It would be pretty lame for a movie entitled The Last Porno Show to skimp on the porno part of the show. Fortunately, Paputts is smart enough to know this, and within the first few minutes of the movie, we have seen both a graphic scene of a porn movie and just as graphic a shot of a man in the audience, ahem, enjoying said porn movie. The camera tracks through the theater and into the lobby, finally settling on the theater’s cashier, who is obviously dead. Sex and death, and we’re not even five minutes into the movie!
“In culling from his father’s position as a minor league porn kingpin, Wayne begins to reflect upon his father in a more respectful light…”
As it happens, the dead cashier, a man we find out is named Al (Christian Aldo), is the now-former owner of this sleazy porn palace. He also happens to be the estranged father of our protagonist, Wayne (Chadwick). Wayne is a struggling actor, so method that late in the film, while drawing upon childhood memories of his father’s dubiously moral life as inspiration for an acting role, he restages said memories complete with the original participants. In culling from his father’s position as a minor league porn kingpin, Wayne begins to reflect upon his father in a more respectful light than he has throughout most of his adult life: his dad wasn’t perfect, but was, perhaps, as paternal as he was capable of being.
The theater represents a community center, of sorts, for the pervy patronage. Regulars come and go, and some longtime loyalists form the network of hopelessness that spreads like a cobweb about the space. But the more Wayne researches this aforementioned movie role by taking charge of the theater’s resurrection and involving himself in the lives of the various derelicts who populate it, the closer he actualizes the memory of his father and the status he occupied in this offbeat world.
"…sex and death, and we’re not even five minutes into the movie!"