By Dr. Rex Rod
Special to YNOT

HOLLYWOOD – In the old days, Randy Spears was one of my favorite male porn performers. Between his ruggedly decent looks, frequent pairing with the buxom brunette beauty Paula Price and tendency to clamp his mouth shut like a steel trap while he fucked, he was a charming exception to the overly-hairy Ron Jeremys of the smut universe.

More recently, Randy has been missing from porn, apparently on a long hiatus to “find himself” as a performer. He has returned with one of the strangest, least-sexy erotic videos I’ve seen in my 30-plus years as a porn reviewer.

The only truly remarkable thing about Spears’ latest performance is how painfully dull it manages to be for something shorter than seven minutes in length.

Presented as a soliloquy, the camera lingers on Spears’s face as he settles into character as “Greg,” an ex-porn-star who relates his sad tale of falling into a life of drug and alcohol abuse, motorcycle riding and self-loathing, all for the purpose of avoiding having to consume “one can of little potatoes and one can of pork and beans.”

Everything seems to be going OK for Greg in the plotline, until some “idolatry” starts to “creep in.”

Now, as a longtime reviewer of adult film, I can tell you that when talk turns to things creeping in, a transition from dialogue to sexual action is about to occur — quite often sexual action involving the person or entity doing the creeping.

As such, I was expecting Spears to at least start masturbating at this point — or perhaps descend into a flashback scene in which we watch Greg get it on with a performer calling herself Idolatry, or perhaps Ida Lotry.

Instead, the soliloquy simply continues, with odd intercuts of old appearances by Spears at the AVN Awards, an incongruity that really ruins the fiction of the piece, strangely and artlessly taking us out of Greg’s world and back into Randy’s, and then back into Greg’s again. When the merry-go-round finally stops in Greg’s world, everything suddenly gets all Jesusy for some reason.

Greg, you see, is both a porn star and a Christian, which I guess is where the tension in this weirdly sexless porno is supposed to come from, but which really just serves to take the plot down what seems like a path totally extraneous to whatever sort of titillation the viewer is supposed to experience.

Next, Greg says “shame started to creep in,” which briefly filled me with hope he’d masturbate and cry at the same time. That at least would have shown Spears has retained his acting chops during his absence from performing.

But nope, sorry folks. No tear-jerking here — just more of this irritating Greg character sounding winsome about getting paid to have his dick sucked while high and/or drunk.

Slightly alleviating the doldrums of watching Spears’ somewhat flat delivery of Greg’s story are shots of Greg sitting in a park, providing the viewer with another false hope of impending sex, possibly inside a nearby public restroom or maybe even right there on the park bench. Instead of getting fucked, however, Greg’s character is “plucked” — by God, of course, right out of the “very, very dark place” in which he finds himself. (The video leaves the exact location of the very dark place a mystery, so I can only speculate Greg perhaps did go to the nearby restroom, but the interior lighting was malfunctioning at the time.)

Next, Greg talks about getting into his car. Naturally, I’m thinking this might quickly morph into an episode of BangSedan, but no luck this time either. Instead, we get more of Greg talking about breaking down and crying in his car, but still no jacking off. Also no hooker, no random MILF he picks up at a coffee house … nothing. Just more banter about dark places, God, ego and other things that don’t interest me much artistically, let alone sexually.

Greg’s story then briefly takes a bizarre turn into theological BDSM, as he talks about how he knows he was “hurting Him” (that’s capital-H Him, as in God) as well as hurting himself. Greg then describes begging God to “take him back,” which made me wonder if what I was about to watch was actually the most deeply offensive-to-Christians gay porn ever made — which, although awful and hurtful to many people, would at least be something newsworthy about this otherwise remarkably boring and vaguely sad porno.

Next we see Greg reading the Bible with a couple of friends, neither of whom is a woman, again raising the possibility of a homoerotic turn. Instead, the story takes the nauseatingly predictable route of invoking the Parable of the Prodigal Son — who as we all know was some kid in the Bible who asked for his inheritance before his dad died, blew all his money on stupid shit, then came crawling back to live off the family dole. This generated deep and abiding resentment from his older brother, who eventually stabbed the prodigal in the back with a burning sandal he found inside a talking whale, or something.

Anyway, in this porno parody of the parable, Greg hears a spirit say “I am running toward you,” but the makers of this incredibly lame porno evidently didn’t have the budget to depict the spirit using CGI, or for that matter, some mope in a bed sheet. Again we’re stuck with watching Spears emote on camera while talking about the spirit — and, as probably goes without saying by this point, without seeing anybody fuck or suck anybody else, spiritual or earthly.

I’ll be honest: I dropped out right after hearing Greg talk about “the turning point” and “losing everything,” mostly because I noticed only 30 seconds remained in the video. Realistically, that’s long enough for any kind of sex scene, hot or not.

It saddens me to have to do this, but I give Randy Spears’s return to porn, whatever it’s called, my second-lowest rating, Almost Inert, which is one step above Totally Torpid.

Why only my second-lowest rating, you ask? As lame as Spears’s new video is, it’s still better than anything that “Roxy” chick has done in the past 20 years.

Dr. Rex Rod is an experienced porn reviewer and author of When Does the Blowjob Start? A Porn Fan’s Guide to Fast-Forwarding Through Feature Titles.