WWW- post on villagevoice.com: Gilvert 11 (JM) isn’t the first porn I’ve seen that incorporates raw meat, but it certainly offers the greatest variety–various cuts of beef, whitish chicken drumsticks, something dark and slippery I’m guessing is liver. The first meat movie I saw had men kneading women’s feet with uncooked ground chuck, which is a great way to forever put an end to wifey’s requests for foot massages. Here the meat gets placed all over the woman’s body, wrapped around her face, stuck in her mouth, placed demurely over her crotch. It is the grand finale of a story that finds Ashley Blue inhabiting her latest Gilvert character, a young woman who blackmails $40,000 for college–a chance to turn her life around–from her uncle who once sexually abused her. I hear Lifetime’s showing a softcore version.

Shock porn’s rarely this realistic–or absurd. On the same day I watched Gilvert 11, I also saw Cam’ron’s straight-to-DVD gangsploitation feature Killa Season. Over two hours of porn-caliber dialogue and acting shot on video, this movie probably had a smaller budget than Gilvert, on account of them not having to pay sex workers (although Cam does lick the side of his uncredited wifey’s face and hump her softcore style). But Cam’ron–who wrote, directed, and produced the movie–didn’t skimp on the ultraviolence and gore, including entrails yanked out of a man’s stomach by hand. What’s more shocking? That Cam would reduce his nuanced rap narratives to the most obvious play-acting (which I still enjoyed), or that Ashley Blue and her director would center the Girlvert’s entire backstory around sexual abuse, that industry bugaboo? Apples and oranges–or liver and entrails–yes, but both these flicks skate onto thin ice and fall right through, redefining the pageant that is pseudo-cinema. Like Tarnation, only watchable.

Ashley Blue is porn’s most savage critic–and it’s most spirited actress. Where other starlets have ego–their motivation is starletdom–Blue simply has id. She abhors hypocrisy; when she pushes porn to its limits, she’s not proving its resiliency, she’s exposing how it’s already broken. Girlvert is born to lose. In all the movies I’ve seen in the series, she suffers humiliation or worse, and exacts mindless but dogged revenge, generally by cajoling a man in exploiting another woman. Here’s how this one goes: Girlvert gets to school and befriends the succulent sorority girl Kaci Starr, who promptly sics two frat boys on her. They pour something in Girlvert’s drink and makes her blow them until she throws up–then makes her wipe it up and keep going. Afterwards, they tie her, naked, to a tree and pelt eggs at her. Next Girlvert finds the warm embrace of two campus Christians, a guy and a girl (Roxxxy Rush); bored with their songs and rhetoric, she raises holy hell, telling the guy his friend’s a lesbian, and to fuck the homosexuality out of her (he does, and slaps her face with his dick, yelling, “Demons be gone!”). Finally, she returns to the sorority, and instructs the “retarded” maintenance man to, in essence, rape Kaci Starr’s character, shouting like mad all the while. Amber Wild gets the meat treatment (plus the oversized dildo treatment) for preaching vegetarianism. At the end, the Girlvert tosses her books in the trash, no lessons learned.