Site: www.backseatbangers.com Cost: $40 monthly auto-renewing, $10 7-day trial, $5 3-day trial Genres:: Reality Sex Condoms: No One-line summary: A fun ride, but beware the potholes. Reviewer: SexHerald Staff

Rating:

Imitation may or may not be the sincerest form of flattery, but it's certainly one of the commonest forms of pornography. Probably ever since the silent film era, it's been pretty much guaranteed that five minutes after someone puts together a scenario that's even moderately successful at being hot, someone else will file off the serial numbers, change the title, and bring their own version to market.

So while we're not saying that it's impossible that two different groups of bright young pornographers would have simultaneously come up with the idea of a van that drives around southern california picking up nubile young women and having them fuck tanned frat boys in the back seat, if we were the owners of Bangbus.com, we might be filing a stolen vehicle report just about now.

Still, if BackseatBangers' inspiration is obvious, there are a few noticable differences in execution, some good and some bad. Rather than using in-house male talent, BackseatBangers' scenario is that the boy has answered an online ad to star in a porn video, with a woman to be picked up later. (If your humble reviewer had to guess, he'd say that many of the players were actually recruited as couples: there's a sense of ease between, say, the beautifully tattooed Dylan and her surfer-dude partner that's one of the best things about the site.) The vérité-porn style may not be to everyone's taste, but it works for me more often than not, and BackseatBangers' players are often a lot of fun to watch. So why is BackseatBangers only getting a rating of 2? Technical difficulties, I'm afraid.

The problems start when you first enter the site: a flood of popup windows, opened by a script running in a pop-under window, which require some careful and quick clicking to get rid of. Worse yet, one of the popups tries to convince you to install the “cyberheat plugin”-- one of those pernicious popup/spyware applications that, once installed on your machine, are almost impossible to get rid of. Malicious plugins like this are one of the plagues of the modern web-surfer, and shame on BackseatBangers for employing them. Then, assuming you dodge that bullet and are ready to sign up, BackseatBangers demands your email address before they'll tell you how much the site costs. Gee, think that address might end up on a spam list?

The sad thing is, there's some damn good sex to be found here, and if they just let the content sell itself on its own merits, they'd probably have nothing to complain about financially. But for whatever reason, they decided that grasping for that extra dollar was more important than trusting their audience: if you're gonna ride this van, keep one eye on the rear-view and the other on the road.