Debbie Does Dallas . . . Again

It’s big-budget cheerleader surreal remake porn! The best kind of porn! With ghosts and demons and convertibles and fake halos and a blowjob in a coffin! Debbie Does Dallas . . . Again is unlike any other porn movie I’ve seen. (Well, I mean, the people-having-sex part is pretty standard, but all the other weirdness is unusual.) This is Vivid’s big-budget award-bait picture for the year, helmed by Paul Thomas, the studio’s go-to guy for such movies. He directs a lot of films, and some of them he seems to more or less sleepwalk through, but every once in a while he rediscovers the joy and weirdness of his work. Debbie Does Dallas . . . Again is one of his better efforts, full of strangeness and silliness and cheesecake and overacting and hot sex and whimsy.

Yes, it’s obviously related to the classic Debbie Does Dallas, but the two movies are kissing cousins at best. The original Debbie is about a rural cheerleading squad who . . . how to put this delicately . . . whore themselves out to make enough money to send their friend to try out for the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. This version concerns a coed cheerleading squad on their way to the national finals. Debbie — played by Stefani Morgan — has an intense rivalry with her nasty co-captain, Monique Alexander. They fight over boys, and over control of the squad, and Monique manages to get Debbie “accidentally” killed during an especially dangerous acrobatic stunt. At that point, I realized this movie was going to be a lot different from the original. Debbie’s spirit lingers, and she meets an angel (played with great strangeness and humor by Penny Flame) who urges her to move on. Instead, Debbie makes a deal to dole out sexual favors in the afterlife in exchange for a chance to return to Earth. It’s like Bring it On meets Mean Girls meets, well, any of the zillions of movies where some dead person comes back to life to right wrongs. Debbie reincarnates in the body of a geeky would-be suicide played by Hillary Scott. Naturally, she kicks ass, takes over the cheerleading squad, and leads them to the nationals . . . where there’s actually a plot twist that surprised me. I won’t spoil this for you, but it’s a lot twistier than most porn.

As for extras, well, this is a big ol’ three-disc set. One of the extras is a disc of the entire original Debbie Does Dallas, so if you want to write a compare-and-contrast paper for your Film Theory class, you should have everything you need, I guess. There’s tons of more conventional extras, too.

Give me a P! Give me an O! Give me an R! Give me an N! What’s that spell? Yeah. You know what that spells.