RUNAWAY
Vivid
Directed by B. Skow
RANDY RUNAWAYS
Capri Anderson, Asphyxia Noir, Skin Diamond, Phoenix Marie, India Summer, Barry Scott, Jerry, Mark Wood, Tom Byron, Jessi Palmer, Tommy Gunn
I can’t decide if Runaway gave me more respect for B. Skow as a director, or for Capri Anderson as an actress, or for Tom Byron as an actor (well, actually, I already pretty much respected his thespian chops), or it impressed me, or if it just really, really freaked me out. It’s complicated. And for a porno, it’s really complicated. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to go around lauding Vivid for having made a truly thinky jerk-off picture, because I wouldn’t call Runaway thinky, per se. But I would call it thought-provoking, and it’s not often I can say that.
Cause here’s the thing: Runaway is a sort of coming-of-age road-trip movie about a barely legal girl with very, very serious daddy issues. Capri Anderson’s character, Amy, lives with her very bitchy mother, played Lisa Ann, and her boyfriend (Barry Scott). On her eighteenth birthday she gets unceremoniously kicked out of her house for something stupid and goes to find her father, who she’s been told died years ago but who apparently has been writing to her. Starved for fatherly affection, Capri berates her mother for forgetting her birthday and flees to a motel with her two prostitute friends. Her mother is panicked over this for some reason and sends (Barry Scott) out after her.
Nothing oh so shocking there, except for some very serious themes at play. But then things get interesting: Tommy (Tom Byron), a middle-aged, bearded, cross-country trucker on his way to Texas, stops in at the motel diner and gets a room. While waiting for her friends’ John to get finished with his hot threeway with her friends (Skin Diamond and Asphyxia Noir, who, between the two of them, make the most strangely-named slut sandwich in the history of the world) Amy notices Tommy sitting behind her, telling the (hottie Phoenix Marie) waitress about his eighteen-year-old daughter. This, apparently, turns Amy on. The scene is set up in such a way that we’re not entirely sure whether Tommy is actually Amy’s father or not, but then Amy gets up and goes to masturbate—fully nude, mind you—in the diner’s bathroom while thinking of him.
Like I said, daddy issues. Later that night, hanging around outside the motel after a tiff with her hooker buddies, Amy spies on Tommy as he serves the waitress an anal serving of his steaming sausage, and apparently is very turned on by what she sees. She can’t stand it. So she hangs around outside Tommy’s room waiting for him to come out for a smoke. He calls her out on her voyeuristic tendencies, and she comes onto him, hard.
She tries to convince him that she’s a hooker the next day to get into his elderly pants, and he’s hot to trot until he realizes how young and inexperienced she is, and that she’s not, in fact, a prostitute (this seems to be the dealbreaker for him). We are led, thus, to believe that Tommy is a troubled but very good guy. When she goes back to the room the next day, Amy realizes that her friends have been fucking her mom’s boyfriend all along. In a fit of pique.After a series of mishaps, Amy stows away in his truck and they set off on a road trip together to Texas, where Amy’s father is waiting for her, we assume, with open arms—her mother’s boyfriend, harboring some dark secret we haven’t been made privy to yet, hot on their tail and having arguments with his invisible friend about whether he should kill Amy now that she knows about his secret life as a john.
So here we have an age-inappropriate budding romance between a possibly-father-and-daughter pair (which eventually turns into very disturbing pseudo-pimping at a truck stop), schizophrenia, prostitution, and homicide. In a porno. And, mind you, this is all without the usual tongue-in-cheek, rib-jabbing kind of self-referential humor you see in feature films of the fuck-flick sort. This is all pretty fucking serious shit. It’s acted out by performers who may not have been to the finest of acting schools, and there’s a whole lot of boning going on. But the boning often drives the plot forward, like sex can do in real life. And the issues the characters are dealing with—with the possible exception of the boyfriend’s angel-and-devil-on-the-shoulders routine—may not be handled with the skill appropriate to such weighty topics, but they’re taken seriously.
I won’t ruin the end for you, because it actually is rather interesting, as is most of the sex along the way. But there is murder and there is reunion and there is… I don’t know, salvation in it? And a bunch of cumshots, too.
—Miss Lagsalot