If there’s truly a land of opportunity, California is it, and Ed Powers serves as a crackling example of how someone with a little pluck can manufacture a persona for themselves in the land of weirdness.

Where else but in California could Powers turn loitering and lechery into a cottage industry? He did so in his commercially successful Bus Stop Tales, but had Powers pursued the same concept for example, in Philadelphia, he’d be getting time off for good behavior much less time at all on the video sales charts.

With that degree of success under his belt, Powers went on to bastardize a hallowed tradition of the privileged—that of the “debutante”. Given the series’ format, is it safe to conclude that any Vassar girl in her right mind would shit a plaid skirt to be labeled a deb?

Now, if you think assholes are sacred cows, think again. Powers has come up with another series that proves, conclusively, that sphincters can be funny. As a sequel of sorts to last year’s award winner in the anal category, Dr. Butts The Next Examination features Powers again as the neo-proctologist Dr. Butts, a graduate of the Groucho Marx school of medicine. Only this time Butts/Powers takes an unintentional but hallucinatory journey through a time tube as a kind of Anus in Wonderland.

Dr. Butts meets up with the shrill Polly Prism whose voice is the next thing to a referee’s whistle and whose manic personality makes an escapee from a plane wreck seem calm. Randy West plays an equally out-in-left-field anal doctor, a fatigue-wearing M.A.S.H. reject who talks like General Patton and has a pet teddy bear named Poindexter. Also along for the ride, director Bruce (dig those shades) Seven, still looking like a beatnik poet after all these years, finds himself in the same predicament as Butts—just “trying to get the fuck out of here”, here meaning wherever they are.

The meandering Butts winds up in a room called Anatomy Theatre where a number of girls bump and grind and flash their asses—the same kind of place where John Stagliano probably goes on vacation. In a stab at some trick photography Powers even performs a dance number for himself, kind of mocking the heinie movements Stagliano and Bruce Seven videos thrive on.

Powers goes from one room to the next where female patient-seeks-doctor encounters are in progress. The girls all seem to have on thing in common—problems with their asses that only a macropenis insertion can seem to alleviate. Newcomer Anisa gets it from a doc in a clown face, and after some anal thermometer hijinx, Bionca gets real funky with Marc Wallice. She’s exceptionally cute and alluring in this scene. Cassandra Dark is having her tits tweaked and her tonsils checked. A perfunctory ass examination is followed by normal sex (shucks).

When Bruce Seven makes his entrance, it’s as much a commentary on the “boring” (Bruce’s words) state of girl-girl videos as much as anything else. Carolyn Monroe and Kaiko are indulging in some soporific Sappho until Bruce whips out the anal beads and all hell breaks lose. Kaiko gets a butt plug up her ass, and Carolyn gets the beads up hers which are oh so slowly withdrawn. Directors take note: this is why Seven’s stuff is so highly rated. It’s honest, representative filth. Unfortunately, by dint of timing, when Carolyn takes on steady partner Cole Stevens in a non-analer it seems way too calm and anticlimactic after the beads.

“This whole fuckin’ place is weird” says Bruce. Well that’s like Edgar Allan Poe copping an attitude about graveyards. Powers and Seven are still trying to find their way out of the ass darkly when the pretty Japanese Kaiko waylays Powers because she needs an asshole doctor. Ed obliges by ramming it up her Mitsubishi. The best, however, is saved for last where Carolyn Monroe, as Dr. West’s patient, gets it up the butt in a condom-drenched finale. It at least “atones” for her earlier non-anal bout.

Dr. Butts 2 The Next Examination is an outlandishly off-the-wall journey into the asshole. It’s a little bit silly, a little bit of a parody with lots of face-distorted close-ups and anal sex so graphically rendered, you can smell it. It’s raucously entertaining, genuinely depraved and delivers the goods. The only way Powers or anyone else is going to beat this one is by finding a bunch of Playmates who’d be willing to take it up the ass. Of course, these girls would have to leave town on the next wagon train and never be seen again.

Oh, did I say wagon train? Could be another concept.