June 2000 Cover
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By
Giacomo Tramontagna
Descent
Rating: 3 Stars
Directed by Steve Scarborough. Videography by Lester Moore. Edited by Jim Wigler. Music by Rock Hard Productions, Rusty Bender, and Paul Allen. Starring Aiden Shaw, Marcus Iron, Chris Rock, Zak Anders, Todd Gibbs, Blake Harper, Jason Branch, Nick Moore, Mark Mason, Rick Allen, Clay Powell, and Damian Ford.
How to order
Aiden Shaw, shirtless, races headlong through urban gloom. A Criswellian voice on the soundtrack tells us that "loneliness has overwhelmed him at last, and the terror of madness chases him through one dark alley
after another." Then, perhaps overtaken by madness, he flings himself into a Dumpster-- listening to those bat-brained voice-overs, you can only sympathize-- and enters into an alternative universe. There, quasi-Gregorian
chants, fancy digital graphics, and views of Red Planet Mars leave no doubt that you're watching an art thing, maybe a Martian one.
After an initiation ritual involving hair trimming, bondage, and four-way sex, Shaw makes his way to a building where he opens a door and sees himself making love to Marcus Iron on tumbled sheets. Of
the four sex scenes in Descent, this ardent duo is least disrupted by jump cuts and experimental folderol. A three-way featuring Marcus Iron, Blake Harper, and Jason Branch (Harper's off-screen mate) sounds like a gift from
porn heaven, and portions of their sequence are precisely that. The sex, however, is interspersed with shots of Shaw, marooned in a desolate white space, desperately yanking at a long, long cable ending in a naked light bulb
we've previously seen filling with urine. (Don't ask.) An orgy for five cowled monks led by Damian Ford feels abridged and, finally, irrelevant.
Descent marks the welcome return of Shaw, a multi-talented artist, to gay adult video after a hiatus. He's felicitously paired here with Marcus Iron, who has never appeared to better advantage-- possibly
because he stays naked, hardly utters a line, and has the good luck to be teamed with Shaw, Harper, and Branch. Director Steve Scarborough does deserve points for attempting something out of the ordinary.
Descent is a frustrating mixture of haunting visuals, dumb kitsch, hot sex, and production values that short-circuit its performers' erotic power supply. But it shouldn't be missed.
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