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The Underboss
Rating: 3 Stars
US Male. Produced, written and directed by Paul Barresi. Videography by Christian Woods, John Simms, and Ed Maxx. Edited by Kevin Glover. Starring Paul Morgan, Kevin Kemp, Dino DiMarco, Zach Richards, Bobby Blake, Sebastian, Dean Spencer, Tommy Cruise, Dino Phillips, Jamie Gillis, Ron Jeremy, Alberto Valentino, Crystal Heaven, Paul Barresi, and man
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The Underboss, Paul Barresi's most ambitious production since the 1997 Good Fellas Bad Fellas, has so much going for it that you may wish it were longer than its 100 minutes. You may also wish the plot made more sense and the sexual possibilities were more fully explored. But Barresi's stylish handling of a large, first-rate cast in sexual and non-sexual roles makes this flawed effort eminently watchable.

Barresi himself plays the title role, appearing as Tony Russo, right-hand man of Don Antonio Geonelli (Jamie Gillis). The narrative, sparked by the mob's plans to get rid of boxer Mighty Joe (Alberto Valentino), whose antics jeopardize their fight-fixing schemes, eventually moves sideways into Russo's deviously funded extracurricular loan-shark business. In the interstices of the story, various Mafiosi, jailbirds, and denizens of the ring have sex with abandon.

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Barresi can show an almost peerless ability to integrate sex with plotted action. In The Underboss, however, sex and plot sometimes head off in opposite directions. Expectations are raised for scenes that don't happen. When, for example, guard Tommy Cruise initiates sex with Dean Spencer, cell-mate of the incarcerated Mighty Joe, who's out having a visiting-room confrontation with Russo, you expect the sex to escalate when Mighty Joe returns to his cell. But Alberto Valentino, whose star quality promises more than we get, never does have a sex scene. Luckily, a number of other people do, with three interracial couples (Paul Morgan and Kevin Kemp, Dino DiMarco and Zach Richards, Bobby Blake and Sebastian) hitting the highest points on the thermostat.

Since The Underboss feels like the first episode of a mini-series, one might hope Barresi makes a sequel that develops characters, pulls loose ends together, and requires Valentino to take off his pants. In Paul Barresi's work, you get a sense that the man behind the camera (and frequently in front of it) aches to make real movies. But the frequently hot, sometimes eccentric videos Barresi crafts for the porn industry give us a more rewarding and quirkily personal vision than any number of corporate Hollywood products.