This Cult 1990s Cyber Porno Predicted Our Horny Dystopian Present

A skyscraper looms over the shadowy streets of a lifeless near-future metropolis. Inside, a straitjacketed prisoner screams from his dank cell as scientists ponder his unusual condition.

These ominous scenes come from a movie released in 1995. Ostensibly, it was the story of a man who could read people’s souls, granting him access to their deepest, darkest fantasies, but it also carried with it an unerring prophecy. The movie warned that the future waiting just 30 years ahead of us would be a high tech authoritarian dystopia, where an infinite well of hardcore porn lurked just below the surface of life at all times, and the lines between reality and fiction had totally vanished.

In our present moment—with the tech oligarchy ascendent, the algorithm serving us treacherous dollops of AI slop, and X.com a haunted house of thirst traps and boot-licking amateur phrenologists—these themes seem eerily prescient. But this wasn’t a David Cronenberg classic or a sci-fi anime that’s currently enjoying some sort of critical renaissance on Mubi. This was Latex: A two-hour porno packed with blowjobs, gang-bangs, and boat loads of fetish.

Celebrated within the adult industry at the time for its strikingly ambitious and innovative production standards, this award-winning “masterpiece” of “cinematic pornography” has been all but forgotten. But now, 30 years since its release, it feels more than ripe for reappraisal. I tracked down producer Jane Hamilton—aka Veronica Hart, a veteran star of the Golden Age of Porn—to unpack the mysterious legacy of Latex.

IT PREDICTED OUR ‘BLACK MIRROR’ SOCIETY

Taking place in a CGI metropolis of pink neon, flickering video billboards, and CRT monitors, the ominous setting of Latex feels like a cross between 1984 and a neo-noir Playstation One game—which also feels like a decent shorthand for the real world that we have all come to inhabit today. “A lot of the imagery harkened back to Metropolis,” explains Hamilton, referring to Fritz Lang’s German Expressionist class war fable from 1927—a rather unexpected aesthetic touchpoint for a skin flick. “It was really ambitious. Nobody was doing anything at all like that in adult,” she says. “People were like, ‘What the fuck is this?’”

Ironically, given the DIY, OnlyFans-led nature of the industry today, Latex was better at predicting our current social conditions than it was representative of the 2020s porn landscape. The mid 90s were the era of artistic revolution in pornography. Previously, Hamilton tells me, adult movies had been storyless “sex loops” ogled in the shadowy depths of garages and men’s clubs. Then came the 70s “porno chic” era, which saw narrative movies like Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones gain mainstream recognition. But the idea of real “artistic, creative sensibility” in porn, according to Hamilton, didn’t kick off until the 90s.

“The name of the game,” she says, “was to stand out from the pack.” Cue Latex director Michael Ninn, whose lavish, technologically ambitious spectacles were “style and visuals above all else.” Hamilton believes that the publicity-shy and enigmatic filmmaker could have been a highly paid ad director on Fifth Avenue if he’d wanted. And it was Ninn’s cutting-edge vision that made Latex such a unique and prescient work.

1990S UK CLUB WEAR IS THE HEIGHT OF FASHION

“We looked to England for fashion,” confirms Hamilton, describing how fetish zine Skin Two provided inspiration for Latex’s wardrobe of blonde bob wigs and Teletubbies-colored PVC.

PornSTARS ARE the new CELEBRITIES

For all its sci-fi rumpy pumpy, the most compelling drama in Latex comes from its fascinatingly earnest lead performances. “The acting of Jeanna Fine and Jon Dough… is pretty fantastic,” remarks sex movie review blog House of Self Indulgence, before conceding that “the top-notch pathos [of one black-and-white flashback sequence] quickly falls by the wayside when the vapid TV hostess is double-teamed.” Such commitment wasn’t always guaranteed—during the shooting, some performers arrived on set after “working all night, without even taking a shower,” Hamilton recalls. Those actors “probably wouldn’t be able to work at McDonald’s.” But those who put in the effort could transcend the entire industry.

Crossover success was not unheard of: Marilyn Chambers, one of the biggest pornstars of the 70s, was top-billed in the aforementioned Cronenberg’s 1977 horror film Rabid. And the 90s saw the gulf between adult and mainstream entertainment narrow. By the year 2000, ‘Alt-porn’ pioneer Gregory Dark was directing music videos for Britney Spears (“From the Bottom of My Broken Heart”) and conceptualizing them for Linkin Park (“One Step Closer”). A few years later, Jenna Jameson’s autobiography became a New York Times Best Seller and she appeared in Family Guy and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The stars from Latex flirted with mainstream recognition, too: Fine’s naked torso appeared in cult crime thriller The Boondock Saints in 1999, and Dough—a veteran of over 1,400 adult videos and one of the industry’s biggest stars—was the subject of two Louis Theroux documentaries for the BBC.

But by far the biggest mainstream success story from Latex was Hamilton herself. In 1996, she was cast as a judge in the Academy Award-nominated Boogie Nights—with director Paul Thomas Anderson declaring her “the Meryl Streep of porn”—and went on to make appearances in shows like Six Feet Under. These days? “I play dead people a lot,” she says, describing a recent background role on HBO series The Bookie. “And I was just in an Ariana Grande music video as a bartender.”

porn soundtracks ARE artforms

Adult movie soundtracks have been certified cool since 2015, after cult dance label Dark Entries started reissuing Patrick Cowley’s 80s back catalogue. The hypnotic synth score of Latex offers another sensuous example of the sub-genre.

“Music was hugely important to [Ninn],” says Hamilton. The director composed much of the score himself, and managed a band called Eros prior to his career in porn, taking them on tour across Asia. “He knew all about the Gregorian chants and stuff,” she continues, describing the inspiration for the Latex OST. “But when I turned him on to Enigma, he just flipped.”

The German electronic music outfit, famous for New Age hits like “Return to Innocence,” would inspire the film’s relentless score, which elsewhere nods to acts like Delerium through its relentless techno beats, MIDI pads, and ethereal sighs. Vinyl release when?

THE ARTS ARE BROKE

At the 1996 Adult Video News Awards (AVN)—often billed as the “Oscars of porn”—Latex took home 11 of the 14 prizes it was nominated for, including Best Actor (Dough), Best Director (Ninn), Best Music, and Best Video Feature. And though Ninn’s visionary approach didn’t always guarantee success (his 20-episode CGI porn series Playboy’s Dark Justice was, Hamilton recalls, “described somewhere as ‘the worst show ever run on Playboy’”), he would become one of the porn scene’s most celebrated filmmakers by the turn of the millennium. AVN ranked Latex third on its list of ‘The 101 Greatest Adult Tapes of All Time’ in 2001.

And yet… while the 90s had been all about style and ambition, the new millennium ushered in a change of tone. Suddenly, everything was “completely amateur, with people looking to get a feeling of real sex,” says Hamilton. It was a trend that continued unabated: by 2016, up to 95 percent of productions were “gonzo” shoots, claimed feminist scholar Shira Tarrant. And with YouTube style shorts and subscription models now the norm, the industry doesn’t have the time or money for visionary epics. “We’ve been through the same thing as the music business,” she says. “There’s money to be made, but not enough to justify one project having $200,000 spent on it.”

With internet piracy and websites like Pornhub driving down profits, actors are rarely able to win multi-film contracts—and are now usually paid per scene. Over-saturation of the market means that the more daring work of yore has gone from view. “I don’t even have copies of a lot of the movies we’ve made,” Hamilton says, “and I’d like people to be able to see them.”

In 2025, at least, Latex is still floating around the more illicit corners of cyberspace (and on Amazon and HMV)—a reminder of a time when pornography wasn’t just faux sex tapes and free streaming sites, but a wildly ambitious and influential artform in itself, not to mention one that occasionally seemed capable of predicting the future.

Follow James Balmont on X @jamesbalmont