By Keri O’Shea
Well, it’s fair to say we’ve been offered found footage movies which cover a multitude of themes and genres over the past few years at Brutal as Hell, but a porno found footage movie? Yep, this is indeed the frame for Lucky Bastard, and when we got an offer to review it, I have to admit I tentatively raised my hand, not because I wanted to ogle the porn aspects (apparently there are already websites for that) but instead out of sheer curiosity about how found footage would work in this case…if nothing else, I thought, here was something the likes of which I hadn’t reviewed before. Would novelty be enough, though? Having sat through an incredibly banal found footage movie just a few days before, my hopes were admittedly not high that my faith would be restored in this particular format. Happily, however, what we get here is not just some thinly-veiled excuse to make a cheap piece of shit and sprinkle it with ass shots. In fact I was more than pleasantly surprised by just how entertaining and yeah, clever Lucky Bastard was.
For found footage, the initial scenes are pretty standard, but the movie gets these almost-obligatory crime scene set-ups out of the way and then quickly moves onto something altogether more engaging, though not before reminding us that we’re definitely in porno territory when a waiver appears on screen, telling us that the participants have given their permission to be featured…hmmm. And so, with that understood, we wind back in time by a week, and learn that Lucky Bastard is actually a feature which runs on a successful porn site run by the gruff but definitively worldly Mike (Don McManus) – and credit to the movie for playing with possible expectations from the get-go, initially seeming to set a couple of women up for the expected porn-torture-porn before revealing it’s all part of a shoot and – whoah – showing us that porn can even be consensual. Mike does a lot of different types of porn on his site, see, and he’s something of an entrepreneur: one of his most popular gimmicks is to invite subscribers to submit video blogs, explaining why they should get to be the ‘lucky bastard’ who gets to fuck one of the site’s hottest porn stars. For a new edition of Lucky Bastard, he has managed to persuade one of the girls, the legendary Ashley Saint (Betsy Rue) to do the deed, even though it breaks her ‘no amateurs’ rule. They select a guy from the submitted videos, book a plush house in San Fernando, and go pick up their guy, Dave (Jay Paulson).
He seems okay, although terrified, and evidently uncomfortable with the Lucky Bastard shtick whereby the lucky winner is filmed from the time of pick up to the scene itself – but Mike has a business to run, won’t be dissuaded from doing just that, and insists that the show goes on. The show does go on, and things go wrong, of course, in a series of ways which thankfully managed to carry some genuine tension along with them; some of the developments I could see, err, coming, and some I couldn’t – but overall, I at least cared about what was going on in a way which can be quickly lost (if it’s in there at all) in a shooting format which all too often threatens to degrade into an annoying dizzy spell.
For starters, one of the reasons that Lucky Bastard holds together so well is that it has a uniquely believable reason for everyone to be holding cameras, looking at footage, or for it all to be taking place in locations which are choc-ful of cameras. In fact, screw the mockumentary thing, porn allows this to work so much better; we seem to have at least one experienced cameraman and some tripods too. Then we have people who are eminently comfortable being on film in the first place, because it’s their living, and they understand how to appear in camera shots. Also, the movie happily dodges what I’d expected it to do, and that’s to fall into line and represent its characters, as per common consensus when it comes to porn as either ogres or exploited women, nothing more than the proverbial cannon fodder for something protractedly nasty and yet predictable to follow. Instead, we have real characters here. Particularly in the case of Mike and Ashley (where Rue’s performance was so believable that I looked to see if she was a genuine porn actress sidestepping into non-porn a la Jenna Jameson) there’s a real sense that they give a shit about one another. That’s refreshing. All the people in this film are by turns wry, sardonic and believable, and whilst not perfect, they have an element of charm.
Then, Lucky Bastard seems to work on two different levels altogether, again surpassing what I thought I’d be seeing here. On one level, to be clear, it’s a film which doesn’t take itself 100% seriously (which also helps in some of the scenes which can’t quite hold together as serious). You may snigger at, for instance, a dildo being left in the foreground of a supposedly menacing scene, or at Mike wondering aloud if ‘endangered species porn’ could be the next big thing. The script is slick enough to make you laugh. I like that. It also makes it clear that porn films like these are a product, so even though it shows pretty graphic sex on-screen (not hardcore scenes, but sometimes only for the love of pixellation) it also shows what happens after cut-scenes, and shows things going laughably wrong too, although sex is far more important for the context of Lucky Bastard – and that’s where the film shows it can be more interesting still.
Ultimately, I think what I liked about the film so much was how deftly it handled some pretty important modern-day issues. Yes, in a film about porn going wrong – I know, I know, I heard me too, but hear me out. It’s a film which doesn’t parade its bigger ideas, but by its very nature it’s asking questions about the intersection between the internet and real life. Identity, fantasy, and the relationship between the two are brought into a pretty neat focus during the film: when is a person acting, and when are they themselves? When a person becomes used to being filmed so much, does spontaneous speech begin to disappear – with a camera on a person, are they always going to talk differently, speak in some semi-scripted way because they know how they might appear (and is that why Dave is so resistant to it)? What control do we have or should we have once we’ve been filmed and that footage moves out of our control? To go back to basics – what’s in a name, even? I don’t want to represent this film as some great, lofty treatise on the nature of existence – it ain’t, it knows it ain’t – but it has ideas, and it uses a clever framework to hint at what might, just might be behind these. Sharp and watchable, Lucky Bastard has something about it, and even where it begins to falter slightly towards the end, I stayed grateful for this. As I usually have to add, though, watch the trailer at your own risk…