"Day for Night" and "The Stuntman" stand as the supreme examples of cinema revealing the filmmaking process. Pornographer Cash Markman attempts a light- hearted self-reflexive exercise in "That Voodoo That You Do" and falls flat on his keester.
I doubt if all his 1000 or so videos are bad, but this one is ridiculous. It relies on a number of obvious gimmicks and is so paper-thin that even the endless array of in- jokes and silly stuff produces no laughs. The requisite XXX content has a life of its own, actually clashing with the surrounding attempted satire.
Central premise seems to have been contributed by consulting Ron Jeremy, who is so fond of his anecdotes about the "Good old days" when porn stars like himself were employable because they could be relied upon to deliver and maintain an erection. So we have wannabe porn star Kyle Stone (playing a fictional Kyle Stone, of course) getting angry that guys like Steven St. Croix get all the work and even when he thinks he has a plum assignment his co-star Nautica Thorn nastily insists on a big-name replacement.
He goes to a cut-rate spiritualist Shanna McCullough, whose fake belly laugh is virtually the only laugh in the entire feature. Sitting at her magical crystal ball, she creates a voodoo doll for Kyle to use, with St. Croix's cum as the element (instead of clips of hair or fingernails) to make it work.
Kyle creates dolls not just for Steven but also Evan Stone and Lee Stone, betraying Markman's evidently original dumb idea for the project: why not make fun of the fact that 3 porn stars have the same last name? I suppose he didn't get the memo to make a porn video uniting the dozen or so femme stars named Lynn.
The predictable nonsense of these reliable stars going limp is not even portrayed by Mr. Cash, apparently because even though they are good sports he did not want to personally ridicule the actors. So there are no shots of limp dicks or dicks going limp at all - it is merely voiced over as if this were a network TV version of the subject matter.
Markman appears as an idiot director with wooden Steve Austin as his assistant in uninteresting performances; I spotted "Stills by Alan" portraying the still photographer but for some reason he gets no acting credit. In order to get the full-length sex scenes in the can, the dicks conveniently go limp AFTER a scene is shot, during the requisite still photography posing sessions. The issue of using a stunt cock for close-ups is broached (when Kyle is replaced by St. Croix early in the show), but very poorly handled as if these pornographers know nothing about shot matching.
Cash is fond of name-dropping and trying to appear hip, but the only semi-zinger in the script is to make fun of his own producer Toni English for her using the alternate pseudonym Kelly Holland in shooting these hundreds of Penthouse videos. I caught this jab but it was hardly humorous.
The ladies are hot, and in these benighted times for the Adult industry I suspect that is all that 99% of viewers watching this junk care about. Maya Gates in particular performs anal sex effortlessly (with Kyle), while Katie Morgan is a picture of beauty in her opening scene opposite St. Croix. My only real takeaway is that somewhere deep down Cash or whatever his name is likely attributes his success (making 1,000 programs is nothing to sneeze at, even if they are mediocre) to supernatural intervention - it surely isn't talent.
