The Adult Film That Got Shelved In The Family Section Of Blockbuster

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Released in 2005, Pirates is a production so wildly overreaching for its industry, so technically ambitious, and so aggressively cinematic that it rewrote what was considered possible in adult entertainment. [music] It won 11 AVN Awards, the New York Times reviewed it, it was shot on a real ship, and the owners of that ship had absolutely no idea what was actually being filmed on their decks.

[00:00:24]Producer Samantha Lewis would later state with characteristic confidence that Pirates was the most expensive pornographic film made to that date, a budget reported at well over $1 million.

[00:00:36]In the context of an industry that routinely shot features in a single day for a few thousand dollars, this was a huge risk. It was, depending on your perspective, either a stroke of mad genius or an act of corporate recklessness that could have bankrupted everyone involved. It turned out to be the former, but only just, and only because Junie had a clarity of vision that was almost disturbing in its specificity. The screenplay, credited to Max Massimo based on a story by Jose Short, is set in 1763.

[00:01:07]Captain Edward Reynolds, a naval commander with a persistent self-confidence problem, is hunting pirates in the Caribbean [music] Sea.

[00:01:15]His crew has little faith in him, with the notable exception of his fiercely loyal first officer, Jules. When they pull a drowning woman named Isabella from the water, she sets the plot in motion. Her husband's ship, she tells them, has been destroyed by the feared Captain Victor Stagnetti, a villain whose ambitions extend well beyond mere piracy into the territory of supernatural world domination. Reynolds, Jules, and their ragtag crew set sail after Stagnetti.

[00:01:43]Battles are fought, dark forces are unleashed, and the seas and islands of the Caribbean run wild. It is, as the New York Times dryly noted, a story about sailors hunting evil pirates who have plans for world domination, and also many of the characters have sex with one another. The cast June assembled for Pirates reads like a who's who of the adult industry at that particular moment. Jesse Jane played Jewels with a kind of swaggering physicality [music] that made her the film's de facto action hero. Evan Stone as Captain Reynolds brought a broad comedic energy to the role that the film leaned into rather than away from. He was by all accounts genuinely funny on screen in the way that the best B-movie leads always are.

[00:02:28]Tommy Gunn played Stagnetti with the requisite menace.

[00:02:32]Janine Lindemulder is on top form in one of the lead roles as Serena alongside the likes of Carmen Luvana and Teagan Presley in supporting roles. This all rounded out an ensemble that was by the standards of the industry a remarkable gathering of talent in one place for one production all working from an actual script with actual characters and an actual three-act structure. And this is exactly why I am creating this retrospective. Pirates was made with a golden age ethos in 2005. The shoot itself was where Pirates distinguished itself most dramatically from everything else released during the period. June, who also served as his own cinematographer, decided to shoot the entire film on high definition digital video cameras at a time when even mainstream Hollywood was still navigating the HD transition. The result was an image of startling crispness.

[00:03:26]Every rope, every tree, every costume rendered with a detail that had never appeared in an adult production before.

[00:03:33]To that image, June added over 300 special effects shots. 300. For context, this was not far off the effects count of a mid-budget Hollywood genre film.

[00:03:44]There were strange battle sequences involving skeletons, supernatural visual effects, explosions, and storms. The production's sound department mixed the entire film in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. Not merely a technical flex, but a philosophical statement that this film was to be experienced, not merely watched. An original score was composed and later released as a standalone soundtrack CD, an act so unprecedented in adult filmmaking that it functioned almost as a joke, except that it wasn't a joke at all.

[00:04:17]Then, there was the ship. Several scenes in Pirates were filmed aboard Bounty II, a full-scale replica of HMS Bounty moored in St. Petersburg, Florida. The vessel was remarkable, a working tall ship with the visual authority of a genuine period galleon, exactly the kind of location that gave Pirates the cinematic weight Junie was chasing. The owners, when approached about a production, were told that the film being made was a Disney-type pirate film for families. They agreed. Cameras rolled, the scenes were captured. It was only later, reportedly, that the truth of what had been shot on their ship became clear to them. A revelation that caused, one imagines, a fairly spectacular moment of reckoning. The mix-up would echo forward in an almost comedic way when the film was released.

[00:05:04]Video stores, apparently confused by the production values and the period setting, shelved copies of Pirates alongside mainstream family adventure titles. Customers encountered it expecting something broadly equivalent to Treasure Island. They did not find [music] that.

[00:05:20]The release strategy for Pirates was as unconventional as every other aspect of the production. Digital Playground packaged it as a three-disc DVD set priced as high as $70, an extraordinary sum at a time when most adult titles retailed for a fraction of that. Later, an edited R-rated version was made available, which only deepened the sense that something genuinely strange had happened here. An adult film had been produced with sufficient narrative coherence that it could be meaningfully edited into a version suitable for non-adult distribution. Pirates was also released on both Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, making it one of the first adult titles to appear on either format. The influence underlying all of this was never subtle. Pirates of the Caribbean was everywhere in the film's DNA, in the supernatural villain, in the period setting, in the ensemble structure, in the action-comedy register that Evan Stone's performance locked into. But, June was not merely copying. He was transposing. The genius of the project, such as it was, lay in recognizing that the swashbuckler genre was capacious enough to absorb the conventions of adult filmmaking without collapsing, that the adventure scaffolding could support the weight of everything else, that audiences could follow a story, care about characters, and find narrative satisfaction alongside everything the genre was more explicitly offering.

[00:06:45]This was not how adult films of the day were being made. The golden age had briefly aspired to it, of course, and I have reviewed many films of the era that are truly cinematic in nature.

[00:06:56]But, as I have lamented so often, that ambition was largely abandoned as the video era reduced the need for theatrical production values. Pirates was, in a peculiar way, a revival of that ambition, retrofitted for the HD age. When the AVN Awards were announced for 2006, Pirates swept the room in a way that had no precedent. It won 11 awards, including Best Video Feature, Best DVD, Best Director, Best Actress to Janine Lindemulder, and Best Actor to Evan Stone. June had gambled everything on the idea that audiences and the critics would respond to craft, to story, to spectacle, that they wanted more than the industry had been giving them, and he had been right.

[00:07:39]Essentially, Pirates exists in a category entirely of its own making. A film so singular in its ambition, so specific to a moment when technology, money, and one director's stubborn refusal to accept the limitations of his industry all aligned at exactly the right time that it has never really been repeated. The sequel, Pirates 2: [music] Stagnetti's Revenge, arrived bigger in budget and lesser in spirit as sequels tend to be. But the adult industry moved on. Streaming fragmented the market, studio budgets collapsed, and the economics that had briefly made a million-dollar adult epic possible simply ceased to exist. What Pirates represented, that wild and straight-faced insistence that the genre deserved spectacle, deserved craft, deserved 300 special effects shots, turned out to be a road that led nowhere in particular. Nobody followed Junie down it, not really, not with the same conviction. And so the film sits there in the history of its industry in the new millennium like a ship in a bottle, intricate, inexplicable, [music] and completely impossible to imagine being built again.