I entered adolescence at a time before many people had internet connections in their home. A time when porn wasn’t so easy to access if you were under 18 – unless you happened to find your dad’s stash, or stumbled across some that had been ditched in the wilderness. (Which was apparently a common occurrence that I never experienced.) Thankfully, an outlet that many of us had access to at that time was late-night cable television. Specifically, the sort of movies and TV shows that featured a lot of gratuitous nudity and simulated sex and earned the nickname “Skinemax,” after the movie channel Cinemax, where a lot of such entertainment could be found. The latest movie from legendary filmmaker Charles Band, the found of the company Full Moon, is an AI erotic thriller called Prompt, which is presented in a way that transported me right back to those Skinemax days. This is exactly the sort of movie an adolescent boy in the early ‘90s would have hoped to find on late-night TV.
When Band first announced this movie, the plan was for it to star Keep Chambers from his production Piranha Women – but something changed on the way to the start of filming and the lead role ended up being played by porn star Lilly Bell. Given the fact that she has been doing hardcore work for several years, it’s no surprise to find that Bell had zero problem spending a large portion of Prompt’s 62 minute running time fully nude, acting out simulated sex and masturbation scenes.
She does all of that very well, but she was a good choice for the leading lady because she also does well in the dramatic moments.
Her character is Taylor, who makes a living putting together AI advertising campaigns. In her spare moments, Taylor likes to watch and masturbate to AI-generated porn... but in her latest masturbation sessions, she has started to catch glimpses of a “mystery man” (Jax Cody), who seems to somehow be watching her through the AI program.
The sight of this guy makes her even more excited, inspiring her to give her ex Paul (Ian S. Peterson) a booty call and later invite her friend Sara (Elliott Woods; a.k.a. fellow porn star Hazel Moore) to watch some AI porn with her an keep an eye out for the mystery man – a situation that, of course, leads Taylor and Sara to have sex with each other as well.
Most of the time, there’s not much “thriller” to this erotic thriller. We see that her obsession with AI porn and the mystery man starts to have a negative impact on Taylor’s life, as she becomes less reliable and punctual with her work meetings, but otherwise the movie is just a series of nudity and sex scenes. In the final moments, something happens that might bring to mind the sort of story you’d see in a sci-fi or horror anthology series, but the nudity is the real selling point.
Full Moon had a sub-label, an erotica label, called Surrender Cinema, and Prompt is the sort of movie they would have released as a Surrender Cinema movie back in the day. Honestly, I found it kind of refreshing to see that this sort of movie still exists.
We’re living in a time when younger viewers are saying they want to see less sex and nudity in their entertainment (leading to a Deathstalker remake that was shockingly devoid of sex and nudity), and when some will say that softcore movies aren’t needed because hardcore pornography is so readily available that it almost seems unavoidable. But I don’t share these opinions. I think there is still a place in the world for movies that have gratuitous nudity and softcore sex scenes. This sort of movie is still fun to see every now and then, and I don’t think the audience for such movies is as small as it may seem.
Tuning in to late-night cable TV and catching another Shannon Tweed or Shannon Whirry erotic thriller, or a sex comedy like The Bikini Carwash Company or Hollywood Hot Tubs, those were the good old days, and we need to keep those good times alive to some degree. I was happy to see Charles Band and Full Moon doing just that with the release of Prompt, especially after I had the shock of watching a neutered Deathstalker remake.
Prompt: a return to the good old days of gratuitous nudity and softcore sex scenes. May these things never die. The movie is currently available for rent or purchase at THIS LINK.
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