A lot of companies cranking out shitty step/sibling/step-parent family porn are just paying lip service to the idea that intrafamily sex is sexy and something to jack off to, but almost all of them are failing to put any real effort or time into setting up the necessary tension and emotional drama to give the situation any real weight. They put two people in a room, have one of them proposition the other and have the other say wait, this is wrong, and then they’re off to the races. Bree Mills and Craven Moorehead take their time, let the situation develop, create mood and tension, and allow their actors to do the same. Also, maybe more importantly, they don’t give you a situation that’s immediately readable at first glance. When Carter Cruise`s best friend Khloe Kapri joins the family for a holiday weekend before the girls go off to college, we don’t know who’s going to get inappropriately fucked by who. There could be any number of combinations here, but we’re better than fifteen minutes into the movie before there’s any definitive hints as to where it’s headed, much less any nudity or sex. Before that, it’s just ominous music, occasional comments, and the certain knowledge that because it’s family porn, someone is going to end up getting fucked, and maybe crying.

In this case, it’s Khloe, who is so close to the family that they call her their second daughter. She’s a perky blonde who has known them forever, and when she has a bad dream, Ryan Keely and Tommy Gunn come to her rescue. Well, in a way. They bring her a glass of water, pet her hair, cuddle her, and then team up to get her pajamas off her and get Daddy inside her. All of this happens in almost dead silence; they never, as so many porn movies do, abandon the artistic conceit that their scene is real and that the details matter — their daughter is in the next room, probably listening, and they have to at least try to be discreet. The silence and the whispering, and the eventual climactic failure to maintain it, are that much hotter for being so intense.

The second vignette — The Fosters — is a little less subtle. It gives itself away from the very beginning, partly because of the presence of Charles Dera, who has turned into an almost literal caricature; with his gravelly voice, unsubtle eyebrow activity and definitively pornstar moustache, he’s a front-loaded cartoon of sleaziness. I don’t know if he’s acting or what, but he didn’t used to be this way. He was previously best known for being able to come twice in a short span, but he seems to have redefined himself. He’s joined by a newly and shockingly blonde India Summer, who matches him for creepiness in this scene as soon as she says, about their fostering of Elsa Jean as they welcome her to the family, “I think this is God’s plan.?”. To be sure, there has never been a porn movie in which anyone ever gave Christian theology any sincere consideration, but usually it?s just titillatingly taboo, not disturbingly itchy. That kind of effect is usually reserved for zealots in real life. If your fetish involves the Bible, though, wait for the Bible reading by Dera.

Given that Moorehead and Mills are taking their cues from The Handmaid’s Tale — and I honestly dread the day that a porn company finds the gumption to introduce a version of that to the world — it’s no wonder that Elsa Jean is having nightmares in her new house. She sits through the Bible readings, listens to the moralizing, hears her new family fucking and talking about how much they’re going to enjoy her, and wakes up thrashing to find them waiting for her to join them in bed. After that, the scene proceeds without much in the way of surprise or acting, except that Elsa Jean, who has up to now played the part of a withdrawn, possibly slightly autistic child, reveals a certain amount of the saucy, dangerous coquette that we know has had trouble with previous foster families. It’s more in-your-face and less nuanced than Second Parents, but it might still be your jam.