Take one look at the cover of Sanatorium and you may instantly form an opinion of this movie. 'Oh geeze, it's going to be one of those low budget, poorly acted, and downright weird movies.' To my pleasant surprise, that long held stereotype (at least long held in my mind) was debunked.

Sanatorium arrives to you in special edition packaging. It's just a huge cardboard box holding the actual DVD. The front is a blown up version of the cover so you can see more detail on it. The back is similar as well, but features a fold out version of Tabitha Stevens, the movie's star. I wish I could tell you how to fold it. I sat for ten minutes before giving up. I think it's supposed to be a stand to hold the movie packaging upright, almost like an easel.

The premise of this movie is that Tabitha Stevens is on a mission to take down hypocrites in society. The ones who say pornography is disgusting and immoral and yet have the largest collections. She's taking on the people in the porn industry who demand more sex, more extreme scenes, a higher men-to-women ratio in a scene or movie.

As she recounts her life, often in confusing and hard to follow scenes, she points out several moments in her life that are pivotal. As she gets pulled further into the dark underbelly that is the porn business she finds herself losing more and more of what she began with in the first place - her sanity. She loses herself to the madness that is one particular producer, a creepy dude who plays the organ and collects shamanistic trinkets. He challenges Tabitha to do more extreme scenes and threatens that if she doesn't her friend "Kelly" (shown in a straitjacket, hood, and dental mouth gag in a padded medical room) will die in a certain number of days.

In response to Tabitha's journey into the dark side of porn and the producer's threat, she goes on a spiritual quest to cleanse her insanity from her. She ventures into the desert and wanders around with very little clothes in confusing scenes that are interspersed with her giving blowjob after blowjob.

Several porn actors and actresses make cameos in this film and I found their cameos to be fairly well done. Sara Sloane pops up as a porn star that is being "investigated" by a federal prosecutor who after poking her with his rubber gloves ends up poking her with his penis. It's actually a hot scene and one I really enjoyed. James Deen and Kagney Linn Karter make an appearance when the creepy producer mentions the porn industry capitalizing on the hot, young, new girl fresh off the bus from Iowa. James Deen makes cameos in so many porn nowadays he's like Where's Waldo but with less stripes and more cock. Boy, does that guy know how to fuck a girl. While I'm not a fan of Kagney Linn Carter generally, her scene didn't detract from the overall flow of the movie and I found myself not disliking it at least.

As Tabitha swirls deeper into her delusions and shamanistic quest, the scenes become more confusing and quite frankly weird. In some scenes she looks like a cave girl, wearing little more than bits of cloth and bones strung on a necklace. You follow her into the darkness of her mind and it's a weird and confusing ride. Every few minutes though, there's a random, disembodied penis for her to suck just popping out of nowhere. "Oops another cock!" I exclaimed on more than one occasion. Um, random? Okay, well it is porn and there does need to be some kind of sex.

That is definitely something I appreciated about this movie. There was actual acting and a story line. There was a decent attempt at putting together a coherent story line. It's a story line with a message too. Just because you like sex doesn't mean you have to do all the extreme things and have to be ashamed of it. Sex can be fun and shouldn't have to be persecuted, something I wholeheartedly agree with. Tabitha is making a social statement with this movie.

This DVD set includes two discs - one with the actual movie, scene selections and director's commentary and a second disk with cast interviews, deleted scenes, "popshots" (the cumshot of a scene), and extended scenes. There's definitely more here than just your standard porn movie. Deleted scenes are always a bonus in my book.

Did I like this movie? Surprisingly yes. Sanatorium proved itself worthy by having relatively good sex scenes, good acting, a message-carrying plot and stars whom I liked. Don't let the weirdly designed cover dissuade you. Insanity never looked so good.

I wasn't the only one who enjoyed this movie. My chihuahua was sitting on the chair next to me while I watched it and ever so often her ears would perk up and she's look right at my computer screen, almost like she was paying more attention. Good thing she's fixed. I don't want a chihuahua in heat getting too excited thanks porn.