Rating: NNNN
THE GIRL NEXT DOOR, written and directed by Christine Fugate, produced by Fugate, Adam Berns and Eren McGinnis, with Stacy Valentine. 84 minutes. A Cafe Sisters production. A Blackwatch release. Opens Friday (July 14). For venues and times, see Rep Cinema listings, page 71. Rating: NNNN
If you’re looking for sex, look no further than Christine Fugate’s no-budget documentary The Girl Next Door, an up-close and personal look at porn actress Stacy Valentine, whose problematic self-esteem and peculiar profession have led her to treat her own body as a real-life science project.
Valentine is near 30 and a fan of plastic surgery. If you’ve ever wanted to see actual liposuction, breast augmentation and a collagen injection, then this is the film for you. In a moment of startling intimacy, she announces, “I’m trying to make myself unrealistic” — and she has succeeded. A pretty woman in the bland midwestern style of minor beauty-pageant winners, Valentine has reconstructed herself as an erotic fantasy creature who only looks good naked. With her outsize breasts, there are simply no clothes that hang properly on her petite frame.
Girl Next Door suffers from the usual problem of no-budget documentaries. Director Fugate financed it on her credit cards and shot it on video, so it does not look good. Indeed, after a couple months of big-budget effects movies, it’s jarring to see this kind of bare-bones filmmaking. In midsummer, one tends to forget that not everyone gets $100 million to play with.
That said, Fugate does get behind the scenes and into the world of adult filmmaking, though the on-set footage is more chaste than even the sort of porn one sees on hotel pay-per-view.
Valentine is an intriguing subject for a documentary. It’s not mentioned in the movie, but she’s kind of old for a porn star, and she’s not in the business, apparently, to enhance her earning power on the strip club circuit. She’s the kind of woman who would invite her mother to the adult video awards show. JH
xxx-woman gets intimate
