Have you ever wondered what it would be like to give instruments to four girls who bang on camera for a living and try to turn them from porn stars into rock stars? Tight strives to give viewers that experience, reality-TV-show-style, but the whole experience comes off as more confusing than interesting.
Watching Tight is a strange experience. Is it wrong to berate porn stars for their lack of creativity or utter inability to act in a convincing manner? Typically this is tolerated because it makes up about 5% of the experience, the other 95% being about her and the plumber or delivery guy getting it on. Here, about 90% of the movie is “story” (a thin vehicle to get from one ridiculous moment to the next) with about 10% of borderline R-rated porn thrown in for good measure. Then one questions whether they’re watching a serious endeavor or just an ill-conceived attempt at going boldly where porn has seldom gone before — reality TV and trying to get you to care about the people you’re watching.
Retired porn veteran Bree Olson masterminds this effort, gathering the girls through some hazy selection process. It’s also not explained when or where the girls learned to play their instruments. Monica Mayhem steps up to the mic while Layla Labelle, Alicia Andrews, and Tuesday Cross back her up with guitars and percussion. Bree sets them up in a house in Las Vegas where they’ll cohabitate, rehearse, and fool around as only porn stars would.
Soon after, Bree inexplicably hands management responsibilities over to her incompetent sardine-chomping cousin Joel, who books a spontaneous tour for the unprepared foursome starting in Denver. Once there, he bails on the situation, stranding them with no gas money to get home, so what’s a woman of loose morals in dire straits to do to earn a few bucks? Use your imagination.
And that’s the problem — there’s really no imagination or creativity in any of the events that unfold, the music that gets written, or the relationships (and subsequent “explosive” dissolution thereof) that wax and wane between the girls. Everything feels like a setup to get somebody naked. The girls have heated conflicts, but the only way you can tell is the constant interruptions for interview segments outside of the scene where they tell you “I was so mad” but it never comes across in the moment. If it’s scripted, the performances fall flat. If it’s unscripted, then these are some incredibly shallow people getting pissy over the most inconsequential stuff. But again, is this something to fault these people for?
If over the almost two hours the movie runs you were to cut out the band parts, what you’d have left is porno lite, a 20-minute highlight reel from a Girls Gone Wild video. The calamities that befall the band aren’t tragic enough to elicit any genuine emotion from the performers or the audience, and aren’t stupid or hyperbolic enough to be worth a laugh. It’s a deadpan train wreck most of the time, scarcely interesting enough to stop and look at.
If the performances were more convincing (Bree Olson is particularly vapid for a former pre-med biology major), the plot more twisted, the sentiments more genuine, or the music more compelling, there might be something to see here. It is unlike anything you’ll see anywhere else, so it gets a couple points on novelty alone. It raises an interesting question about whether porn stars can successfully transition into other careers without their past overshadowing everything, but every time a challenge presents itself in Tight, the panties hit the floor and they screw their way out of the situation. It’s not uncommon for rock bands to indulge in mating with groupies, but a clearly stated objective here was to try to make it legitimately on their musical talent and not to rely on sex to make things happen. However, they turn right around and make sure sex is always the default solution to every problem, from playing shows topless to lure in a bigger crowd, to sleeping with fans backstage to reward them for staying for the whole night, to an arranged lesbian-sex scene between two members of the band who at that point have supposedly developed a deep-seated hatred for one another to try to help them resolve their differences. Awk-ward.
Also on the disc are extra concert footage, deleted scenes, music videos, bonus videos, an image gallery, and trailers for this and other Wild Eye features. They give you some extra viewing time for things going on outside the confines of the story they set out to tell, as well as some music footage without the constant interruptions of interviews and insight from the cast about what was going on behind the scenes.
Shut off your brain, dim the lights, and lower your expectations, and you’ll at least survive the experience. There are handful of quasi-memorable moments, but at no point did I feel like I was getting anything out of what I was seeing or hearing. The girls are Barbie dolls through and through, and have been relying for too long on their looks to open doors for them for anything else to work, and it shows. Handing them instruments changed virtually nothing about that…but maybe that was the whole point.
It’s not a compelling “behind the music” sort of tale where you really get to know the artists and their struggles. There are no real surprises and while I wanted to see the girls rise to become something greater, they largely end up right where they began. No redemption, no strength of character, no coming together to overcome great odds, no build-up to an epic accomplishment…just boobs and bitchiness and occasional rock music. Perfect for a bachelor party or maybe as required viewing at a horny college fraternity, but for everyone else, you’re not missing much.
