Hard Academy: Part 3 (2018) Online

Rocco Siffredi had a great acting career, with many fine feature films/videos to his credit, but now that he's a puffed-up porn "artist" behind the camera success has gone to his head. Witness this 3rd volume of a gonzo orgy series he cranks out for his beloved buddy John Stagliano's Evil Angel label.

Lengthy (only 4 scenes but 211 minutes of boredom) opus ends with Rocco handing out certificates to graduates of his Academy where Euro talent is taught how to become sex workers in gonzo porn. Not actors mind you, but what the industry euphemistically calls "models" in recent years. And Rocco presents this nonsense as "giving back", fashioning himself as something of a humanitarian for indoctrinating impressionable youth into a variation on the World's Oldest Profession. I much prefer the good old days when becoming a porn actor or actress was thought of as part of the continuum of the entertainment industry, even with an option to perhaps (though it be highly unlikely) crossover into mainstream acting.

DVD contains trailers for other Rocco videos, and shows Volume 2 of this series with big stars in it. But for Part 3 Rocco emphasizes younger, almost newcomer femmes, of which the Latin sisters Ortega stand out, literally. These buxom beauties are almost lost in the shuffle of dozens of folks spread out in outdoor group sex, but caught my eye at least when the camera wanders over to watch them hump briefly before wandering over to others.

Gang-bang is a favorite of Rocco's and a couple of the girls get that treatment too. And his British emanuensis Kelly Stafford is in the spotlight as a "trainer" of the aspiring porn stars.

This sort of generic porn harkens back to the early days of Adult Cinema, when lazy pornographers would include an "orgy" scene in the film assuming fans doted on the stuff. Some like Carlos Tobalina used that type of content as a crutch, making their work barely watchable. And Rocco's modern version is no better, actually anti-erotic as there is no intimacy by definition in a crowd, and the frame filled with writhing bodies is not a three-ring circus but rather an overload of detail that makes viewing a chore.

The pretense that this academy/camp where the kids exercise when not f*cking each other is a positive activity is laughable, and my early reaction was that the whole thing was an excuse to recruit a large cast for a porn film without having to pay the players. And that instantly brought back memories of my earlier (30 years-plus ago) career as a movie journalist, when I covered Troma in NY and encountered endless reports of how they would not pay the actors in the film but reward them instead with "screen credit", supposedly the entree to the film biz and a step up on the ladder to success. The city of New York never shut them down for this practice, and as a result Lloyd and the Troma team have been enshrined by a new generation or two of ignorant fans as innovators in the art of Le Bad Film. Caveat emptor.