The female-focused porn studio Sssh.com last month released an R-rated softcore re-edited version of its AVN award-nominated feature Invictus last month, as AVN.com reported, and as the film’s director (and studio founder) Angie Rowntree intended, the politically charged film is now receiving at least some attention from the mainstream press.
Invictus has been nominated for a 2018 AVN Award in the Best Drama category, while Rowntree received a Best Director nomination. See a full list of the 2019 AVN Award nominee at this link.
Forbes magazine online published a lengthy article on the film that combines a critical evaluation of its merits with an interview with Rowntree. And while the “review” of Invictus isn’t exactly glowing, Forbes writer Mark Hay appears to see the merit in Rowntree’s intention of imbuing adult films with progressive social themes.
“The general public has this idea that, because a movie features explicit sex, it isn’t capable of having any depth or delivering a message,” AVN’s Sherri Shaulis told Hay in the article.
The writer acknowledges that Rowntree indeed has a message, “about climate change, government corruption, and the erosion of trust in the media she sees in the modern world, and where those trends may take our society—that deserves to get out to a wider audience and inspire dialogue.”
“I’m hoping,” Rowntree told Forbes, “that the R-rated cut makes it feel safer for people who have large audiences to talk and write about it, be they journalists, academics, or media influences.”
Unfortunately Hay, who farms the task of evaluating the movie out to David Sterrit, a former chair of the National Society of Film Critics, is skeptical of the movie’s potential to reach the mainstream audience that Rowntree appears to have in mind, as Sterrit judges the film, “heavy-handed and clunky in the way it puts its message across.”
Nonetheless, the critic is not entirely down on the softcore cut of Invictus, ultimately deeming it, “perfectly adequate. It tells a story in a reasonably coherent way.”
Perhaps most damning however, Sterrit feels that “the film’s erotic elements... don’t live up to the quality of increasingly common softcore scenes in mainstream films. Sure, they may be a bit more explicit. But, Sterritt argues, they are not hardcore enough to satisfy most folks who really just want scintillation over story and message.”
But, Hay asks, what about entering the film in festivals, or trying to find a home for Invictus on the indie circuit? Rowntree appears to have no such ambitions.
“What I’m hoping,” Rowntree told the Forbes writer, “is that the first wave of viewers to watch the R-rated version will be people in the media, some of whom will write about it and their responses to the film’s message.”
Photo by Sssh.com Screen Capture
