Pregnant porn star Elektra Luxx (Gugino) quits the business to become a small-time sex guru but remains at the center of unwanted attention, fending off a streaking neighbor (Mad Men's Vincent Kartheiser), a probing private dick (Timothy Olyphant) and a testy Virgin Mary (Julianne Moore). Meanwhile, in barely overlapping narratives, Luxx's dim-bulb peer (Palicki) falls for her onscreen fuck-buddy (Chriqui), and a virginal fanboy (Gordon-Levitt) discovers that his own sister wants to be an Internet It girl.
An oddly fastidious sequel to 2009's little-seen Women in Trouble---this second part picks up right where you left off, or likely didn't---it's another episodic, shaggy-dog parade of L.A. denizens caught in moderately compromised positions. With an ear for dime-store repartee, as well as a fetish for bathroom stalls and stuck elevators, writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez occasionally approaches a kind of seedy poetry, and his overqualified cast slums it with aplomb. (Gugino's a battle-weary soul in a platinum-blond wig, while a characteristically down-home Olyphant is the hottest pot on the stove top.) But the film apes porn's low-rent aesthetic a little too convincingly, rolling out one incompetently shot-and-edited sequence after another while lacking the wit or verve to make it forgivable. Gutierrez clearly has great affection for his characters, but his artless, airless construction gives audiences scant chance to understand why. It's less a hard-core sex romp than a soft-cored satire, far more taxing than titillating.
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