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Why God Probably Looks Like Alicyn Sterling
by Ryan Williams

Those who claim that the universe is not made up of patterns and pre-set tracks are, for lack of a better word, kooky.

The patterns are all around us. You simply need to look at your life in a different way. Perhaps if you took a bath once and a while and stopped thinking about how miserable you are you’d see ‘em, pally.

In the early 80’s, our house had HBO in it and HBO had just gone 24-hour. I like to rehash an era of sitting inside and playing with Legos or wasting an entire ream of paper by drawing the same thing 500 times, whilst Clash Of The Titans and The Pirate Movie merrily played in constant rotation. THIS WAS MY KINGDOM, and HBO, my tutor.

Every six months or so I go through a binge, wherein I buy every DVD that I can think of at reduced prices thanks to my buddy, The Internet. Most of the time the movies I pick up are memories of times past (My shelf is choked with copies of Foul Play, Zorro: The Gay Blade, Poltergeist, Midnight Madness and Popeye. (Oh, Popeye… you’re so Shelly DuVall-ey and stupid…), but occasionally; I will pick up a copy of something crappy and cheap simply because it feels right. It is, for all intents and purposes… an homage to my original tutor.

Last time I went nuts and spent too much money of too much crap, I added a fantastic double-feature DVD to my exploitation collection: The Pom Pom Girls and The Van . Aw, yeah baby! TWO movies that used to decorate the USA: Up All Night airwaves with their uber-edited silliness and braless-tank top appeal! This was a fantastic score, and I watched both shitty movies with eager abandon. Where HBO was my shit-movie tutor… USA: Up All Night was my Ninja Sensei…

This is where I would normally get into a 3-page diversion about how good The Pom-Pom Girls is, based solely on the fact that 70’s exploitation queen supreme Rainbeaux Smith (left) appears in it and does her best to look smart (even when she’s being groped by one of the principals actors in the front of a car), but it wouldn’t have anything to do with patterns and pre-set tracks, and at 380+ words-so-far, I need to allude back to my original paragraph or I will lose those of you who have already managed to get this far into my rant. So let me just hit this really quick: Rainbeaux Smith is a fuckin’ hottie. Wowzers. I want to put my man-parts into her lady-parts and get sweaty. Too bad she’s dead now (your narrator wipes his hands and hacks Damian Anaya).

One of the extras in this double feature extraordinaire is a reel of hard-to-find exploitation trailers. The one that caught my eye was a promo for something called Malibu Beach - a teen sex romp from 1978 starring That Chick With The Big Tits and The Horny Guy With A Cool Car. The flick looks great. And by “great”, I mean “shitty”, and by “shitty”, I mean “shitty”.

I might not have made this as embarrassingly plain and simple enough for you yet: I like shit, I like shit a LOT. The shittier you think a movie is, the more I probably like it. Not in that “so bad it’s good” way. Most of this stuff IS bad, and not in a “good” way… but every once and a while, you get a piece of shit with a beating heart. And if a pile of shit with a beating heart doesn’t do it for you… well… you are a sad, sad person. Shut up. Yes you are. No! YOU are. Fuck off.

For the last half-year or so, I have kept my eye out for Malibu Beach. It hasn’t been an obsessive search. I mean I sort of “look” for it when I pass the Midnight Movie section of FYE, but I hadn’t gone on a hard-core, restless, George-C-Scott-“what-have-you-done-to-my-daughter”-esque mission. I did find it on Amazon for under $4 on DVD, though. And during my search, I also came across a little gem called Malibu Summer. And lordy, was THIS a cool find.

I’m gonna change gears here and talk about something else for a second. But if Tarantino can do it and get called “BRILLIANT” by all you Kevin Smith wannabe’s then I am allowed to expound on something for a few paragraphs myself before I get back to the point. It will all come back around to the universe being made up of patterns and pre-set tracks and why Rainbeaux Smith made my peeper stiff all those years ago. Trust me. We’ve been through a lot together. I won’t steer you wrong.

I went through a particularly fond right of passage in 1992. Back in ’92, I was a senior in high school, and I was an avid video junkie. The reason why was simple. A VHS copy of The Pom-Pom Girls was FAR more likely to keep my interest than the version you could see on basic cable. There are usually two big, round reasons for this. And when the reason get chilly they get all hard and poi

Our local VHS crackhouse was a tiny chain store called Video King. I was extremely well-known to the employees there, and they knew what I liked. It wasn’t unusual for me to walk out of the place on a Friday night with eight or ten movies at a time, most of them bottom-of-the-barrel schlock flicks from the video nasty explosion of the early 80’s. Cannibal Ferox! Watermelon Man! Private School! Cavegirl! Naked Warriors! Dr. Butcher, M.D.!!! PUT IT ON MY PARENTS’ ACCOUNT, LADIES! Anyway, they knew me, and they looked the other way when I slipped stuff like 9 1/2  Weeks or Caligula into my stacks, along with the gore, I got the sex. And what’s better than sex and violence? Nothing. Nothing at all.

Because of my familiarity with the staff and their disregard for observing the posted signs stating that you had to be 18 in order to rent stuff from the “Mature” section, I made the critical decision of renting a porn movie for the first time at Video King, four years before I was supposed to be allowed to (“You must be 21 in order to enter The Saloon! -Mgt.).

I didn’t yet have the guts to actually enter the “Saloon” of the mega-store (yes, it was REALLY a “Saloon” room… you had to walk through double doors and the whole outside wall was painted yellow and had fake cacti stapled to the side of it…) – but one afternoon whilst I was perusing the shelves close by, I made a wonderful, terrible discovery… some delightful bastard had left an over-sized Triple-X feature on “Sci-Fi” shelf right next to the cowboy-doors.

I grabbed that sumbitch and rented the HELL out of it, I did.

I thought that renting a porno would be kind of a hassle if I was 17. But “Jan”, up at the counter didn’t blink an eye. And this wasn’t subtle, either. This was the early 90’s- before DVD’s. Back then if you wanted hot wet cum slut adult action you had to carry an over-sized cereal box-shaped monstrosity up to the counter. If you were lucky, the box DIDN’T have the words CUM, SLUTS or WET on the side.

On this occasion- I was lucky. The oversized box simply had “The Eye Of The Needle” printed on it, along with a lovely blonde in an evening gown, gazing lustfully at the camera, eagerly anticipating the ounce of coke that she could snort up just as soon as the photographer said “Okay, that’ll do it, thanks sweetheart!”

My plan was simple: this movie was stuck on the Sci-Fi shelves. If Jan at the counter gave me any flack about it, I would simply tell her that I assumed that this was the legitimate spy thriller starring Donald Sutherland and that a mistake had been made. If that didn’t work, I could say that I didn’t want to rent it, but I saw it on the rack next to Critters 2 and I thought she should know that one of her horses got out of the barn. Saloon. Whatever.

With my heart pounding, my breath short, and my boy-parts tingling in anticipation, I took my turn in line at the check-out, and was amazed and delighted that Jan didn’t bat an eye when she went into the stacks to retrieve my purchases.

In retrospect, the “wink” she hit me with when she gave me by saggy bag of plastic-and-magnetic-taped bliss was probably loaded with more buckshot than I was able to comprehend back in the day. Ah, youth.

SCORE! I had just rented hardcore pornography!

I ran three stoplights in order to get home and “enjoy” my quarry.

The Eye Of The Needle, it turned out, actually had a pretty cool plot. The entire thing was shot from the POV of a guy named “Barry”. Barry lived in a Southern California 2-story beach house, and his two frat buddies had made a bet with the guy: he had to “last” for 24 hours without having sex, no matter what these two dudes threw at him. In order to prove that he was “being good”, Barry was to carry the cumbersome video camera around with him for the duration of the event. His two frat-dude pals, eager to put the horny cameraman through hell, went ahead and got a bevy of hot sluts to go ballistic on in front of the hapless hero. All Barry could do was watch.

Okay fuckers… it’s no Gone With The Wind, but it wasn’t the shittiest plot in porn history, was it? Fuck off. I watched it and soaked the thing up. Well… I guess it’s safe to say that I didn’t watch it all the way through. I sort of watched it… in… spurts. Christ. If I could high-five myself right now I totally would. And I would have earned it. BOOYAH.

The Eye Of The Needle featured at least two male stars who I would go on to see perform in hundreds of other XXX-rated productions: Randy West and the mind-numbingly stupid T.T. Boy. As far as ladies went, they brought out three or four women who you probably saw again, but I certainly didn’t- except for one. Of the ladies involved- two of them had big fake boobs. The first was a redhead who would go on to feature in the classic X-rated San Fernando Valley remake “My Cousin Ginny”… the second was a blonde bombshell who went by the name Alicyn Sterling.

Alicyn Sterling was everything that I didn’t care for in a woman and more. Her face was too round, her hair was platinum blonde (or… perhaps… sterling?? I am totally making the ‘Dr. Evil’ face), she had big, misshapen fake tits, and she looked like she was probably 6 feet tall, compared to everyone else she appeared with on screen. PLUS- and I can’t believe that I not only THOUGHT this at the time, but that I am admitting it: but she did a lesbian scene with another girl in the movie and at the time I didn’t think two women getting it on was all that hot.

Fuck you. I was seventeen. At the time, I also thought that Genesis was awesome and that Ron Howard was a Great Filmmaker.

At any rate, despite not being the least bit attracted to Alicyn Sterling, I made an illegal duplication of The Eye Of The Needle and proceeded to wear the damn thing out with over-use. The next time I went to Video King, I made a beeline for the big Saloon room and loaded up on anything that had Alicyn Sterling listed as a cast member. The only reason why that I can imagine is because it turns out that SHE was the busty blonde who was on the original porno’s box cover, and I somehow looked to her as being my good-luck-get-to-rent-porn-at-17 charm. Suddenly, what I “didn’t care for in a woman” didn’t matter. I collected as much of her oeuvre as I could find, and there is a very good chance that I stimulated the Kleenex stock from 1992-1993. Dude. I said “stimulated”. I am so fucking awesome.

Okay, so back to my recent purchases. Back to my hunt for Malibu Beach. Back to how the universe is made up of patterns and pre-set tracks. Because this all REALLY WILL come together, like an episode of Fraiser, only not as latently gay.

The other day I searched for and found a copy of Malibu Summer on DVD. Because of a temporary brain-fart… I assumed that Malibu Summer was the same thing as Malibu Beach. I can only attribute this lapse in judgment on the drugs I have been ingesting in order to keep my allergies at bay this spring. They make me logy.

I bought Malibu Summer, thinking that it was Malibu Beach. Malibu Beach is a beloved USA: Up All Night staple from my teenage years. Malibu Summer is a made-for-late-night-cable tits-‘n-ass romp that tried with all of its’ might to compete with Andy Sidaris-helmed projects like The Picasso Trigger and Savage Beach. It says something when the shit you crank out isn’t even as “good” as Savage Beach.

BUT! And this is a big but… while watching my copy of Malibu Summer, the madcap CineMax-tailored sex-romp from the early 90’s, I noticed something familiar about one of the actresses… the actress with the big fake tits… and the platinum-blonde hair… and the round fa- HEY!  THAT’S ALICYN STERLING! HOLY FUCK!

Yes, kids, it’s true! Due to my lengthy and immature adoration for schlock flicks from my teenhood, and my whip-smart memory of the first porn star I ever had a “thing” for… I ended up buying a crappy “legit” movie that featured an actress who was trying to break into the business after getting her start sucking off Randy West.

So… here’s my point: The universe is made up of patterns and pre-set tracks that we, with our limited brain capacity, simply will never be able to follow. But if you pay attention, every once and a while you will see it unwrap. And when It unwraps… you end up with a shitty porn actress with big fake tits.

MAP IT OUT! I loved shit movies since they started babysitting me on HBO. Shit movies on HBO got me into shit movies on USA: Up All Night. The fact that you couldn’t actually SEE tits on USA: Up All Night led me to renting shit at Video King. Renting shit at Video King got me the moxie to rent pornography four full years before I was supposed to be allowed to do so. Renting pornography got me into… well… pornography. And Alicyn Sterling.

And fifteen years later… I buy a shit movie whilst looking for another shit movie, and who’s in it? Alicyn Sterling.

Well if you don’t see the fucking pattern by now… I mean really. Jesus.

I need a drink.

(EDITOR'S NOTE:  To see Ryan struggle with his countless other issues, visit www.myblisteringhell.com.)