Star Ballz (2002)

Rating: *
Review Date: 6/11/02

Essentially an anime styled porn parody of "Star Wars" (1977) that lampoons several dozen other pop culture properties as well. Sailor Moon ("Sailor Moon"), Goku ("Dragonball Z"), and Pikachu ("Pokémon") assume the roles of Princess Leia, Han Solo, and R2-D2 respectively, and they spend the next forty-five minutes being chased by Darth Vader's Spermtroopers and having sex with anything that moves (and a few things that don't). Bottom of the barrel production values make this a serious chore to sit through, making you lament the desktop video revolution and the people that it has empowered. With great power comes great responsibility, but how many people take that to heart?

Like most porn, the only thing this video has going for it is some rather snappy cover art. The tone for the entire production is set before the video even starts, and it becomes painfully obvious that only fans of "Beavis And Butthead" are going to get anything out of the experience. The animation is a poor combination of 2D character animation and 3D rendered environments, made worse by low and inconsistent frame rates. Like some of the worst anime on the market, the character animation hovers around the four to eight frames per second range and motion cycles are re-used way too much. Even the 3D rendered scenes suffer from low frames rates (probably 10-20 fps) which is totally inexcuseable in this day and age of home video hardware and software. I was creating stuff of higher quality on my home computer ten years ago on hardware that was several hundred times slower. But the sound is even worse than the animation. The recording quality is terrible and the music is very amateur. Again, this is made worse by an extreme overuse of recycled sound clips that play over and over during the excruciatingly long sex scenes.

And yet, I can see where these people are coming from. I'm all too familiar with this brand of geek humor. This is the kind of stuff that you come up with late at night when you and your geeky friends are hanging out at Denny's, or Taco Bell, or wherever. You come up with an idea, and pretty soon you all start giggling out of control like the bunch of adolescent idiots that you are. Unfortunately, bringing this silly and juvenile brainstorming to an audience as entertainment rarely, if ever, works. It's neither original, clever, or coherent, and the only people who find it amusing at all are the people who came up with it in the first place. That is the true hallmark of geek humor. If more thought and care had gone into the execution, this might have been a slightly amusing effort as opposed to just being a random collection of rude sex and uninteresting pop culture references.