An American In Prague, a tacky mockumentary often promoted as one of the best selling gay porn films of all time, was a great disappointment for me. In the movie, headline star Chance plays a well-hung American boy who flies to Prague to audition for Bel Ami boss George Duroy, but Chance is miscast. He isn't particularly attractive and comes across as a completely obnoxious gay ghetto twink-whore and so he can't carry off the role of likeable cum-filled frat boy let loose on the Continent. The film's Slavic performers, despite their Statue Of David musculatures, have all the sexual charge of a stale glass of Pilsner.

Johan Paulik acts as Chance's host and tour guide, but of course we see little of stunning Prague beyond a few fleeting backdrop shotsanatomyofhell.jpg and instead are trawled through one automaton-acted sex scene after the other. Paulik takes Chance to a Prague swimming pool, where well-built Czech guys apparently cruise each other for sex. Paulik's heavily-accented voiceover narration is meant to be sexy but bores us to death with cheesy statements about regular neighbourhood events being as "reliable as my morning erection" and so on. One of his neighbours likes to bring guys back to the apartment block and fuck them on the stairs. "He's an exhibitionist, I'm a voyeur - we make for perfect neighbours" say Paulik, sounding every bit like Martina Navratilova commentating on a Williams sister inside-out backhand. Later, Chance is treated to some Prague gay nightlife, which looks even more wretched and shit-boring than its well-financed Western counterpart.

From the title and the storyline, I imagine that there was supposed to be a certain kind of college-boy sexiness to the whole thing. If the actors of An American In Prague looked like well-fed, sporty freshmen who play a bit of rugby, wear dirty socks and eat what their mothers cook for them, then it may have worked. But they don't. The problem with the guys here - especially Chance - is that they look like teen runaways who've been vacuumed up by porn producers or pimps and shoved into a porn flick after they've been processed through the gym and the solarium. (I'm sure this isn't the case with these specific actors and the producers of this specific film, but that's what they look like.) They look too batltle-hardened for their age, and too gay, and their mechanically over-polished performances and hungry-for-porn-stardom camera charisma ruins any potential frat-boy effect.

The two-disc collector's edition copy I watched contains many hints. Chance, performing some "outakes" with Ion Davidov snappily asks the director, "what do you need, so I can finish, so I can leave". It's meant, I guess, to be bratty-sexy but all I see is a streetwise hustler type who knows the ropes a little too well and who's jaded way before his time. Amateur porn, such as that of Sean Cody, with its tangible air of straight guys naively whacking off for a handful of hundreds, is far hotter.

If I bumped into a guy like Chance while I was backpacking across Europe, I'd steer a wide berth around him and his nine inch cock. Facially, he looks like Clair Danes, and his slick gay subculture acrobatics are a complete turn off. The scene where he performs a gyrating strip-tease for Paulik made me and my viewing partner laugh out loud. Everyone has their own tastes, but I'd be following the college boys who looked like they love a good game of hackey sack on the beach, not Chance, who looks and acts like he's fallen off the caboose of a gay porn travelling circus. For contrast, look to the enduring popularity of earthy Lukas Ridgeston, the chunky stunner who plays it for all it's worth, but somehow always looks like he'd be happiest fixing his car on a hot sunny day.

Furthermore, Chance and Paulik look too young. I'm sure "all models were over age 18 at the time of production" but they simply look too un-manly. Again, a couple of burly late-teens oozing testosterone and chewing the fat about football and girls would do the trick, but these boys look too child-like. Watching them made me feel older than what I am - I'm probably not ready to get excited over nubile young flesh, at least while ever I have some of my own. And, the players that aren't so kiddie-porn are shop-dummy plastic perfect. Hairless, pneumatic bodies and rythmic pumping of cocks into mouths or buttholes produces an almost animatronic effect. When you break your back in the gym and watch your diet for years to be professionally attractive, you lose a certain sexiness.

This could be a motto for the whole film, which was too over-produced, self-referential and deliberate to work for me. I think too, that even for porn, a star needs to have more than just a big dick. They aren't that uncommon, after all, and if they're topped with a not especially hot face or body, and a total turn-off personality, then the whole effect is discounted.

Related Reading

Lukas' Story
Mandragora

Aiden Shaw Interview

Feature: The Norman Heuristic