The Dark Brothers are oft considered pioneers of what is today known as alt-porn, the infancy of which can be seen in the 1985 feature New Wave Hookers.

Initially, an underage Traci Lords (who went on to become the rare mainstream crossover, however one-dimensional her acting turned out to be) was originally cast in the film as “the Devil,” perfect casting, would say many industry folks, and prophetic of her role in almost single-handedly imploding the porn industry by her underage status in all but one film.  Replacing the underage Lords on the box cover is another well known starlet of the era and one time muse (well, at least she tried) to Charlie Sheen:  Ginger Lynn, who is still doing hardcore at age 47, in the unlikely case you haven’t seen Dirty Rotten Mother Fuckers with James Deen.

New Wave Hookers also stars two of the more interesting males in porn:  Jamie Gillis and Jack Baker.  Gillis is a Columbia University graduate whose acting is a cut above, even compared to many mainstream actors, and he likely would have broken into the mainstream had he not answered a fateful advertisement in Variety for nude male models.  Baker was actually in the mainstream for a time, making appearances in several television programs, including “Happy Days” and “Good Times,” before making the all too common transition from mainstream to hardcore.

Although Baker did perform some hardcore acts during his career, he is best known as one of the few non-sex actors in the industry, his role in New Wave Hookers intended to provide his trademark comic relief that, in this case, has Baker discussing the aphrodisiasical quality of New Wave music in favor of “…that nigger music,” a questionable choice of words but nonetheless a stroke of irony in a movie whose ultimate objective is to undermine New Wave (i.e. A Flock of Seagulls; we all ran so far away) music by mocking its inherent soullessness—music that, by and large, contains hardly a vestige of the characteristic Jazz and R&B sexiness that African-American Baker (ostensibly mocking the predominantly white New Waver’s perception) refers to as “nigger music.”

The plot, you see, is the probable enough scenario that the brave New Wave of music is capable of arousing women to the point of acting like sex-starved hookers, and that capability is brought to fruition in a series of absurd fantasy scenarios dreamt up by both Baker and Gillis, the fantasy sequences naturally accompanied by a New Wave soundtrack and featuring the likes of:
Tommy Byron—a porn icon whose reinventions from awkward virginal type to his closely related rocker and biker iterations have been integral to his success; although a keen underlying business acumen to diversify (Porn 101 criterion for sustainability:  diversification) has made Byron the graying hall of famer he is today.
Peter North, a good-looking and likable fellow hall of famer whose laconic dialogue is indicative of the limited acting skills that are apparently more than made up for by the wildly preternatural money shots whose trajectory has at times originated in the Valley only to end up in the everglades of South Florida.

Yet aside from the mad genius work of Nick Zedd (nickzedd.com), some of which could arguably be considered alt-porn but fits more appropriately under his infinitely more interesting self-coined Cinema of Transgression (go to your local Blockbuster and ask the kid behind the counter for Richard Kern’s Manhattan Love Suicides, a series of short films in which Zedd plays a double role in a surreal hardcore sadomasochistic short entitled “Thrust in Me”), alt-porn is essentially a disposable genre that does not have the sort of artistic gravity to influence other genres in the same way New Wave Hookers influenced alt-porn.

The problem is that alt-porn is painfully static, and hardly transgressive, a genre seemingly more defined by the flaccid visceral effect of boys and girls with tons of piercings and tattoos… um…fucking, the outcome of which is a forced coolness that at once betrays the viewer and fails to render the punk gravitas that is forever constipated throughout the process.

Alt-porn is perhaps better defined by actors and actresses with unconventional body types (including but not limited to the obese, amputees, dwarfs, giants, amateur males with tiny genitalia) rather than well-muscled woodmen and abtastic women, however many tattoos are wrapped around their limbs, pieces of metal piercing their skin—wait a second, isn’t this sounding a bit too conventional?; in fact, my suggestion for those seeking an anonymous haven is to get inked, get pierced, dye your hair black (however, don’t use Nice ‘n’ Easy—I was spotted within a day) and get on the stick to Venice, CA.

New Wave Hookers, then, is a porn film whose popular actors brought an unconventional movie into the mid-1980s stale mainstream—well past the golden age, when it was an exciting event to attend a porn film at an actual movie theater in Times Square—and stir up what had become a VHS assembly line of formulaic movies that could be purchased at your local smut shop (or that little room with saloon doors at the back of the video store) for a mere $59.99.  So while New Wave Hookers’ influence on alt-porn is clear, such a distinction is dubious at best, and it remains instead a porn classic that will likely humor rather than arouse the modern viewer.