Iris

Its bloated running time (nearly 2-1/2 hours) hampers Seth Gamble's ice-cold Wicked Pictures thriller showcase for Blake Blossom as "Iris", but he merely proves he's not the next porn Scorsese or Abel Ferrara. You have to wait for the final black & white reel to solve the mystery of what makes this lovely Angel of Death murderer tick.

Her pithy voice-over narration and the rather stupid dialogue give hints of what's really going on, but most Wicked porn fans will simply suffer through it in order to watch the four sex scenes. After all, that's the point of the new Wicked, which after three decades as a leading porn label concentrating on feature films has now succumbed to the "vignette of sex" approach.

Instead of a Travis Bickle taxi driver, Iris is a timeshare driver for Lifts, an uncreative name after the real-life company Lyft. When she changes from casual wear into a snazzy all-black tough broad outfit, I expected to see a variation on Abel's iconic Ms. 45 (Zoe Lund, RIP), but no such luck. We watch her pick up fares and kill the poor slobs in cold blood, hinting at why, but leaving us hanging till the end.

Along the way, her victims tend to be male, though lovely Emma Hix gets offed along with her unsympathetic, bickering boyfriend Alex Mack. Jennifer White survives after providing a torrid opening sex scene with a belligerent date at a restaurant, overplayed by Snidely Whiplash, oops -I mean Charles Dera with a mustache.

Dera reappears at the end in the key segment. After an extremely tedious sex scene with him in her apartment, Iris finally regales him (and the audience) with an explanation, established by a "Two Months Earlier" flashback presented in black & white. I won't spoil it, but let's just say this rather beautiful serial killer (Angelina Jolie I suppose would have played the part in a mainstream movie) has a hangup supposed to represent the anomie of our times. Let's just say I found the explanation too neat and quite anticlimactic.