The Devil in Miss Jones 3-5 (1986-1995)

Sequels have long been one of the most parodied aspects of adult film and justifiably so, with there being thousands of gonzo adult videos released as part of numerous series who's entry numbers are into the double digits. Even some of greats were susceptible of falling into the never-ending sequel trap given the various changes the adult industry throughout the years. For instance John Leslie's Voyeur series lasting for 37 entries before Leslie's death in 2010. Still, much like mainstream films, there are instances of adult sequels that break the mold, even if they're destined to be overshadowed by their predecessors. One of the most crucial and influential titles from the “golden age” of porn or “porno chic”, Gerard Damiano's The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), first got a sequel in 1982 from Henri Pachard in which star Georgina Spelvin returned to the titular role of Justine Jones. Four years later the series would take a drastically different turn under the direction of Gregory Dark with The Devil in Miss Jones 3: A New Beginning and its immediate follow-up The Devil in Miss Jones 4: The Final Outrage. Dark would return to the franchise years later with The Devil in Miss Jones 5: The Inferno, which once again saw Dark putting Justine Jones through his warped vision of the underworld while continuing to take the adult video into more bizarre and difficult territories.

Following a terrific opening credits sequence set to the infectious tune of the Gleaming Spires “A Christian Girls Problems”, A New Beginning introduces a new variation on the character of Justine Jones. After an argument with her cheating boyfriend, Justine (Lois Ayres) hits the town and brings home a despondent groom (Paul Thomas) who was dumped at the altar, though their rendezvous is cut short when Justine hits her head on the headboard, breaking her neck. Awakening to total darkness, Justine is greeted by Negro (Jack Baker), welcoming her into Hell. Not believing any of it, Negro informs Justine of a way out, a treacherous trek through the various sexual perversities of Hell.

New Wave Hookers (1985) may be the film Dark will be best remembers for, but there's a strong case to be made for The Devil in Miss Jones 3 being his finest work. Perhaps no other hardcore film of Dark's best represents just how different and innovative a filmmaker Dark is and just how much he stood out from his contemporaries working in the adult field in the 80's. The only possible comparison being Stephen Sayadian's Nightdreams (1981) and Cafe Flesh (1982), with Dark's immaculate production design fully embracing the artifice of his unique vision of Hell, each new scenario Justine is either witness to or a participant in being more arresting than the last. Equally eye-popping is leading lady Lois Ayres, who's “new wave hooker” look and irritable mood are in perfect synchronicity with Dark's “fuck you” attitude. Always an incendiary filmmaker, the film feels even more daring the older it gets, the racially charged barbs hurled back and forth between Ayres and Baker are sure to have some blushing more than the outrageous, oftentimes taboo shattering sexual content. Both play off each other brilliantly, virtually every line of dialogue uttered by Baker and Aryes responses being hysterically funny, though the film is also a who's who of some of the biggest names in the adult field of the time like Tom Byron, the previously mentioned Paul Thomas, Amber Lynn, and Vanessa Del Rio who, in one of the films most unforgettable scenes, finds herself ravaged by a gang of rat men.

Shot as one long film but split up into two releases, The Final Outrage continues where A New Beginning left off with Justine continuing her trek through Hell. Dark takes the racial element even further with a specific section of Hell, “the racist room”, designated for individuals condemned to fornicate with those they felt superior too while living and later in the film Dark obliterates a specific taboo that, while hardly rare in adult films, is approached in a manner so blunt, very few if any other directors would have the nerve to attempt. Part 4 also carries over another, crucial aspect that featured prominently in the third and which would become a staple in Dark's films, the interview concept. Throughout both films, there are numerous cutaways to interviews or testimonials with various people from Justine's life, each giving their impressions of what kind of person she truly was. These segments are equally funny and bizarre as the rest of the film and while character development wasn't exactly Dark's main priority with the films, they do serve to make that previously mentioned taboo scenario all the more perverse. The idea of the interview, or “interrogation”, is one of the few parallels that can be drawn between Dark's hardcore work and his erotic thrillers, with several of his softcore protagonists “confessing” the narrative to either an interviewer or directly to the camera and later hardcore works like Snake Pit (1996) and the Shocking Truth (1996-'97) films being centered around interviews with the female performers.

The Inferno, the fifth in the series and the last to be directed by Dark, is also the most surreal and abstract. While the film is built around the premise of yet another recently deceased Justine Jones, played by an almost entirely silent Juli Ashton, being thrust into a variety of sexual scenarios by Satan himself, this time played with scene chewing gusto by non-sex Dark favorite Rip Hymen in an absurd devil costume, Dark takes the same approach as he did with New Wave Hookers 4 (1995), nearly dispensing with narrative altogether in favorite of a Dante-inspired tableaux of highly imaginative and immaculately designed sex scenes. While not as charged as the third and forth films in terms of sensitive subject matter, Dark does take some none-too-subtle shots at feminism, with Hymen describing Justine as a virtuous drag and if the name Justine didn't already make it obvious, the influence of the Marquis de Sade is apparent in all the films and perhaps moreso in The Inferno, with Justine's “initiation” into the various sexual proclivities of the underworld being very Sadean in nature. Like New Wave Hookers 4, The Inferno was shot on video and finds Dark using the format to become even more experimental with editing, the film being the most delirious of Dark's entries in the series, making use of music video-esque quick cuts that would only become more pronounced in Dark's future adult videos and it would only be a year later that Dark began directing actual music videos.

While speaking to Psychotronic Video in 1997, Dark explained DMJ5 by saying “In a sense, DMJ5 is sort of the concept of the tarot card as a joke, the devil as a jokester manipulating reality through media images. Media images really interest me so we worked that into the script.” The Inferno was also the end of the line for Dark and VCA, who had been his distributor since his first adult feature with the second half of the Dark Bros. duo being Walter Gernert, AKA Walter Dark, co-owner at VCA. In the same Psychotronic piece, Dark explained “I probably could have sat down with VCA and worked it out... VCA's attitudes about music, content and dialogue are very conservative. And in my films it's not that I want to denigrate or be misogynistic so much. I just want to explore visual imagery which VCA doesn't find particularly erotic. My stuff is about, visual interesting shit with sex going on. It's not necessarily about eroticism.” It's precisely that attitude that made gave Dark's adult films their reputation. Being sequels to one of the biggest titles of the porno chic era, The Devil in Miss Jones sequels are perhaps going to be overshadowed by the legendary first film, but Dark's three films in the series stand as some of his best work with the fifth film leading to a new chapter in his career.

New Wave Hookers 2-4 (1991-1995)

Terms like “trailblazer” and “pioneer” tend be awarded rather liberally but in the case of director Gregory Dark, they're more than earned. With a body of work consisting of adult films, softcore erotic thrillers, a horror film starring a WWE superstar and music videos for acts ranging from the Melvins to Brittney Spears, Dark's career trajectory has been as idiosyncratic as anyone in the entertainment industry could hope to have. While directing the adult industry centered documentary Fallen Angels (1985), Dark became convinced that he could make a better adult film than any of the people he was interviewing, so he did. Much like Stephen “Rinse Dream” Sayadian had done a few years prior with Nightdreams (1981) and Cafe Flesh (1982), Dark's films changed the perception of how adult films looked and sounded with colorful, surreal visuals and scenarios and contemporary soundtracks. Dark made history from the very beginning with Let Me Tell Ya 'bout White Chicks (1984), one of the very first interracial sex films, but it was New Wave Hookers (1985) where Dark really changed the game. Easily transcending the Tracy Lords controversy that surrounded it, the film is widely considered one of the best films of its kind, though it wasn't until 1991 did Dark returned to his most famous title and two more sequels under Dark's direction would follow with Dark's avant-garde tendencies becoming more pronounced with each sequel.

Taking the idea of using new wave music to program women to become prostitutes from the first film to even stranger places, New Wave Hookers 2 follows “L” (Rip Hymen, a frequent non-sex actor in Dark's hardcore features), a cult deprogrammer who's just apprehended Kimberly (Madison), a prostitute involved with the “Cult of Willie”, run by its namesake (Jack Baker), a pimp who keeps his girls under control by playing hypnosis-inducing music before sending them out to turn tricks. Throughout his interrogation of Kimberly, L learns how the Cult of Willie operates, though is in for a major shock upon discovering Willie is at the mercy of a bigger, much more dangerous operation.

While the general New Wave Hookers premise of using music to hypnotize women into prostitution is outlandish in itself, Dark ups the bizarre ante considerably with New Wave Hookers 2. The idea of the music technique being appropriated by a pimp, a typically hilariously on-point Jack Baker, who holds sermons for his girls reading from “the good book”, Pimp by Iceberg Slim, makes for an already berserk scenario, Dark outdoes himself with a twist involving a cabal of women from the lost city of Atlantis hellbent on world domination. A standout film in a year ripe with unusual adult fare like Sayadian's Nightdreams sequels, PartyDoll a Go-Go! as well as John Leslie's Curse of the Catwoman and Laying the Ghost, New Wave Hookers 2 is a film Dark himself has claimed as a favorite of his own adult works. Still shooting on film, New Wave Hookers 2 is one of Dark's most colorful, with the visuals matching the story in the lunacy department, with Dark's sex scenes consisting of men in Phantom of the Opera-esque masks on leashes and human lamps, eroticism seeming like an afterthought. Dark also opens the film the same as the first, with a montage of the films female talent set to the Plugz “Electrify Me”, the theme of the series. Along with Madison, the top-shelf ensemble includes the likes of Savanna and Patrica Kennedy as well as Peter North, Randy Spears and Randy West, giving the film some casting ties with the aforementioned Sayadian and Leslie features.

Only slightly less outlandish but still outrageous is the narrative Dark concocted for New Wave Hookers 3 (1993). The film opens with John Baxter (Jon Dough), addressing the audience via video from Heaven where despite being dead, he's happy as a successful pimp and proceeds to tell the story of how he got where he is. In desperate need of money, John proposes to his beautiful wife Tiffany (Crystal Wilder) that she begin selling herself to bring in extra funds. In need of business advice, John turns to Sol (Rocco Siffredi), a shifty lawyer who informs John of a “deep house”, a brothel where women are programmed to have sex for money with the aid of musical earpiece. Tiffany is coaxed into going and John's plan works, though he begins to regret it once Tiffany starts charging him for sex and Helen (Tiffany Million), the head mistress of the deep house, affectionately known as “Boss Mama”, grows more and more fond of Tiffany due to her resemblance to a past lover and hatches a sinister plan to keep Tiffany all to herself.

With a nearly two hour run time, New Wave Hookers 3 is certainly the most involving film of the series script wise, with Dark somehow managing to work in a fairly damn endearing story of marriage into yet another spin on the central New Wave Hookers ingredient. Being a Dark film, of course the film was incendiary by design and it's not as if he gives anyone in the film a truly happy ending in the classic sense of the term, but there is something about the Baxter's that has a certain sweetness to it and Dark's warped sense of humor is ever present. The film is also notable in that it was one of three Dark hardcore features made during the same year that Dark also directed four exceptional softcore erotic thrillers, and while Dark himself deliberately tried to keep the two separated, with New Wave Hookers 3 there does seem to be a bit of overlap with Dark's Secret Games films with the central theme being prostitution, and the fourth wall breaking video playback was a crucial element in Secret Games 2: The Escort. Visually though, New Wave Hookers 3 is unquestionably a hardcore Gregory Dark film. The Phantom of the Opera masks return, Dark spruces up a sex scene with a bed with an imposing chain link headboard and the films most memorable image, as so wonderfully uttered by Wilder in the film, a “gaggle of quacking duckmen”, one of the most brilliantly deranged instances of Dark utilizing animal masks.

The most abstract and surreal entry in the series and one of Dark's strangest as a whole which is quite a feat, New Wave Hookers 4 (1995) is as different from the previous films as possible. While the opening credits is in a similar style to the previous three films, gone is “Electrify Me”. Also gone is the hypnotic music device, or any attempt at telling a straightforward story. If New Wave Hookers 4 is “about” anything, the sexual scenarios seem to all be from the imagination/hallucinations of an institutionalized midget named “Half-Pint” talking to himself in a mirror, opining on the nature of women, sex and prostitution. The inmates appear to be running the asylum as the doctor observing Half-Pint (Jon Dough) fancies himself a frog, ribbiting in-between his observations. Dark does ultimately bookend the film the way it began, but at the time New Wave Hookers 4 was Dark at his most unhinged and provoking. Dark had never catered to the trappings of conventional adult films but New Wave Hookers 4 was a different type of film even for Dark and would be a sign of things to come when Dark would go even more free-form. Deliriously seguing from one scene to the next, arousal seems to be the furthest thing from Dark's mind, with Dark dressing his male performers up as clowns, dogs, puts bird cages on their heads and in the films most infamous scene, two performers in seal costumes beg for fish on a set of ice blocks.

Following New Wave Hookers 4, several other sequels followed, though Dark had no involvement in any of them. There was even a reboot of sorts with Neu Wave Hookers (2006). New Wave Hookers 4 was also one of the last films Dark made for VCA, who had produced and distributed the series as well as Dark's other hardcore films with Walter Gernert, a co-owner at VCA, being “Walter Dark”, the second half of the infamous Dark Brothers. After leaving VCA, Dark formed his own production company, Dark Works, and secured distribution though Evil Angel, his subsequent adult work following the template set by New Wave Hookers 4, becoming more abstract, confrontational and uncomfortable, pushing the sex as well as the slick, music video style editing into even more challenging territories. Speaking to Hustler's Erotic Video guide and quoted in Psychotonric Video magazine in 1997, Dark philosophized a bit on New Wave Hookers series saying “One of the key ideas running through the New Wave Hookers series is the transference of power, inverting the normal situation and turning the male into the sex object.” While the first New Wave Hookers will perhaps always be the film Dark is most well known for, the second, third and forth films are classics in their own right, each showcasing the talents of one of the most original and innovative artists to ever work in the adult medium.