Downer documentary about porn star Annabel Chong and the production and personal aftermath of her record-breaking 1995 gang bang video in which she has sex with 251 men in a mere ten hours. This movie drops you right into the fleapit. It’s a sleazy world of creeps and cheats, with one insecure girl at the center of it all. Actually, she seems comfortable when nude on camera, but catch her while she’s fully clothed and ask one question about her honest feelings and she slips into about 197 different nervous tics and rarely looks her interviewer in the eye. Chong’s at her shakiest when she less-than-coherently argues that her gang bang video is some kind of feminist statement. You can see it in her darting eyes though that even she doesn’t fully believe what she’s saying. It’s not until the second half of the movie, when she goes to Singapore to visit her parents and agonizes over how to tell them about her porn career, that Annabel Chong starts to get real.
All in all, Annabel Chong isn’t likable (but that’s okay—her likability isn’t the point of this film). She’s weak and spacey and whatever it is that she’s trying to put across, she’s trying too hard to do it. She has things to say, but she can’t spit out the words right. She has silly ideas. She’s depressed. She’s 22.
And that’s what this movie is really about. It’s less about the porn industry than it is about simply Annabel Chong, 22 year old fuck-up. It’s about the train wreck that many of us are at that age. The early 20s are the prime mistake-makin’ time of a person’s life. That’s when you flip your metaphorical car into a ravine… and then have get it back on the road yourself without your parents knowing how badly you’ve screwed up. It’s when you’re an adult, but still don’t know who you are, yet. It’s the time that you look back on later in life and cringe over what an asshole you were.
Today, Annabel Chong is out of the adult film industry completely. She goes by her real name now, has a straight job, and considers her old porn star self dead and buried. A stage play, 251, based on Annabel Chong’s porn days saw production a few years after her retirement and she gave it her blessing, but declined to participate in any way.