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Heaven to Hell
Rating: 3 Stars
Directed by Chi Chi LaRue. Videography by Max Phillips Music by E.M. Diaz. Starring Brad Patton, Dean Monroe, Erik Rhodes, Roman Heart, Tristan Adonis, Kane O'Farrell, Joe Sport, Josh Weston, Colby Taylor, and Matthew Rush.
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Heaven to Hell ended Chi Chi LaRue's contractual debt to Falcon Studios, leaving the director free to focus on independent work. This is no contractual-obligation knockoff, however; it's a sumptuously mounted tour de force LaRue considers "the crowning jewel of my Falcon career." Production values are high. There are stunning vignettes. But even though LaRue's 165-minute fallen-angel epic demonstrates heavenly skill, it also encompasses lapses that are, if not hellish, purgatorial.

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A concept LaRue invented for a straight production at Vivid is reimagined here in homo terms. Set "in a realm that preceded reality as we know it," Heaven to Hell begins with one of the Devil's soldiers, the superb Josh Weston, bagging good angel Brad Patton. Weston leads the wounded, white-winged being into Hell, where his Satanic majesty Dean Monroe ogles the captive and says, "Prepare him!" Joined by fellow demon Joe Sport, Weston ravishes Patton in a scene presenting the blond ex-figure skater's debut as a bottom. Feathers fly. In other episodes, the Devil frolics with his three pet "Dog Boys" (Colby Taylor, Tristan Adonis, Roman Heart), and demonic bodybuilders Erik Rhodes and Matthew Rush go heaving through a flip-flop fuck. Then the ten-man cast convenes in Satan's throne room for infernal group sex.

The sex is hot, but sometimes overwhelmed by a lavish mixed bag of design frills ranging from pillars of hubcaps to flame-and-mirror effects that echo Cocteau. The devils' stuck-on horns are distracting (you wait for one to fall off), but the tribal curlicues inked on bodies by sometime Falcon model Spike are effective touches of Satanic chic. British power bottom Dean Monroe is well cast as the Devil, but LaRue doesn't dramatize his leadership of Hell. In the final free-for-all, Monroe nearly gets lost. (He's also cursed with bad prosthetic ears.) Brad Patton, whose cock approaches the heft of a 16-ounce beer can, fares somewhat better. But the completion of his role, when he appears reborn as a black-winged top and joins the devils' orgy, gets thrown away.

Heaven to Hell comes with a bonus disc whose highlight is a lively behind-the-scenes documentary that just stops short of upstaging the main event.