It seemed harmless enough at the time; we get an email advertising titles that sound like straight-to-video knockoffs of popular box office hits. We get this stuff all the time, and with all of the references to girls this and sexy that, they sounded more like sex comedies than anything else. Two of us instantly volunteered to review the videos.

Then we saw the boxes, and realized this was not at all what we had in mind. Were they sex comedies? The short answer is yes with an ‘if,’ and no with a ‘but.’ Welcome to the wonderful, contradictory world of softcore porn.

This writer will be the first to admit that these are not waters that he treads with any regularity. When the urge strikes me for something in that genre, I prefer to see people actually having sex, so it has been decades since I last saw anything in the softcore category, if ever. It was with this mindset that I sat down and watched “Voodoo Dollz,” eager to learn more about the field and, more importantly, what about it gets people excited.

“Visit the Collinsport School for Girls,” the box says. This is amusing, because after a scene between Christina (the super-hot and spunky Christine Nguyen) and Meg (Kitty Katzu, who’s cute but has a flatter chest than half of my guy friends), the action switches to a completely different school, which means the only parts of Collinsport School for Girls that we see are a locker room and the dean’s office. It made me wonder if the writer responsible for the copy on the DVD’s back cover shut it off after the first scene.

The movie’s title turns out to be a play on words, as Voodoo is the porno nom de plume for one Alexandre Boisvert, and the movie is Voodoo surrounded by (mostly) beautiful women (the dollz), yuk yuk. Voodoo is also quite possibly the worst actor I’ve ever seen. Ever. Ron Jeremy is Ian McKellen compared to him, and the women in this movie are Meryl Streep. Is he deliberately doing an impression of a bad ‘80s porn star? If so, mission accomplished.

The movie wasn’t a total loss, though. For example, it brought two rather lovely models onto my radar, namely the aforementioned Nguyen (far left, who’s much hotter than this pic would suggest), and Charlie Laine (far right).

Now, I am clearly living under a softcore porn rock, because Laine has 140 titles to her credit on IMDb – which seems like a lot for a 24-year-old, but maybe that’s just me – but since I don’t dally into lesbo porn, which is Laine’s specialty (along with a few ‘tie & gag’ videos, hmmm), this is my first exposure to her. Laine has a fabulous bod and bad girl looks, which means she can rock a plaid skirt like no other. The problem is that Laine and Nguyen are wasted here. The other two school girls (Beverly Lynne and Nicole Sheridan, respectively) appear to be afterthoughts – they’re both in their 30’s, so the idea of them as teenagers is more amusing than anything – and the matriarchs of the schools – who worship some evil voodoo god – have to play it straight and humor-free. Sigh.

Here is my main question, though: who gets turned on by these movies? “Voodoo Dollz” is actually more conservative than some R-rated movies I’ve seen. There are multiple scenes of oral sex (women only, for some reason), and in each case, the head of the “pitcher” is in a place where they couldn’t possibly be able to reach the goods of the “catcher.” I found this curious; if it’s a matter of not showing penetration, fine, but surely you can have these girls in a more realistic position and just shoot it in a way that we don’t see anything, right? The way this movie works, it’s both unsatisfying and unrealistic. Is this how most softcore movies are? Seriously, I’d love to know; I honestly have no idea.

Halfway through “Voodoo Dollz,” I thought of Steve Martin’s character in “Grand Canyon” when he’s watching the dailies of some violent bus-heist flick he was producing. He berates the editor for cutting out a scene, explaining that it’s essential for setting up another piece later in the movie. The movie he’s making, of course, is crap – and he knows it – but he’s still bound to make sense of the crap. “Am I the only one who appreciates the writing?” he asks, exasperated. Writing: that is what “Voodoo Dollz” is missing most of all. That’s a typical drawback for a porn flick of any stripe, yes, but why? if Barry Sonnenfeld can serve as director of photography for a porn movie (he needed a job, said he couldn’t get an erection for six months afterwards), and Massive Attack can score a porn movie, why can’t some Diablo Cody-type former stripper, um, bang out a smart script for a porn movie? You know, I’ve been thinking about writing a screenplay. Maybe my guitar and wah-wah pedal will give me some ideas…