Page 69 - AVNSeptember 2025

“Deadly Vows is like a mix of all my love for
action movies.”
Atop a remote hill somewhere north of the San Fernando Valley, under distinctly
Bonsai-esque trees on a makeshift training campground, adult industry legend Mike
Horner is spitting sensei challenge-speak at a sweaty, buffed-out Ryan Reid.
“OK, so the rules are, first person to hit the dust loses. No breaks, no timeouts, no
excuses,” Horner commands Reid, pointing his cane at her.
“Fine by me,” she retorts.
This is one of the early scenes of Deadly Vows, Digital Playground and writer/director
Ricky Greenwood’s tentpole project for 2025, and if it calls to mind some similarity to
Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill ... well, that’s not by total coincidence.
“We’re trying to be a little bit different than Kill Bill, but I will say Deadly Vows is like
a mix of all my love for action movies,” Greenwood tells us. “It’s a little bit of Kill Bill, it’s
a little bit of Riki-Oh. Scott Nails has a patch like Snake Plissken [of John Carpenter’s
Escape From... movies]. You can see all the references, like the jacket that Scott wears
is kind of like First Blood.”
All of that duly noted, there’s still no denying that the parallels with Kill Bill are ...
significant. Perhaps most predominantly by virtue of the character played by Elly
Clutch—in her very first major acting role—known as “The Bride” (or, alternately, Ellen).
On getting into the character, Clutch laughs, “She’s a bit bitchier, I guess, than I am
as a person. She has a lot of rage, she’s very angry. And, you know, a lot of people
have done her wrong, and so she’s not really afraid to kind of, you know, take revenge.
She’s a bit vengeful ... hot-headed. So I feel like I just tried to kind of like think of things
that pissed me off.
“And I listened to a lot of music,” she continues, “I listened to a lot of Deftones and
Hole on the way in, ’cause I had to get into the mindset of, you know, sexy but pissed
off. ’Cause you can’t just be pure rage. You have to have the reasoning behind it. And
they have to still be attracted to me, even though I’m pissed off. So, yeah ... a lot of
music.”
In terms of role preparation, though, no cast member underwent anything more
strenuous than Reid, who takes on her first leading role as Sarah, a scrappy street
urchin of sorts she describes as “sassy and cunty and, like, little miss know-it-all ...
like, me. Literally, me.”
To get into fighting shape (also quite literally) for the role, Reid endured three months
of rigorous training twice a week for two hours at a time, on top of 6 a.m. workouts.
“I was like, holy fuck, how am I going to survive this movie?” she recalls. “I was
learning different types of boxing, punches, kicks ... how to take a punch, how to throw
a punch. And then, something I haven’t done in years—which is crazy, that life is such