HOLLYWOOD – With his first virtual reality porn release being pilloried by critics and consumers alike, director Skidley Rott admitted yesterday he may have missed the mark with his maiden virtual voyage, chalking up the misstep to “a fundamental misunderstanding” of terminology.

“At first, I was pretty confused when I read comments complaining about the movie being two-dimensional and not compatible with popular headsets,” Rott said about the initial reviews of Van-tastic VR Voyage, his new production for Smoking Butterfly Entertainment. “Soon, it dawned on me ‘virtual reality porn’ isn’t just ‘reality porn’ without the sex.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rott’s collection of five sexless vignettes — in which three guys in a van drive around picking up women and interviewing them about what might happen if all four of them were to have sex — is not scoring well among viewers, tallying an average score of 0.003 stars on the user-review forum CoitalCritiques.

“WTF? There’s no sucking or fucking AT ALL in this stupid vid,” wrote SkeetFreak42, one of the most-read reviewers on the site. “By my count, there’s 47 minutes of women talking about what it would be like to blow three guys, but not one second of anybody actually blowing anything — except, of course, the opportunity to make me interested in watching the rest of the movie.”

Rott’s long-time production assistant and confidant, Scotty “Rugburn” Withers, said he tried several times to straighten out his boss on the meaning of the term “virtual reality porn,” but to no avail.

“I even showed him a demo of a VR porn video from another company, but Skid got vertigo about two minutes into it and accused me of trying to trick him into playing the latest release of Halo with me by disguising it as work-related research,” Withers said. “Of course, to this day Skid also thinks the movie Avatar is the story of how Facebook was invented, despite having seen it four times, so I suppose I shouldn’t have expected 120 seconds of a VR porn demo to sort him out.”

Performer Sasha McTush, who is featured in Van-tastic’s second scene, said while it did seem odd to her to spend a whole day of what was ostensibly a porn shoot capturing nothing but in-van interview footage, she didn’t think much of it at the time, because she assumed there would be additional days of filming.

“I figured Skid was just compiling a lot of footage for the behind-the-scenes and DVD extras stuff,” McTush said. “Still, even without being double-penetrated, gagged or gaped, I’d have to say this was the most challenging porn scene I’ve ever done. Trying to make sense of the sort of things male porn performers say for a half-hour at a time is almost as difficult and headache-inducing as trying to plumb something coherent from the transcript of a Donald Trump interview about his foreign policy proscriptions.”

Another featured performer in the film, Morpheinia Lynn, said she thinks Rott has “broken new ground” with Van-tastic despite the negative reception.

“So far, everybody doing VR porn is slavishly committed to the same tricks, like it being 3D and shot POV-style,” Lynn said. “I think by offering a flat, static, two-dimensional shot in the back of a van, Skidley is bravely defying convention — much like he did when he created a cable-TV-friendly softcore version of Face-Drenched Jizz Whores which had been edited down to the parts where the girls show off for the camera what their butts look like in cutoff shorts.”

While red-faced over his filmmaking error, Rott said the experience was “highly educational” and his next VR porn release will benefit from the hard-earned knowledge he has gained since the release of Van-tastic VR Voyage.

“Among other things, now I know the importance of VR stuff being ‘immersive’ in order to help draw the viewer into the environment of the scene,” Rott said. “So next time, instead of filming in a van, we’re going to shoot the whole thing in a swanky Beverly Hills-area swimming pool.”

Image: Marshall Astor