WWW- In his novel Blue Movie written 35 years ago, when the adult film industry was making its first tentative stabs at legitimacyTerry Southern imagined the making of a highbrow, big-budget, celebrity-studded porn film. He dedicated the book to someone he felt could rise to such a challenge, Stanley Kubrick, but it was Blake Edwards who ended up bastardizing Blue Movie (without credit) for his Hollywood satire S.O.B. , in which Julie Andrews went topless.

When Kubrick filmed Eyes Wide Shut in the late ’90s, the media ran amok with predictions that he’d brought Blue Movie to life for real, and that this would be the “sexiest movie ever.” But it turned out to be empty hype (Kubrick even toned down some scenes to get an R rating), and the only claimants to big-star porn remain the total downer Last Tango in Paris , Bob Guccione’s misshapen Caligula (with Malcom McDowell, Peter O’Toole and Helen Mirren in various states of undress) and, in a distant third place, Chloe Sevigny fellating Vincent Gallo in Brown Bunny .

But porn has of course mainstreamed in other respects. Memoirs of porn stars routinely make the New York Times bestseller list, and there’ve been several major movies based on the exploits of Johnny Wadd Holmes alone.

Now over the horizon sails Pirates , released in late September on DVD and a massive hit for co-producers Digital Playground and Adam & Eve Pictures, which promised a groundbreaking adult crossover into the mainstream video market and appear to have delivered. Press releases boasts that Pirates , despite its high price, is outselling other recent porn releases by a margin of two to one. The film’s premiere was afforded a red carpet bash at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre.

And the film definitely is going for some level of respectability, in marketing if not in content. Note Pirates’ straightforward title, bereft of gratuitous X’s or double entendres . The film could easily have been dubbed SeXXX Marks the Spot or Walk My Plank , or Swashfuckler , but the temptation was firmly resisted.

This “collector’s edition” comes in a three-disc box set, containing a widescreen version of the film, a high-definition version (so the sperm can glisten that much more brightly, and there’s that much more clarity to the silicone implants), plus a making-of documentary, audio commentary, cast bios and even a reel of auditions featuring the few cast members who don’t have sex.

In the film itself, you’re astonished to see a horde of animated skeletons chasing the stars back to their rowboat for the story’s, uh, climax. No, the skeletons don’t get to have sex with anyone. I’ll leave it to your personal fetishes whether that’s a good or a bad thing.

The stars of Pirates the energetic raccoon-eyed Jesse Jane, girl-next-door type Carmen Luvana, hard-edged adventurer Janine, enthusiastic redhead Teagan Presley, and Devon, Austyn Moore and Jenaveve Joliearen’t exactly household names, but they’re well known to fans of the film’s director, the single-named Joone, who has a music-videomaker’s flair for lush lustiness and distracting editing tics. (Female stars overwhelm the males at every turn in the porn industrythe male members of the cast, who barely make the credits on the box cover, include Tommy Gunn as the Tarantino-esque Captain Stagnetti and the handsomely endowed Evan Stone as his noble vanquisher.)

Pirates makes the most of affordable computer technology to flesh out (so to speak) its Caribbean backdrops, but the writing and acting show how classy trappings can only take you so far. The puns that the filmmakers eschew in Pirates ‘ title and packaging, they are happy to indulge in for its superficial script: a pointedly brisk pronunciation of the word “seaman,” or ejaculations of “Mighty pirate hunter, can I taste your massive sword?” The sex scenes emerge from nowhere and last way too long; granted, they are Pirates ‘ rascally raison d’etre , but the challenge would be to integrate them more delicately into a coherent storyline. Terry Southern’s Blue Movie gauntlet has yet to be seized.

The last frontier for scripted porn films would be to escape the limitations of genre parody, and self-parody. Pirates , beneath its billowing sails, is content to wallow in old-school sexplay: long scenes of people screwing in between unconvincing shots of model boats floating in what’s probably a swimming pool.

Most of the collector’s edition bonus features are a bust, in the bad sense of that word, sensuality-wise. Those who’ve always wanted to see a blooper reel for a porn film will be upset with the missed opportunity hereinstead of awkward deflations or improper bodily functions, it’s just another weak litany of actors blowing their lines. That’s no surprise, given that they were hired for an altogether different type of blowing.

But there is one small portion of the overblown Pirates package that hints at what might have been. It’s a two-minute short purporting to be the inspiration for the feature (as if Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t). There’s no sex in it, just moody shots of a sole male pirate washed up on a deserted beach, burying his treasure and facing his doom. The studly buccaneer doesn’t speak, grunt or masturbate. In the context of this perverse package, it’s an astonishing smidgen of piratical art for art’s sake.