Making a low budget independent comedy can be a risky project, particularly when you take into account just how subjective humor is. What one person finds funny may not work for anyone else, and a lot of times ideas that seem hilarious on paper wind up falling flat on their face or fizzling out completely. What can, surprisingly enough, make or break indy comedies is the location. Kevin Smith made it work with Clerks, which is a perfect example of how you can turn in a successful low budget comedy by hinging it on one central location as long as you establish your characters well enough and have the dialogue to make your story interesting. David Wendell follows a similar idea through with his feature length debut, Smut, though the two films don't really have that much in common.

Marty (Lee Holmes) is a young man who decides he needs to go out and explore the world a little bit in hopes of finding himself. To make this happen he hops on his motorbike and takes off across the country only to have run into mechanical problems in the middle of Indiana – a small town called New Prairie, to be precise. Without enough money to get his bike fixed, Marty starts to wonder if he might be trapped until he winds up taking a job at an adult bookstore called Max's Adult Emporium where he works the counter.

As Marty starts to settle into his new job, he gets to know a few of the other employees as well as some of the regulars who patronize the establishment. Max (Mark Boone Jr.), the owner of the place, will do anything for a buck and isn't above exploiting his employees if it suits his needs. Though he's not nearly as mean as he'd like people to believe, he's not going to win the Humanitarian of the Year award anytime soon either. Marty really hits it off with an aging writer named Elmore (played Sweet Sweetback himself, Melvin Van Peebles) who enjoys drugs almost as much as he enjoys hanging out in the peepshow area at the back of the store. He's half blind, but he doesn't let that spoil his fun. Last but not least there's Mary Jane (Jeanette Goldstein), the stripper who works the peepshow and who obviously has some issues as strippers sometimes tend to have. Marty sees past Mary Jane's sassy exterior however, and soon he starts to fall for her – unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be reciprocated all that much.

While working away and trying to save up to get the bike fixed and hoping that Mary Jane will come around, Marty decides to kill some time at work by using the camcorder he finds laying around to shoot a documentary. He interviews anyone he can and who is willing to go on camera in the store and he ends up with a pretty interesting little movie on his hands. A local businessman gets word of it when Marty's friend, Bav (Meredith Scott Lynn), a tattoo artist, starts taking over promoting it for him. As the news about the movie starts to spread Marty winds up becoming a bit of a local celebrity and learns a few interesting life lessons along the way.

Quirky and at times surprisingly sweet (and not in a bad way), Smut is an interesting little off the wall film with a few really good laughs and some good characters. Melvin Van Peebles steals every scene he's in but the cast is quite good all around even if none of the other performers have the same kind of screen presence as Melvin does. Mark Boone Jr. is fun as the surly porn shop proprietor and Lee Holmes is a likeable enough guy that he works in the lead. The way his relationship with Jeanette Goldstein's character unfolds is interesting and believable and they have a good chemistry together here.

The pacing for the film is fine and at eighty-nine minutes it sticks around long enough to flesh out the characters and wrap things up nicely but never so long that it over stays its welcome. The cinematography is effective even if it's unremarkable. It suits the small town atmosphere well and it does a good job of capturing some of the seediness of the store where the bulk of the movie takes place.

Video:

This production, unfortunately, doesn't look so hot on the 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that is presented on this DVD but it is at least watchable. There's a bit of aliasing present in a few scenes and in spots the sharpness looks to be a little lacking. Color reproduction is fine, though the black levels are murky throughout the film. You don't have to look too hard to see some compression artifacts throughout and the image is quite grainy for most of its running time.