EYELASHES — “Have a sense of humor about the boatload of weird you’re about to witness.”

EYELASHES

Vivid Alt

An Eon McKai High Definition High Magnification Film

EYEFULS
Violet Monroe, Charlotte Vale, Aiden Starr, Katie St. Ives, Kitty McMuffin, Vin Vericose, Sher Wood, Dane Cross

Ok, I kind of get it. Eon McKai is an artsy type — directing for Vivid Alt, he’d really have to be because, you know, they’re really artsy over there. And as a fuck-film artiste, it’s only natural that Eon gets bored filming the same, ho-hum, in-out, wham-bam subject matter… all the damn time. People boning in front of you can only be aesthetically interesting for so long, especially when you’re a sex cinema savante, like Eon. So one day, he thought, “You know what would be fun? Switching it up a little!” Hence Vivid Alt and their bizarrely forced artistic shots with weird perspectives and camera angles and what not, until all the diagonal shots got boring and even filming people through the bars of cages (so edgy! so artsy!) got old. What next? Hmm… Well, being an alt-art kind of guy, I’m sure Eon has a penchant for old-timey technology. I bet he gets a chubby just thinking about filming on an 8mm camera, using scratchy old film to make stag movies, using magnifying glasses to… Wait! Magnifying glasses?! Yeah! Hell yeah, why not try using those in a movie?

And, well, yeah. Why the hell not? After all, it’s just another porno with just a bunch more dicks and more of the same old orifices, doing the same old routine. Why not mix it up by holding the camera, but then holding a magnifying glass in front of the camera to zoom in on certain parts of the anatomy while the rest of the shot still shows everything normally? Like an old-timey, steam-punk-ish, split screen. Fucking artsy porn genius, bro! Hell yeah, am I an artiste or fuckin’ what?? High fives, ice a bro, and chug Miller Lite, but with panache, cause we’re Bohemian like that.

Anyway, here’s where things break down, and where one can behold firsthand one of porn’s major downfalls: nobody tries anything before the fact. There are no trial runs, no experiments, no nothing until it’s already being filmed. It is painfully clear that Eon McKai, genius director of dirty films though he is (*cough*), never actually had anyone go at it while he held a magnifying glass up to the camera before the day of the shoot to see how it worked — or, rather, didn’t work. What results is a kind of mystifying failure of what was, for all intents and purposes, a cool idea that just isn’t as cool as it sounds. Like that time you decided to try jerking off with some of that Purel hand sanitizer, cause, shit, who doesn’t want a clean dick? But then you forgot about that open, bleeding rash you had down there from over-use and attendant chafing, and ended up with chemical burns in the ICU. It just doesn’t work very well in practice.

Similarly: Eyelahses. It’s not that it’s not kind of interesting to watch, but rather than it being really hot to zoom in, say, on the girl’s lips as she’s swallowing a cock, it’s just kind of confusing. Here are her lips, ok, and they look pretty big (but not really that big — it’s just a hand-held magnifying glass, and it’s kind of out of focus, and…) in comparison to the rest of her, but then she moves and — shit! — she’s out of the magnifying glass and the action is obscured by the thick black plastic edge of the magnifying glass and everything’s all jumbled, and now the camera has to move but the performers have already moved to try to compensate, so it’s all just out of focus and… Dude, just put the magnifying glass away already! But that’s the thing! Eon can’t put the magnifying glass away, because this isn’t a dress rehearsal, it’s the day of the big fucking show and everyone’s here and they’ve already signed all the paperwork so we just have to go ahead and do it, practicality be damned! (That’s what artists say, right? Some kind of Warhol or Picasso quote would fit in here, I’m sure, but I’m too lazy to look them up.)

So. It’s kind of. Well… I want to say it’s amusing and you can at least have some novel fun stroking to Eyelashes’ unusual visuals and chuckling. Except that Eon, being an artsy type, and Vivid Alt, being a very serious type, can’t seem to find any humor in this bizarre banging situation. I feel like a little levity, in light of the laughable situation with the magnifying glass fucking up the whole “edgy,” “artsy” look of the film, might have helped everyone. I mean, for Christ’s sake, Eon, here you are filming a woman in a corset with one of those little teeny hats with a veil over the eyes, getting nailed on a leather couch in a stripped-down white room, with her titties bouncing around (beautifully, I might add — Aiden Starr is one of my new favorites), and you’re filming it and holding up a fucking magnifying glass to it like some kind of degenerate detective — and not even an old-school, Sherlock Holmes, round, cool-looking magnifying glass, but a rectangular, old-person-reading magnifying glass! You can’t be cool in this situation! It’s a lost cause! This is the textbook definition of ridiculous, so chill out and enjoy yourself.

But no, no, Eon McKai is too serious an artiste for such lighthearted games. We’ll use this magnifying glass in every scene, as much as possible, goddammit, or this will all have been wasted! …and so we do. Ad nauseum. It’s ok, I guess. I mean there are some pretty strokeworthy scenes in this film, and I wouldn’t not recommend it. Aiden Starr, as I said, is adorable in her Victorian getup, Katie St. Ives squirts gloriously, Kitty (Meow) McMuffin has the coolest hair and stage name in the biz, Charlotte Vale is cute as a nut-busting button, and Violet Monroe is raunchily reminiscent of the mysterious goth girl you always jerked off to in high school, so there’s no reason not to watch this movie and get your rocks off to it. Just remember to have a sense of humor about the boatload of weird you’re about to witness, and for god’s sake, don’t leave this DVD lying around the house. If your kid ever gets curious and pops this DVD in, he’ll get the idea in his head that sex is a very serious undertaking indeed, and that magnifying glasses are involved, and woah, do I see some fucked-up paraphilias coming out of that. —Miss Lagsalot