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Coal Miner’s Son
Rating: 2 Stars
All Worlds Video. Produced by Dan Cross. Directed by Casey and Peter O’Brian. Written and photographed by Jett Blakk. Edited by Ann Igma. Starring Dave Nelson, Ben Damon, Scott Davis, Dean Maxwell, Reed Parker, Gregg Rockwell, Nolan Scott, Sebastian, and Johnny Thrust.<br>
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Dave Nelson plays a blond undergraduate hunk who is plucked out of college to run the mine bequeathed him by his father. He's named Cole, apparently in honor of the family product. (The days of individual mom-and-pop coal mines are lost in the mists of time, if they ever existed, but never mind.) Delectably handsome in a retrograde way, Cole resembles a big, exuberant, firm-crusted Viennese pastry. Alas, his adopted brother Jasper (Nolan Scott), short, wiry, and angstful, is bitterly affronted by the terms of Dad's will. Jasper has, after all, stayed home and devoted his life to that mine while Cole has pursued a candyassed academic career. On two occasions, Jasper's resentment of Cole boils over into rage, and the two thrash around in poorly staged fracases.

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There's also sex, some of it labored, some of it borderline hot. In the first sex scene, a government inspector (Dean Maxwell) abandons his threat to shut down the mine after miner Scott Davis probes his depths. Down in Cole's mineshaft, workers suck and fuck with the same dedication they bring to hacking and hewing. "It's pretty horrible to be with a bunch of guys down here, sweating and digging," says miner Sebastian, explaining to Cole why men in the pit need sex breaks.

Trapped by a cave-in, foreman Gregg Rockwell and three underlings relieve their tensions like true miners, illuminated by the lamps on their hard hats-- and two or three off-camera spotlights beaming implausibly out of the murk. This sequence, though it does recall a flashlit orgy in last year's obscure, trasho Underground Sex Club, is probably unlike anything you've seen before-- and, having seen such a sequence once, you may hope never to see one again.

Nelson fares tolerably well in sexual encounters with Sebastian and, inevitably, Nolan Scott. There's an emotional edge to the coupling of Jasper and Cole. But the context is silly and tacky. Action shot on cheesy sets is intercut with mine footage cribbed from some phantom Hollywood film. Actors mumble their way through speeches that could be in Farsi. But what you can hear of Jett Blakk's stupefying script brings new resonance to a line from Peter Cook's coal miner sketch in Beyond the Fringe: "If you were searching for words to describe the conversations what go on down the mine... boring would spring to your lips."