Next Door Hookups review

It’s a typical suburban scene. Stay-at-home moms are hanging out the laundry. A fire engine cruises down the street, siren-off, on it’s way to a local fair. A Labrador chases some black wrens around a back yard. Someone fires up a barbecue and laments not buying enough steaks. Somewhere a young couple exchanges flirtatious looks before finding an opportunity to sneak away and thrash violently against each other for twenty, thirty minutes before collapsing into a sweaty heap, smoking a joint, and bitching about the fuckin’ suburbs. That young couple just experienced a next door hookup, which also happens to be the name of a site that features a throng of hot young guy and gorgeous young women getting it on, sexy style. Starring a bevy of up-and-coming pornstars (and a few that have already made their names), Next Door Hookups is a strange amalgam of straight porn and a gay point-of-view that puts the male participants in focus as much as, if not more than the female. Showing off the incredibly sexy physiques of both the guys and girls involved, and featuring some of the most intimate and believable porn this side of your sole sex-tape accomplishment made without the permission of your then-partner, Next Door Hookups seems like a steal at $29.95 a month. But wait, dear reader, it only gets better!

Pros:
A number of extremely gifted male and female performers have been seen in Next Door Hookups scenes, including Crissy Moon, Coco Velvett, Ruby Knox, and Nikki Rhodes on the girls’ team and Brenden Bangs, David Studding, Cody Cummings, Rod Daily, and Tommy D representing for the men. All performers look fit, clean, healthy, and eager to make some genuinely exciting porn.

Most every sex scene available at Next Door hookups is shot with a fairly even hand that, although favoring the men somewhat (this is a gay site, after all), offers both performers much screen time. We’re shown the great bodies of all performers and nobody’s pleasure is secondary to anyone else’s. To me, at least, this is how porn should be.

The scenes aren’t just great on an artistic and theoretical level, they also look fantastic courtesy of the High Definition video streams now available on most Next Door Studios sites. Photos, too, look clear and offer good detail.

Joining Next Door Hookups also gives you access to the rest of the Next Door Studios network of 14 mostly homosexual, but also often bisexual websites. Joining through Mr. Pink’s will save you half off your monthly membership price, bringing it down to $14.95 and making a good deal a great one.

Cons:
Sitting at just 720x480 pixels, the downloadable videos sorely need a resolution increase to match the quality of the HD streams. Photo content, too, should be upgraded from its 800x1024 pixel standing to match quality offered by many other sites in similar niches that are well into the HD and high-res revolution.

Updates only arrive on Next Door Hookups’ homepage once every two weeks. It’s no surprise, then, that the archive holds a comparatively scant 188 scenes. If updates started arriving weekly, this would soon cease to be a problem. It would also confirm Next Door Hookups’ standing within the network and ensure that it would receive the right amount of attention.

Checking out the update archive, it’s quickly apparent that there was a change in photographic style and production value in or around July of 2009. Prior to that, scenes looked fairly washed out and murky. Nowadays, things look much stronger and more vital. Perhaps a second run through in Final Cut Pro and Color could help the older scenes shine.

Next Door Studios is very much a network of sites aimed at the male homosexual porn fan. While it’s fantastic to see a gay porn network that isn’t mired in Eurotrash and shitty quality videos, I can’t help but feel Next Door Hookups might fare better as a standalone site. As is, it runs the risk of being neglected by Next Door Studios’ gay clientele (too many broads!) and passed over by straight men and women because of where it lives.

Conclusion:
Knowing for a few weeks that I’d soon be reviewing Next Door Hookups, I took the liberty of sampling, as always, a substantial amount of the site’s content. Finding it exhilarating and entertaining with a much more evenhanded approach to shooting straight porn than anything from an exclusively straight porn studio that I’ve ever seen, I knew this review was going to be glowing. What I hadn’t counted on, though, was the strange situation Next Door Hookups finds itself in. Too straight for gay porn and a little too gay for straight porn, there’s a very real risk of this site not getting enough attention from either camp and never finding its audience. I hope that doesn’t remain a problem and that Next Door Studios have something up their sleeves to keep Hookups alive and kicking and converting visitors into members. (Perhaps downloadable HD videos and weekly updates?)