Minty the Assassin (2009)

Sex has, and always, will be integral of our species for survival. I mean, it is a great exercise, procreation of a human being, and is just very fun act to perform. It has been stipulated in ancient history where women sold their bodies for money as the oldest profession. We buy magazines with scantily clad men and women on the covers, lame jokes in lame films and even watch films solely to turn us on with sexual acts. It was a fairly underground movement for much of the 20th Century, starting with nickelodeons at Coney Island with a fully dressed woman flashing a leg in a short film, to making films where they engage in un-simulated sex.

Around the 1960’s and 1970’s, XXX theatres started popping up around America, showcasing the dirty deed and having fun. Then Hollywood started to figure, if this is a multi-million dollar industry, we must have it too. With that mentality, we were given star-studded pornography, or films laced with sex, such as Carnal Knowledge and Caligula to name a couple. Even then, regular pornos became better, where they actually crafted stories and characters, although fairly marginally to be sure, and gave us sexual stimuli as well as entertainment.

The 80’s came, videotape became cheaper to produce, so the production qualities took a major dip, and they became sex shows yet again. No more quality porn just videotaped sex and slapped on a VHS tape, no care or quality in place.

In 1997, Boogie Nights was released to huge critical acclaim and box office success. I know it is a fascinating film about a fictional character, but the point I am driving at is they dignified pornography as a creative outlet, not just an easy moneymaker. It showed the care they took preparing a screenplay, working out characters and letting them find sex instead of just random sex scenes that lazily appears out of thin air. I am gonna go on a limb and say Boogie Nights is the most recent porno to feature major stars in it.

Minty: The Assassin is the polar opposite of what Boogie Nights stands for: quality porn. This film is about a famous comic book hero/actual assassin named Minty (Elina Madison), an assassin (DUH!) who hunts monsters in scantily clad outfits and eats chocolate as a quirk/enhancer.

After a random opening where she offs a mutant, another random character by the name of Double D (Tabitha Taylor), a lesbian vampire/human hybrid who takes a fancy to Minty, where she then takes a bite out of the dead mutant. After a quick scene of “training” (If arm wrestling counts as training) by Big Boss (Anthony Ray Parker), we then shift to a date between the two ladies. After a random scene of Double D engaging with metatarsal intercourse on Minty in a restaurant where the is nothing covering the sides of the table (!), we learn that Big Boss is kidnapped by baddy/Minty comic book fan Dr. Brain Bender and is held in Cock Tower.

Oh boy….

Anyways, Minty engages with several baddies on advancing floors of the tower, always being grouped, de-clothed, fighting and talking philosophy and science while fighting (!!), by a bunch of mind-controlled (and recently deceased) baddies as a tool to have sex with the main villain or Big Boss will be killed by a bomb within sixty minutes.

Wow, I am not exactly sure what I have just written, let alone just watched. At first, it felt like it would be just another cheaply filmed action film with elements of sex and kitsch and would be forgotten amongst my hundreds of discs waiting to be reviewed. Sadly, it became worse, as it became an unidentifiable amorphous blob of a flick.

1.The film starts of unidentifiable, with a close up of Minty, which leads to a close up of a candy bar, and then a fight with a mutant.

This is a bad start, as we do not know her motive, let alone who Minty is, and we are thrown into a badly staged fight with a reject of Beast from Yucca Flats. Then, we get Double D out from nowhere, killing the reject and sucking his blood. The characters here seem established already, like from a previous film, but this is the first (And hopefully last) film, where we need exposition and back-story of the characters. Why is Minty fully aware of her status as a comic book hero?

Why is every woman in the film a lesbian? How did everyone have mutated super powers?

No answer can be given, as we are never told, not even a smidge of back-story. The whole film just starts off bad and ends worse. There are even strange cutaways where the actors turn into cartoons and then come back without notice!

2.Bad acting.

I looked up some of the stars of this film; some have starred in other pornos and Z-films, while some have actually appeared in big budget mainstream films such as The Matrix. But, this is a film where there is no acting at all, no attempts to create a fully realized person or make an engaging presence.

3.Bad Direction.

I looked up the writer/director Eugene Baldovino on IMDb.com, to see what he has done. I found out he is an editor who has worked on mainly DTV films such as Dr. Doolittle: Tail to the Chief and others like it. He made his debut here, and I kinda hoped his work as a cutter could help with at least pacing. No, he directs with a lead foot, and means it. The film panders for 80 minutes, with a lack of structure or narrative or even common sense. He has no style, ability to guide an actor, or framing action, that I can say Uwe Boll has more talent than he.

4.Lack of sex.

I may be a grown man, partaking in the sweet nectar of love making on occasion, and mature enough to not giggle at the word “sex”, but I’ll be damned if it still doesn’t excite me. So, I sometimes watch a porno, hoping something will come of it, and it usually does, no matter how random they might be nowadays, but I still watch. Here, there is very little sex for it to qualify as a soft-core porno, let alone a regular porno. Sure, there was the random moment in the restaurant and a few teases of missing clothing by our hero from fighting but there is no payoff.

Sure, there is a slightly spicy moment near the end with a lil’ girl-on-girl, but it is intercut with two cartoons who look little like the characters and an orange tree losing an orange that transforms to a real orange. It is then intercut with the two ladies, with one part with taped nipples and the other with a lil’ bit of bare nipple, but they are mostly taped, and the orange gets crushed by the Monty Python foot afterwards!

Whew, what a dozy!

I cannot make this stuff up, but it’s not for a lack of originality that’s for sure. I just have attributes like taste, common decency, common sense and a dashing demeanor. It is an awkward mix of Barb Wire, Scott Pilgrim, Enter the Dragon, Twilight and an episode of “Nova” all in one giant, uneven ball. Even the potentially cool character of Zen Cowboy gets demolished by this weight of bad over his head.

I cannot go on anymore, too much self-mutilation at hand.

Anyways, the DVD from Cinema Epoch at least has a solid 1.85 anamorphic picture, which showed little in the way of defects and problems. The 2.0 Dolby Digital track is standard stereo track, filled with no bass, tinny dialogue from time to time and a lack of punch in the fight scenes. There are thankfully little in the way of extras, consisting of a photo gallery and a trailer completing the supplements.

The only thing good I can say is the opening them contains sound bites from Super Mario Bros. 3, and made me want to play the game. Other than that, a huge waste of time, space and money that creates anger towards the filmmakers and capable of starting riots. I literally threw this copy on the ground and stepped on it to destroy this creation.

Alas, like true evil, it withstood my weight and still works. Anyways, off to the Mt. Doom to throw it into the boughs that created this monstrosity.

0 stars out of 4 stars.

reviewed by Jacob Scarberry a.k.a. Alan Smithee.

© Copyright 2011 John Shatzer