Pee-Wee's XXX Adventure: A Porn Parody

The saddest thing about this poorly-made porn-parody from Vivid Entertainment is that director B. Skow and his star Billy Pistol think they're funny. Basically, they go beyond the usual crappiness of these XXX rip-offs of mainstream properties and, despite the disclaimers to the contrary, make capital of Paul Reubens' career-ruining run in with the law, caught masturbating in a cinema watching one of the great Sandra Scream's videos.

That incident is not explicitly part of Skow's script, but the tagging of Reubens as a pervert hovers over the show, not surprisingly since back in the day (before they stopped producing and releasing DVD features) Vivid was the leading porn label to specialize in celebrity-oriented XXX content.

Fallacy here is that Reubens' famous act as Pee-Wee Herman, which relies on that old "so bad it's good" principle to make his childish behavior and dumb jokes backhanded humorous, would still be funny as satirized or carbon-copied. It's not.

First scene ruins the illusion entirely, a fatal flaw of the movie. Pistol resembles Pee-Wee enough to be adequate casting, but we first see him shirtless in what looks like a medical exam room, horsing around with dildos and sex toys the way Jonathan Winters and later Robin Williams would improvise off-the-wall comedy from arbitrary props put in front of them. Covered in tattoos, Pistol merely looks like a pervert, not the Pee-Wee character. Later, when dressed in bow tie and sort of seersucker suit he fits the role but it's too late already. And his added sneer curling up one side of his mouth is wearying due to Tommy's endless repetition of the tic.

In the original hit Tim Burton movie, Pee-Wee was searching for his lost bicycle, but in David Stanley's lousy script his car is stolen instead, with his girlfriend Dolly inside. Aiden Starr as Dolly plays it like a ventriloquist's dummy in their opening sex scene, a strong clue that she is in fact a plastic sex doll that Pee-Wee thinks is a human being.

Much of the original is imitated in subsequent scenes, including a rather obnoxious Pistol self-indulgent scene of dancing around to a cover of "Tequila" at a biker bar, right out of the Reubens/Burton collective imagination. Adding blue humor and explicit sex to the Reubens concept is disastrous, comedically speaking.

I liked Capri Anderson, a Vivid contract girl, in the female lead as Pee-Wee's eventual real girlfriend, but the other casting choices are poor. With a variety of wigs and even a scene as a Rastaman in blackface (how topical that's become!) Evan Stone is horrible -a classic case of Skow letting a natural-born ham ham it up outrageously. Jada Fire in a maid fetish-costume servicing Stone and Stone's dad (played by Tom Byron, oddly looking at first like the old-age Eric Clapton!) in a threesome is one of the movie's most embarrassing scene, especially for us Jada fans.