The Dark Brothers were proud to say that porn was dead and they were here to change it.

They were purveyors of fine filth, as they also claimed.

And they made — well, Gregory Dark — made movies that are fascinatingly unerotic, movies that the mainstream adult industry didn’t understand, that predate the gonzo and internet era, that had the kind of fashion and art direction that wasn’t dated or a soap opera or a parody of a known movie.

And as for Gregory Dark, his life was one of constant reinvention, from earning his MFA from Stanford University, then doing graduate studies in film at New York University, then making a documentary on the adult industry that led to him immersing himself in it, while finding that he could reinvent himself into a whole new person, half of the Dark Brothers, a somehow even darker form of the already shady world of pornography.

Then he realized that there was a market for erotic thrillers that could be sold to video and cable, made for a more female audience, one that nearly always features strong women and feels like giallo, but instead of murder being the driving force, it’s always lovemaking, but incredibly unrealistic, fog-ridden, neon-drenched, sax-blaring sex that challenges the Jacuzzi in Showgirls for gymnastic horizontal dancing. Everyone has a perfect body and a perfect life, but everyone is miserable. Indeed, Dark told The Rialto Report that no one had a happy ending in these movies.

Dark was also counseled by a father figure who was a psyops psychological warfare expert and had a teacher who gave him a voice in his head so critical that he fought himself with every project. So when his adult films were so different that they changed the industry like soap bubbles inside a syringe full of heroin — seriously, listen to that interview The Rialto Report did — slowly but surely making the look, the feel and the madness of his scenes commonplace.

So where would Gregory Dark take mainstream?

Ironically, his films seem to feel like Michael Ninn, who would seem to be the exact opposite of his adult films. He mentioned that he’d consider how Ninn would compose shots and shoot the female form and that comes through in his softcore work.

The story is one as old as Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Emmanuelle. A housewife is bored and strays, but then learns that once she’s become an escort, her fantasy life doesn’t live up to what she’d hoped it would be. That’s simple. What isn’t is the style Dark shows in each scene and yeah, there’s little to no plot, but everyone looks fabulous, like the kind of drawings of humans we’d send to space so aliens would know just how proud we are of our bodies. Between Dalia Sheppard, Michele Brin, Vidal’s daughter Catya Sassoon, Monique Parent, Kelly Royce and Alison Armitage, this movie feels like a Patrick Nagel portrait come to life.

If Andy Sidaris presented us with the light side of free-spirited and innocent sex appeal, of course Gregory Dark must be his reverse. As women sit on lounges combing their hair and relaxing before another love scene, everyone looks absolutely stunning, so ideal that they even wear their high heels to bed but never sleep.

Bonus points for the non-stop voyeur aspect, including a nun that is watching the watching in a continuing motif, and for using Billy Drago as a non-villain character.

Cindy Hannen (Athena Massey) has gone undercover as a high priced call girl to track down a killer, but soon she discovers that she likes her new life.

There are a few reasons why I picked this movie.

Obviously, as you can tell from the title, it’s Gregory Dark week. These quasi-giallo erotic thrillers are kind of his thing, so you know that you’re in good — if somehwhat dirty — hands.

Mrs. V, the woman who runs the brother, is Meg Foster and I can’t tell you how many movies I’ve stuck with just because she’s in them. And hey! There’s our old friend Rena Riffel, a woman brave enough to make her own sequel to Showgirls. And is that Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a pre-fame part? It sure is. And the more prurient minded of you will recognize Lisa Ann.

With I enjoy about Dark’s erotic thrillers is that he makes them better than they need to be, but he never tries to go all Adrian Lynn and make an artistic statement. He knows that he’s making a sexy cop movie and works to make both parts of that, well, work well.

You know what works every time? The idea that one twin is uninhibited and has a life like you’d read about in Penthouse Forum and another who has a loveless marriage in the lost world of the suburbs. It’s worked so many times and so well that Gregory Dark did it twice, with the first being Mirror Images, which is quite logical.

But if you’ve watched any of his films — his mainstream ones — Shannon Whirry seems like his muse. And so any film with her in it just fires on all cylinders so much better. This time around, she’s both Carrie and Terrie, who were separated when their dad murdered their mother and was in turn killed by the bad twin. But the good twin, well, she’s in an abusive relationship now, much less a sexless one, and all she has is a therapist, Dr. Erika Rubin, who wants her to lie down on something more than just the couch.

Yet when the evil twin comes back, well, what if she wants revenge? And what if she’s willing to hook up with the abusive husband? What if indeed? Beneath the surface gloss and fox and neon and imagery that looks like it stepped out of a 1980s issue of Oui, there’s a dramatic battle for the mind and soul, the line that is drawn between the virgin and the experienced, good and evil and what that really means. Dark’s always throwing psychological games into his films, even when he was shooting movies where Vanessa Del Rio was a brainwashed agent of the KGB and this was supposed to be her Deep Inside greatest hits and ended up being something way, way different. And better.

When I was a kid watching these movies on Cinemax, this is how I thought people actually made love. In my life, I have never heard a saxophone while getting biblical, nor have I ever just touched someone’s upper body for ten minutes at a time while fog billowed out from under the bed.

Honestly, life can’t match up to a Gregory Dark love scene.

Jonathan Brooks (Nick Cassavetes) is a successful psychiatrist whose life gets all screwed up because, well look — women will screw you up. I’m not being sexist. Far from it, in praise of women, no man will ever make me do the things that a woman can.

That mystery woman is Laura (Shannon Wirry) and yes, she has two personalities.

Cue the saxophones.

Cue the soft-focus sex.

Richard Roundtree shows up as Detective Harry Reems, which should remind you that hey, Gregory Dark directed this, like how Tiffany MIllion is in the cast.

I’m also always so happy to see Sandahl Bergman in any movie.

So — after a week of these movies, I can tell you that this isn’t Dark’s best, but it definitely has style. His movies look like Patrick Nagel come alive, with neon hues, marble columns and smoke.

Dark’s Animal Instincts had been a success and seeing as how Dark and Wirry both made this, it was released in England as Animal Instincts 2, which had to be confusing when Animal Instincts 2 came out. So in the UK, you may know this as Animal Instincts 3. I mean, you may be confused, but you may also be watching this with one hand.

Gregory Dark has his best cast in this — well, you know, unless you count New Wave Hookers — movie in which detectives Corcoran (Steven Bauer) and Larson (William Katt) hunt for a serial killer. But as the killer continues leaving bodies in his bloody path, Corcoran begins to feel unstoppable rage and has blackouts. Even worse, the evidence that he and his partner start to uncover points to the frightening idea that one of them could be the killer.

Besides Bauer and Katt, Michael Parks is their boss, and Jennifer Rubin (Bad Dreams!) plays the psychologist that Bauer sleeps with when she isn’t working on his mental state (anyone in the therapy  business in a Gregory Dark film has no idea how to do the patient and provider distance rule properly). And hey! Ashley Laurence, Kristy from the Hellraiser movies!

This one breaks the format we’ve expected from Dark as while there’s sleaze, there’s not much sex. There are, however, flashbacks to just how horrific Bauer’s childhood was. And I get the feelng that Katt is loving getting to play his character.

David Cole (Maxwell Caulfield) is a cop with married to Joanna (Shannon Whirry), who is frustrated by their sex life, which threatens to end their marriage. Then she finds out that he likes to watch and wants to watch her, so everything seems to go well. But this is an erotic thriller directed by Gregory Dark, so you know that things are going to go wrong.

Based on a real Florida — always Florida — case in which a cop and his wife taped her outcall dalliances with other men for money, this is at once an example of the male gaze and female empowerment through said male gaze, as Joanna finds herself getting exactly what she wants and her husband learns that maybe he just likes looking instead of actually doing anything.

Dark gets his best cast maybe ever — mainstream cast, that is — in this one, with Jan-Michael Vincent, David Carradine, John Saxon and U.S. Olympic athlete Mitch Gaylord (yes, the lead of American Tiger).

This movie casts Carradine as a strip club owner who gets the Coles to help him blackmail Jan-Michael and when the press gets wise, John Saxon, as their lawyer, has a defense that claims that Mrs. Cole became obsessed with carnal crimes because of a prescription drug side effect.

Yes, it’s completely stupid. But how many Cinemax late night movies have you made?

The directorial debut of Kateryna Gornostai, this film finds an introverted high schooler named Masha, who is only happy when she’s hanging out with two other ousiders, Yana and Senia. Yet how will young love change everything? After all, Masha is in love with Sasha, Yana is in love with Senia and Senia is in love with Masha.

Even though this takes place a world away — much less a world in danger of Russian troops coming into its borders and possible igniting World War III, which is hinted at in this movie when Senia attends a class explaining how to load an AK-47 — the lives of these teens don’t seem all that different from our country. And it reminds me — I’m glad that I am not growing up today with the pressures of identity, social media and nonstop harassment. It all seems so confining and full of anxiety even in comparison to my teen years in the 80s.

Gornostai started in documentaries and this movie uses that style throughout. It’s a really earnest and nuanced take on the perils of growing up. But yeah, I’m totally good with never being a teenager ever again.

Stop-Zemlia is available on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play and Vimeo from Altered Innocence.

I mean, yes, we have seen this before. A woman changes identities with her identical twin sister, finally getting to sip from the fountain of the fantasies she’s kept hidden in her vanilla marriage, but if I’ve learned one thing from a week of Gregory Dark mainstream movies, it’s that dream life has a dark grey lining under every silver cloud.

Directed under the name Alexander Gregory Hippolyte, somehow this movie brings along Kenickie and J. Peterman into the world of Dark, a place usually occupied by Delia Sheppard (who plays both twins), Dominique Simone, Kelly Royce and Julie Strain, who somehow has the sheer level of universal appeal that allows her to straddle — seductively straddle at that — the light side of the softcore force that is Andy Sidaris and the darkest of the dark that is Gregory Dark.

Where Sidaris presents a world that only exists in Dallas, New Orleans, Hawaii or Savage Beach, places dominated by jacuzzis, men who can’t shoot and the occasional remote controlled weapon interrupting synth-driven touching, Dark’s world is one where the forbidden fruit bites back, where getting to live the filthy life of your darkest dreams ends up decimating your vanilla white picket fence life, but along the way you get silky lingerie, gorgeous framing and, yes, lots of saxophone. I’ve been discussing the usage of saxophone in these movies all week and the only person who loved sex and sax more was probably Lucio Fulci, who showed us just how a woman can really enjoy one in The Devil’s Honey.

Look, I know the internet has all the dirty filth you want, but why is no one making movies like this any more? I mean, a bunch of hacks ape giallo and everyone loses their mind over it and people add some neon and synth and everybody thinks they’re Carpenter. Be brave and try to make one of these movies. Maybe they don’t make them like this any more. And sadly, Julie Strain is gone and while I want her to find the eternal rest she deserves, I wouldn’t be sad to discover that she’s become a sexy ghost.