Critic Reviews

This gory teen comedy blends laughably outrageous carnage with a legitimately scary plot to delightful ends. Throw in a winking fetish for cinephile culture and audiences are sure to go wild for the gutsy film.

It’s not for the easily offended or for the squeamish. Porno finds a way to make the disgusting laughable, and I feel that it’s meant to be a fun and slightly cheesy film.

Porno belongs in the “hot and murderous butt nekkid lady” sub-genre of horror alongside “Species,” “Lifeforce,” and the film it shares its villain with, “Def by Temptation.” Like that 1990 Troma movie, this horror-comedy details the exploits of a succubus, a female demon who tempts men to their own destruction via the deadly sin known as lust.

Unfortunately, Porno gets more uneven as it goes on, with a somewhat slack midsection and a mix of earnestness, broad comedy, titillation, and moralizing that neither fully gels, nor makes something unpredictably wild out of those clashing elements.

[The film] is really little more than a collage of gag-worthy and violent attempts at comedy.

The supernatural element with low-rent visual effects derails an interesting enough concept where the rules don’t matter. Finding a creepy, mysterious porn film is weird by itself, and while it need not be grounded in realism like 8mm or Hardcore, Porno doesn’t have to throw away the rule book to be fun and scary.

Even if the sophomoric Porno doesn't make the grade, it represents a promising start for the talented filmmaker.

There's a lot in common here with "Sequence Break," Graham Skipper's shameless love letter to David Cronenberg's Videodrome - but that has so much more heart, and such better source material on which to riff. Instead, Porno is kind of a schlocky homage to Lamberto Bava's "Demons," the ultimate and original story of a bunch of schmoes locked in a cinema with a malevolent print.