The Doll Underground
GameLink went to the set of The Doll Underground with Gram Ponante more than a year ago and watched Eon McKai film Scene 4 of The Doll Underground. I had almost forgotten about it when the movie finally came out this week. The trip itself is detailed elsewhere, but I hadn’t seen much in the way of Eon’s movies at the time, and the thing that strikes me now is how much like the final product his set was. Eon himself is a diffident, slightly awkward character, and his movies in general reflect his own presence. I guess that’s what directors do, but I haven’t met enough of them too generalize, so Eon in particular stands out for me.
In spite of The Doll Underground’s radical face, the porn is pretty standard, or standard for alt, at least. The girls are bomb-throwing (or at least bomb-making and bomb-carrying) extremists, calling for “young women to rise up from their homogenized suburban environments”, and “The Doll Underground are here to wake up a dreaming nation”, but they pretty much still take it in doggie and kneel for the facials like their sleeping, subjugated counterparts. Not that I have a problem with that. I have a thing for pale, awkward tattooed Gothette girls with dyed black hair, and there’s a veritable kingdom of them in The Doll Underground. Pixie Pearl, Reagan Maddux, Presley Maddox and Lexi Belle can be hard to keep track of, but after a couple of scenes, I stopped trying.
I may be just part of the patriarchal problem, but I sure liked watching the Doll Underground fucking each other and the various guys they needed to use for whatever purposes — brawn, information, sex. The girls all start off slowly, but they warm up as the scenes go on; particular highlight was Pixie Pearl’s scene with Herschel Savage, and Reagan Maddux and Lexi Belle double-teaming Daniel is good too, frantic and passionate. Pixie, who is really the star of the show, gets a good masturbation scene, too — she’s vulnerable and open in it in a way that solo scenes don’t usually reveal, and in an endearing way she manages to be both glamorous and awkward. For pure heat, and pure porn sensibility, Presley Maddox’ tryst with James Deen, a rollicking fuck in an institutional stairwell, is the real money shot, but all the scenes are good ones.
The Doll Underground is a pretty bleak production, but McKai’s jagged direction works for it in a way that didn’t come off as well in some of his other films. It’s a movie about being on the run, hiding, living in shadows, and struggling, but where Debbie Loves Dallas married that desperate loneliness to a weak comedy storyline and an attempt to evoke the cachet of a classic film, The Doll Underground eschews storyline almost entirely, to its great benefit, and spends only the briefest mount of its running time in the evocation of the Weather Underground — again, I think, to its benefit. The cover copy and McKai both mention the ’70s leftist movement, clearly trying for some sympathetic magic, but the Doll Underground’s rhetoric only mentions “the owners” and “Big Business”, calling for young women to rise up and throw off the chains of their overlords, but never gets any more specific than that. Don’t get me wrong — I think that’s good; it seems to me that the more plot and exposition there is in an Eon McKai movie, the farther it goes astray. This one doesn’t.
