

Now, aside from the fact that I like looking at naked people online from time to time like any red-blooded American man, and my history of covering something that this movie kind of reminds me of when I reviewed Girl House, I didn’t know anything about this movie until somewhat recently. I watch a few YouTube channels that talk about movies in various ways. I have a guy I watch for horror, I have a guy to watch for current reviews. I have a guy to watch who talks about the various major awards each year. I have guys who talk about movies in my subscriptions on YouTube. Because of that, I get a lot of suggestions, for better or worse. I saw a couple of suggestions talking about “The Worst Found Footage Movie Ever Made” or something similar talking about about supposed “worst” something or another, and they specifically were talking about Lucky Bastard.

Interestingly, Lucky Bastard doesn’t really have terrible reviews. In fact, it even got a pretty positive review from The Los Angeles Times that comments on the amount of sex and nudity in the movie, but called it not uniquely gratuitous. A lot of the negative commentary came around the subject matter being that this is a found footage horror film that takes place on a porn set. It seemed as though one of the guys I watched was particularly negative about the overly sexual concept of the plot itself. We’ll get more into it later, but the premise of this movie is that a porn producer decides that it would be a novel idea to have a regular guy, a fan of their films or website or whatever, winning an opportunity to star in a scene with their top model.

There’s nothing about that premise that seems overly gratuitous outside of creating a reason for there to be mature themes and nudity baked into the movie. That means that the movie itself has to be pretty bad for people to think that the movie is “one of the worst” horror movies ever made, enough to make a stink about it online and have it seep into my YouTube suggestions. Do they know who I am? The movie had better be Pot Zombies or The Howling: New Moon Rising bad if you’re going to suggest something belongs in that league.

I do wonder if this is something else that created such animosity around this movie that seemingly just released to generally mixed reviews. I’ll discuss that a little more later because I want to see this movie for myself to see if it truly is as bad as some talking heads say it is. However, before I dip into that, our leading lady, the lady who the titular lucky bastard will get to have his big close-up with, is played by Betsy Rue. Rue is now a retired actress/model who left the business a couple of years after this movie’s release. However, Rue was not entirely a complete unknown. She had roles on TV in popular shows like CSI, How I Met Your Mother, NCIS, iCarly, and the 90210 revamp. In 2009, she appeared in two horror films of some note. First is the remake of My Bloody Valentine, and then Halloween II. In between that, she appeared in a sex comedy called Miss March. So, it would seem Ms. Rue was familiar with mature themes and horror. I think that means she was likely well-cast.

And I think that also means we can dive into this movie and see if it really is as bad as I keep hearing. (SPOILERS: It isn’t.)

The movie begins with a little background similar to what you see in other found footage horror movies. It explains that “Lucky Bastard” was the name of a porno site that gave fans the opportunity to be filmed having sex with popular porn stars. It then explains that what we’re about to watch is supposedly the final video made for the site. Lastly, you know to cover their asses, it’s said that permission was granted by the participants for the material to be shown legally. So… there ya go, you internet sleuths. Let’s not claim this totally real website didn’t have the rights to show people getting killed or attacked or both for legal reasons.

The words on screen continue to point a finger at the porno industry for pushing boundaries and, therefore, those who play with fire eventually get burned.

The actual footage picks up from the LAPD. They enter the house where the Lucky Bastard site is filmed. They find the place with the lights out. Inside, in various rooms, they find the victims of a horrible attack. The victims suffered either blunt force trauma or gunshots. There is one female who appears to have survived her blunt force trauma to the head. Pretty much everyone else inside the house or found on the lawn are dead.

One week earlier, we see one of the guys who films for the site, Devin, interviewing one of the performers. The girl says she is texting her boyfriend, but she’s looking forward to getting fucked that night. Oh, and she’s going to suck a cock. Actually, she’s probably going to suck a couple of cocks. She’ll also probably swallow some cum.

Devin says she’s forgetting something. The performer, Casey, looking somewhat confused, glances back. That’s when he says that she’s forgetting what makes their site special. He dangles a set of handcuffs in front of her. That’s when we smash cut to her getting smashed by another guy. She’s gagged and her wrists are bound behind her back. The sex seems a little rougher than expected, and the guy who is plowing Casey from behind while she’s bound and gagged is treating her a little rough too.

In the middle of the rough sex, the doorbell rings, and Devin goes to answer it. We meet Ashley Saint (Rue). She is here to do something with the site, but is frustrated when Devin won’t turn off the camera before she reads and signs the paperwork for the job. Devin tries to play it off that they use everything for the shoot, but Ashley isn’t exactly impressed with the practices.

It’s made worse when she hears Casey in the other room moan in pain. She finds the scene being shot with Casey bound and gagged. Ashley says she’s not into the sick rape shit, but the guy, who is still balls deep in Casey, says he just stepped on her foot. Even Casey says that it really is what the guy said after Ashley clears the room and unties the naked girl. However, Ashley tells Casey that the guys who run this site are bad hombres. Apparently, they raped a friend of hers.

Devin chastizes Ashley for coming into the house and ruining their business. She keeps saying that she wants to know what’s going on with Casey because she’s gone to another room to get her clothes, but she hasn’t returned. She forces her way past Devin and goes down the hall, where the other guy blocks her path forward while Devin blocks her from behind. The guy in front of her grabs her, throws her onto a bed in another room of the house and begins raping her until…

She tells the guy that he’s got his dick against her butthole which causes everyone to start snickering. In walks Mike, the guy who runs various porn sites, and other crew members applauding the performance. All of this is for one of Mike’s sites, which, I presume, caters to rape fantasy scenes.

Admittedly, this isn’t a bad opening scene. Yes, there’s a kind of unsavory sex scene between the guy and Casey while she’s tied up and seemingly being hurt in the process. Yes, there’s discussion of rape and other sexual assault that is not exactly a safe topic by any stretch of the imagination. However, I do believe it is setting the tone for a premise that this movie wants to explore about the expansion of pornographic sex scenes online, especially in 2013, when it was still kind of the early days of this expansion.

We’ll be swinging back around to this later.

Anyway, later, Ashley meets with Mike, who is also filming this meeting. Mike says she’s their biggest star across the various sites he runs, but there is one that she hasn’t done that he wants her to do – Lucky Bastard. She’s not exactly sure which site that is and he says that’s the one that allows for a fan to fuck one of their stars. She’s adamantly against this. She has two hard lines in her job: no anal and no amateurs. Oh, and she’s not too sure about black dudes either. Their dicks are too big for her, but that’s not really all that important right now.

Mike eventually convinces Ashley and they review the candidates. They find a seemingly nice guy named Dave G. Dave is a kind of normal looking redheaded schlub. He says that a lot of people think it’s weird for someone to want to fuck a porn star, but he thinks it would be cool. When he gets a little more serious about why he should be chosen for Lucky Bastard, he talks about having a bachelor’s degree in psychology. He lost a brother to cancer. Afterward, he and a buddy decided to join the army. He says he’s a nice guy, and, by all accounts based on how he presents himself, he seems to be.

Ashley is still a little concerned about whether or not these possible partners for a scene to be published online have been vetted properly. How do they know these guys aren’t stalkers? Has there been a background check? Well, technically, the answer is no to both of those questions, though a background check, I guess, can be done before anything happens. Ashley initially says no, despite Dave coming off as a nice guy. She thinks Mike is humiliating these guys for the site. He says that’s the whole point of the site. She eventually agrees at an elevated price.

The day of the Lucky Bastard shoot has arrived. They pick Ashley up at her house before going to get Dave at the train station. It’s… an awkward meet and greet in advance of the actual shoot. Ashley still doesn’t love doing this job. Mike is pushing hard and being a bit bossy. Dave is not exactly awkward or coming off as a bad dude, but he’s dorky. He won’t stop shaking Ashley’s hand. In the van, he stares at her for long enough periods of time that it is uncomfortable.

The first sign that something isn’t quite right is that Dave’s actual name is something else. So he’s already complicating things. While Mike interviews him, Dave says he works for plumbers and in construction, but he’s at the bottom of seniority, and work’s been slow. So he’s kind of a loser. He also has no problem groping Ashley, but retracts from her when she rubs his inner thighs. Dave doesn’t like the interview stuff. He wants to get right to the fucking. Dave asks Mike about the editing of the footage they are taking because he knows that on the Lucky Bastard site, the joke is usually on the fan. He really does not want to be humiliated or made fun of, but Mike tries to smooth things over as best he can, which isn’t that great.

While Mike is in an argument with the manager who wants to kick them out of the restaurant they are doing some of the interview at before the sex scene, Ashley suddenly storms out after being left alone with Dave. When asked, Ashley says that Dave is creepy. He asked her out for a date after they finished doing the scene. While that is mostly pretty lame, Ashley is very concerned over the professionalism of this whole setup. Mike tells Ashley that she is indeed a professional and she was hired to do this job, so… she has to do it.

That’s when Ashley reveals that Dave called her by her real name and mentioned the names of her children.

Mike tells Dave that he creeped Ashley out. He crossed at least two lines. The first was asking her out for a date. Second, despite Dave trying to just tell Ashley that he liked her real name (Michelle) because that’s also his sister’s name. Mike accuses Dave of being a stalker, but Casey confirms that there is a site that has all the porn stars’ real names. Mike sends Casey to talk to Dave, and she convinces him to apologize to Ashley and get back onto her good side. Dave is pretty good at playing himself off as a shy guy who doesn’t know how to interact with people he’s intimidated by, particularly someone as beautiful as Ashley. It works, and she agrees to do the scene once and for all.

When they get to the house, Mike pays the woman they are renting the house from. There’s a very specific reason why they want this house. It’s been used for reality shows, so it’s already equipped with nearly 20 cameras throughout the house’s various rooms. There are also cameras around the outside looking out at the property.

As everyone is getting ready to shoot, Ashley talks about wanting to get out of porn and into mainstream acting. Mike talks to Dave about how this is porn sex. It’s not normal sex. It’s not intimate. It’s kind of crass and unsexy when you’re doing it. It’s not what he thinks it is as a viewer. It peels back the layer of what porn can do on an artistic side which is showing pretty people doing something on a fantasy level that isn’t at all normal or dripping of any kind of actual emotion or, dare I say it, love.

All of this is a precursor to this being a total disaster. Mike unveils Ashley for Dave and tells him to “fuck her for your country.” However, Ashley is a little more aggressive. She’s the one who initiates everything by pushing Dave down and taking charge. He freaks out a bit when she moves to touch his dick and he pushes her off of him and onto the floor. It’s revealed that he had a premature ejaculation just from the little bit she did.

Ashley storms out once again. She accuses Dave of being a virgin. After telling Mike he’s crossed the ultimate line by pushing her, she accuses him of, more or less, abusing her. She talks about how she was married to someone who abused her, then apologized, then abused her again, only to apologize again. She says she’s done with that and while she is a porn star, she is still a human being with standards. She doesn’t think anything about this Lucky Bastard shit is professional.

While Mike tries to talk to Ashley to cool things off, Dave is sequestered with the two cameramen on the site, Kris and Nico. Dave asks if Mike is going to talk to her and get her back into the production. Kris says that he’s going to try. Dave starts going on and on about not being a virgin. He then goes one step further and says he wants to fuck her. He doesn’t just say that once, he says it multiple times. Nico and Kris start laughing when he goes on and on about what he wants.

All the while, Dave gets more and more upset.

Meanwhile, in the bedroom, Ashley lets Mike into the room to talk. She talks about how she said she didn’t want to work with an amateur and he ignored her. She talks about once having a stalker and how Dave really started to feel like that scenario. Mike says he will send Dave home and close down the shoot. He comes out of the room and tells Kris and the audience that there will be no sex scene with Ashley. When Kris asks if there is any way to salvage what they’ve already done, Mike comes up with an idea… he’ll ask Casey to fuck Dave.

Casey, who is fucking Mike, isn’t so much upset about being asked to fuck the weirdo that has been creepy all day and ultimately is not someone Ashley wants to work with. At first, she was going to do some camera work. Kris asked Mike to take her off that because she was coming off a little too much like she was the “boss’ wife” around the shoot. She had an interest in doing camera work. Sure, she thought Mike was grooming her to become the next big star at the site, but now she thinks he’s treating her like his whore. So, she wants to walk and get the fuck out of there.

Mike, desperate to salvage anything he can, his told off by Casey. He then attempts to get something that will work filmed to recoup some of his money, so he asks if Ashley would do a scene if he hired a professional actor that she likes. He’ll sell it as a Lucky Bastard situation that didn’t work out, but the audience still gets to watch her fuck.

The problem, though, he can’t get rid of Dave. He fires the guy because he was incapable of fucking Ashley. Dave would rather talk to Ashley, but Mike reminds him it’s not his call. Then Dave decides that he’s going to take the footage they shot because he does not permit the footage they already shot of him if he didn’t get to fuck Ashley. Again, this is him trying to protect against the whole point of the Lucky Bastard site of humiliating him. This really doesn’t go over well with Mike.

Mike says that Dave is what’s wrong with the country. He says everyone thinks they are entitled to something. He tells Dave that he had nothing. His father was a grocery clerk and he had to build his porn company up from nothing. Dave says that if he can’t have the footage, he wants money. Mike says he was going to send him off with a hundred bucks, but now? Nothing.

Mike has Nico drive Dave back to the train station, but Nico is understandably nervous about being alone with a guy who is particularly wound up. Kris explains something to Mike that he found interesting about Dave. Kris remembered in Dave’s video application that he said he joined the Army. When Kris asked about where he was stationed, Dave said he was in the 84th Airborne. Kris says there is no such thing as the 84th Airborne, at least not in his lifetime.

While Nico drives Dave to the train station, Dave says he has to take a piss and asks him to pull over. Begrudgingly, Nico does so, but Dave returns with a large rock that he uses to bludgeon Nico to death. It took nearly an hour to get to the first death of the movie. Hold onto that thought for now.

Back at the house, Mike has hired an actor to arrive to do a scene with Ashley. When the real estate lady comes back to start closing up the house, she accidentally walks in on the scene being shot, before talking to Mike. She tells Mike that she saw his car at the bottom of the hill. Mike thinks that Nico is somewhere around the house sulking over having to take Dave back to the train station. While the real estate lady looks around the house for Nico, Dave sneaks into an open window with a baseball bat and greets the real estate lady with a dinger to the ol’ noggin.

After taking the bat to the lady’s head, Dave sneaks up on Mike. Dave wants the footage they shot or he’ll bash him over the head. Mike pulls a gun out, but Dave knocks it out of his hand with the bat. Dave gets the gun and then tapes Mike’s hands, feet, and mouth before stashing him and going into the room where Ashley is filming. Dave has Ashley go get rope while he holds Kris and the other actor, Josh, hostage. At first, Ashley considers leaving but thinks twice and brings the rope.

Kris ties up Ashley and Josh. Kris tells Dave that the footage they shot isn’t just on the hard drive; they’ve been sending it back to the office via WiFi. Kris tries to talk sense into Dave, but he’s not exactly listening. He REALLY wants that footage. Kris tries to run, but eventually he’s shot and killed by Dave. Josh tries to bargain for his life by saying he’ll help Dave escape to Mexico. Dave considers that for a moment, but he’s got unfinished business in the kitchen. He pulls Mike out of the pantry he stashed him in and shoves a dildo up his ass.

Mike says he will give Dave whatever he wants. Dave reminds him of what he said after the apology to Ashley after he creeped her out at the restaurant. He wants an apology from Mike. Mike apologizes, but Dave says he remembers something his father told him, “When you do something wrong, an apology is never enough.” Dave throws Mike to the floor and shoots him dead.

Dave returns to the bedroom and asks Josh about being a porn actor. Josh says the girls get paid more than they do, but it’s sometimes fun. Dave asks Josh if he ever fucked a guy. He’s heard that porn guys are gay. Josh says he never has done that and wouldn’t. Josh says it would be possible for him to fuck a guy just by thinking about a girl. He says that porn actors are always thinking about someone else because most of the time what they do isn’t all that sexy.

Dave offers Josh the chance to save his life. If he can cum, Dave won’t shoot him. Originally Dave wanted him to go hands free with the cumming, but he relents and unties Josh’s hand. He successfully cums, but Dave bludgeons him with the gun anyway.

Dave turns his attention back to Ashley. Dave says that they did this to him. They made him the Lucky Bastard, and then they took it away from him. Dave then blames her for not doing the scene with him. She said that she didn’t want to do it because she thought he was crazy. When Ashley tries to change her attitude toward Dave, he tells her she isn’t respecting him, only the gun. She says he could just toss the gun away, and she will still listen to him and try to help him. He starts to realize the gun didn’t do these things to people; he did, and it seems as though he might be starting to calm down and come to his senses.

However, outside, Casey has returned to the house. Unable to get into the front door, she rings the doorbell. Dave realizes he’s forgotten someone. Ashley thinks it’s the real estate agent, but Dave tells her he knows it isn’t her. Eventually, Mike watches Casey from the windows to see where she is going around the property. She finds the patio door open and enters to find Dave. She tries to leave, but Dave shoots her in the back.

Dave returns to the bedroom and asks Ashley why she’s in porn. He talks about how much of a fan he is of hers and how he didn’t even mind when he watched the bukkake scene she did with five guys. She explains that it’s just a job. It’s just sex and it pays. She needs to feed her kids and pay her rent. She eventually starts to use her acting talents to come onto him to convince him to untie her and do the scene he was promised as the Lucky Bastard. She makes a good point… if he’s going to kill her anyway, at least fuck her first. That’s thinking on your back, Ashley!

Anyway, it was all a ruse to get him to untie her and distract him with sex so she could grab his balls to give her the chance to grab the gun and shoot him multiple times.

Is Lucky Bastard as bad as I heard it was? Not even close. It’s not really a good movie, though, and I’ll explain why shortly. One of the reviews about this movie I saw that was telling me how bad this movie is, seemed to point more toward the subject matter than anything else. It almost came off as if the reviewer was offended by the concept that this was taking place on a porno shoot. I could go on and on about how I think that is not exactly a good faith argument about this movie. This is an exploitation movie, plain and simple. It’s moving the found footage element out of the typical forest setting or the spooky haunted house genre.

The fact that this movie kind of revolves around explicit sex scenes and that this movie earned an NC-17 rating is not the issue here. If you are sensitive enough about explicit depictions of sex and porn as an industry as a whole, maybe don’t watch the movie. I don’t want to accuse anyone who may have looked at this movie and considered it a bad movie based on premise alone as being a bit weird about the topic of sex or pornography, but I know there are folks out there that have an almost negative reaction when sex is pushed too much to the forefront of media. That’s a sort of unfortunate side effect of the last handful of years as younger generations have come up hearing about cases of sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior more widely. It’s a wider topic and issue that needs study and discussion as younger generations are spending more and more time indoors and online as opposed to being out in the real world creating meaningful relationships with others, and experiencing more of the positive side effects of creating those interpersonal relationships that create naturally positive attraction and sexual exploration.

But I’ll digress on this topic before I go too much more into wild accusations or misunderstandings of the reviews I’ve seen.

I will say this. Lucky Bastard has some good things about it. The three main characters of Mike (played by veteran character actor Don McManus), Dave (played by another veteran Jay Paulson), and Betsy Rue’s Ashley are all well-cast and interesting characters. Betsy Rue, in particular, is very appealing. I don’t mean this to sound any other way than as a complement but she is well styled to play a porn star in that era. Back then, a lot of the top porn stars were blondes with blue eyes. She had a believable look to play this role after the proper porn aesthetic makeup was applied. She’s also a pretty well-fleshed out (no pun intended) character. As is Mike. I’ll come back around to that in just a moment.

The real problem with this movie is that it is dreadfully boring. Ostensibly, this movie is a horror film. At the very least it’s a thriller. However, when naturally comparing this movie to other found footage movies like, say, oh… The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity… the issue becomes pretty apparent. Both of those movies knew how to slowly ratchet up the scares. The beginning of The Blair Witch Project told you there were spooky stories about this witch who supposedly lived in these Maryland woods. It planted the seed so that when things started to happen, your mind immediately went to the supernatural. Paranormal Activity peppered spooky, supernatural stuff into the movie every few minutes, keeping you on edge and giving you the insight that there was, indeed, something spooky going on.

Aside from Dave being kind of a weirdo, the tension was not well paced in Lucky Bastard. It takes nearly an hour to get the first kill. You can kind of see things unwinding a bit with Dave, but he isn’t exactly threatening until he suddenly is. There is a way to work with that kind of an idea in a movie, but it’s not done well here. I do have another idea of how this movie could have been so much better.

It’s clear the movie has at least something to say about the adult industry and sex work. Sprinkled into this plot are characters like Ashley and Mike or statements that create interesting thinks to consider or talk about when it comes to how the porn industry works. For example, Mike is constantly asking for favors or expecting people to do things for his movies or shoots. He’s smarmy and has to be every bit a politician as much as he is a guy who knows how to secure a camera guy or a place to shoot. He makes the comment that women make the whole thing run. If all the women in porn suddenly said they no longer wanted to do that, it’s over. A billion-dollar industry would be reduced to nothing overnight.

Ashely is a complex character in the sense that, yeah, she will show up wearing something sexy or have her makeup done in a really alluring way, but that’s a mirage. In truth, she’s a single mom who has real world issues like trying to afford a place to live in the Los Angeles area and putting food on the table for her kids. She’s been abused. People have opinions of her that she wants to rise above, but she’s kind of at the mercy of a society that won’t see her as a real person, only a whore that fucks for money. She talks about wanting to leave porn for mainstream acting work, but Mike is blunt in his response to that. “It’s hard.” Yeah, it is. No matter what else she’s done, people of a certain age will always just see Traci Lords as a porn actress who then got into some B-movies and had a really awesome scene in Blade.

The Casey character is also kind of interesting. She’s played by Catherine Annette. Casey took piano lessons when she was younger and is still pretty good at it. There’s a lot you could explore about why she wants to be a porn star instead of something more, but, unfortunately, it’s not all that explored. On the other hand, a single scene with Dave talking to Lee Kholafai’s Josh about being a porn actor is a little deeper, but still could leave some to the imagination.

Dave is the piece this movie really wants to hinge itself on. In some ways, this character is kind of prescient. He’s obviously insecure. He comes off like the types who would, very soon after this movie’s release, take over the internet and comment sections everywhere. He’s terribly afraid of looking a fool and he has an entitlement complex when it comes to wanting to have his shot at a very popular internet star (porn star or not). He wobbles back and forth as he spins on his own mixed up axis on whether or not he sees this girl as a real person (Michelle) or a whore who thinks she’s better than him (Ashley Saint – the professional decrying the entire premise of his presence). He’s not willing to listen to these other guys around him and refuses to try to play anything cool. It makes him look like a loser to the men on this set while he reveals himself as what he really is, terribly insecure, to the girls, particularly Ashley. The Dave character actually mostly works, and I think there’s a lot you could do with that character.

If I had my way, this movie wouldn’t be a thriller. I’d basically keep the found footage element but turn this into more of a documentary of sorts. That would be a way to better explore those concepts that had to be pushed aside for the thriller element. Why do the camera guys work on porn shoots? Why did Casey decide to go down this path? What are the things that Mike constantly has to dance or tiptoe around working in porn? Is Ashley starting to get sad that she feels trapped in this business when she could potentially do much more? You could potentially still have a creepy guy like Dave who could be more of the fan/viewer side of the business. He could talk about things from the perspective of someone with an unhealthy addiction or relationship to the content created.

If you wanted to focus this “documentary” on the guy with the unhealthy addiction or relationship to the content, this would also work. It could show the rot of online interaction with people and content. By 2013, interaction with people through social media and the availability of adult content online exploded. The social media element could connect writers, actors, producers, and what have you directly to people consuming the content. On the porn side, it meant sites had to offer more and different things than before to attract viewers. Nothing was off the table which could create these weirder or more niche sites with communities of their own. It can show how these guys feel important online while being absolute losers in the real world. This leads them to spend more and more time online. That’s a direction I would appreciate too – especially considering all the things that rose out of the dark crevaces of the internet shortly after this movie’s release like 4Chan, Gamergate, and the dumber Comicsgate.

There’s something here that could work, but it falls short by having to keep that found footage thriller element intact. So, yeah… Lucky Bastard is not a great movie, but, trust me, it’s far from the worst thing ever seen here. Reviewers are more than welcome to feel however they want about any movie they see, but I do feel as though a mix of peculiar relationships with sex in media and movies that are made on smaller budget taking advantage of found footage to keep the budget down and those mature sex scenes to sell the content likely poisoned some reviewers. Then, those reviewers didn’t exactly know how to best reconcile that mature content with how they want to present themselves publicly. I think I’m getting my point across, but it’s a difficult series of ideas and mix of personality traits you can’t exactly explain as much as pick up on when interacting with someone’s content in a parasocial way. Either way, Lucky Bastard, for me, is more a missed opportunity to do or say more than a truly “awful” movie.

Next time, we return to the secret agent world of Duncan Jax. You remember that guy, right? He’s the James Bond ripoff who has a baboon as a sidekick? Anyway, he’s back and we’re going to look at the second, and final, film in his saga, Order of the Black Eagle. Be sure to be back here in one week to check out what I have to say about that.

Until then, I’m gonna watch some porn.