Porn is big business. The combined annual turn-over of straight, gay and fetish video porn is now higher than that of Hollywood. And that's not even taking into account the hundreds of porn magazines and pay-as-you-use specialised websites that saturate the market every year. This big business approach to porn has meant that too much of it is now sanitised, which has caused people to turn to amateur porn in droves. But this hasn't stopped the Hollywood band-wagon jumpers from trying to cash in by injecting some celluloid raunch into their staple diet, with "The People Vs Larry Flynt" and "Boogie Nights", two mainstream films supposedly about the porn industry.

In "The People Vs Larry Flynt", Milos Forman grafted a rousing freedom of speech spin onto the life of irreverent sleaze-bag and "Hustler" magazine editor, Larry Flynt. I enjoyed the film for its performances, insight and humour, but resented the whitewashing of the more unsavoury elements of Flynt's life in order to portray him as a naughty but nice upstart for the American way.

For example, Hustler broke many taboos at the time by depicting, among other niche interests, coprophilia and amputee sex. Flynt is even rumoured to have had a couple of flings with men in his time, as did his rival Hugh Hefner. You wouldn't know that from watching Forman's film, which fixates on Flynt's devotion for his porn model and junky wife, Althea. All the same, Flynt's biopic is a hell-of-a-lot-more fun and engaging than the Tarantinoesque "Boogie Nights".

Using the life of 70s porn star John Holmes as the basis of his story, director Paul Thomas Anderson shows that the family that comes together sticks together, by turning his drugs and porn odyssey into a plea for 'alternative family' values, complete with soppy ending. Annoying industry inaccuracies aside (a porn director who does not shoot the obligatory cum shot!), this strongly acted film is really a two and a half hour strip tease, in which the exclamation mark is the unveiling of Dirk Diggler's (Mark Wahlberg) prosthetic thirteen inch penis.

('Gah, put it away!' screamed a woman in the seat in front of me, while the man sitting beside her sighed wistfully.)

Throughout history and in various cultures, a large penis was symbolic of fertility and virility. Its power was ritualistically invoked to regenerate the earth and bring prosperity to the community. In "Boogie Nights" we see the decline of masculine regenerative power in the 90s. Dirk Diggler's member might cause fascination and envy among some but ultimately it is redundant, a freak-show joke. In the age of invitro-fertilisation, and miracle-performing sperm banks, of what use is a man with a giant prong? Technology, which now does most of the hard labour formerly performed by testosterone-driven men, female independence and snide sex theorists have turned the tide against the true concept of masculinity. It seems that today women can be whatever they want and men should be eunuchs. Ironically, certain types of cock worshipping gay men seem to be the last defenders of the masculine man.

The one time Diggler does allow himself to be picked up by some rough trade for a hand-job in a dark parking lot, he is viciously bashed.

The natural progression of this story dictates that it follows the real-life story of John Holmes to the last. In his declining years, Holmes appeared in gay porn and even took up with a man while serving a prison sentence for robbery. Far from proving that Holmes was a latent homo, these developments show the elasticity of human sexuality to fit circumstances. By stepping around these facts Boogie Nights undermines itself and comes across as dishonest about the lives it claims to depict. It even goes to great lengths to show everyone involved in the skin trade as being an emotional cripple, a looser or an air-head. It's for this reason that the plot meanders after its first gripping hour. It literally has nowhere to go. At its centre is a gaping hole waiting to be filled.

For all the sex and bare flesh they show, "Larry Flynt" and "Boogie Nights" are remarkably unsexy. They lack even the barest sizzle of outlaw sexuality captured so well by the lesbian seduction scene in "Bound" and the kinky shenanigans of "Hustler White". Aside from Sharon Stone's every move and a handful of American off-Hollywood films, European cinema seems to handle eroticism far more honestly. Spanish Pedro Almodovar, an early proponent of raunchy sex and deranged passion, is up there with "Matador" and "Law Of Desire". And who can ever forget the heat generated by the night-time colosseum gang-bang in Liliana Cavani's "Beyond Good And Evil", the sacrilegious sex visitations in Paul Verhoeven's "The Fourth Man" and Catherine Deneuve's housewife whore in the bewitching "Belle de Jour".

For a more accurate, cheeky and non-preachy Hollywood film set in LA's skin trade, I still put my money on Hollywood maverick Brian De Palma's deliriously excessive "Body Double".