pornography

Pandora’s Mirror (1981)

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It doesn’t matter how many times you see the same story repeated in genre movies, as long as there’s a little stylistic or thematic novelty added to the template.  I’ve seen plenty of characters purchase possessed antique mirrors that warp their perception of reality and perception of their selves, mostly in cheaply produced horror pictures like Oculus, Mirror Mirror, and The Evil Within.  I’ve never seen that story adapted into a feature length Golden Age porno before, though, which is the novelty that the 1981 film Pandora’s Mirror brings to the template.  Vintage porno star Veronica Hart stars as the titular Pandora, who is mesmerized by an “enchanted” (i.e., cursed) mirror that she finds in the back of a dusty antique shop.  No one in the film ever refers to her by “Dora” or “Dorie” or any other nickname; it’s “Pandora” every time in case anyone in the audience loses track of the allusion.  Instead of seeing a demonic presence or an evil reflection of herself in the mirror like in most of these stories, Pandora’s mirror allows her to watch the sexual adventures of its previous owners over the past couple centuries, hypnotizing her in an erotic trance.  Obviously, that set-up is mostly just an excuse to stage hardcore sex scenes in various period costumes, but it also plays directly into one of my favorite genre tropes: the doomed protagonist who becomes obsessed with something that’s obviously going to kill them, but they keep at it anyway because it makes them horny.  The fact that the object of obsession is a magical mirror in this case is only the icing on the erotic novelty cake.

The only thing you need to know about Pandora is that her erotic obsession with her mirror is out of character and a cause for concern among her uptight yuppie social circle.  The only thing you need to know about the mirror is that its owner is a seemingly immortal Dan Ackroyd type (Frederick Foster), who appears in every vignette but never has sex on camera; he’s only around to ominously answer questions like “How long have you been here?” with “I have always been here.”  He does helpfully provide the backstory of the mirror’s enchantment, explaining that it was made from the wood of an oak tree that was struck by lightning, which is apparently where all enchanted lumber comes from.  For any information on why the mirror is evil, we just have to draw our conclusions from the spooky synth score and the fact that Pandora is immediately addicted to gazing into its enchanted glass.  There’s an interesting subversion there in how an object that’s typically associated with self-obsession and vanity is instead a voyeuristic window into the sex lives of others, but it all comes around by the time Pandora sees her own sexual fantasy reflected in cursed object (a threeway with the two gym bros who lift weights on the rooftop across the street from her apartment).  This is largely a story about a woman’s masturbatory fantasies taking over her waking life until all she can or wants to do is stare into the sex mirror, to the point where she’s literally consumed by it. 

If there’s anything especially notable about the sex here, it’s that every period-piece fantasy depicted is a group activity.  We start with a Revolutionary War foursome, ramp up to an Old Hollywood poolside fivesome, ease back into a 1970s Broadway foursome, and conclude with a full-on S&M dive bar orgy (at NYC’s infamous Hellfire Club, reigned over here by a tiara-crowned Annie Sprinkle).  The only one-on-one coupling occurs in a go-nowhere side plot in which Pandora’s boyfriend (Jamie Gillis) cheats with her conniving frenemy (Sandy Hillman) after being abandoned for too long as she stares into the mirror.  Situationally, the sexual scenarios that appear in the mirror are pretty hot, especially as they play with the power dynamics of timid newcomers being seduced into deep-end group sex hedonism.  In practice, the action can be a little too impractical & inhuman to maintain that erotic tension, though, especially since every single act of cunnilingues & analingus (and there are plenty) includes way more biting and random tongue flittering than direct, effectual licking.  Worse yet, the casting-couch Broadway audition segment requires a performer to masturbate with the world’s least convincing dildo: a hollow, plastic toy seemingly cut in half with scissors, so that it collapses any time it’s squeezed.  It would be beside the point to knock the film for not properly cropping out the shotgun mics & stage lights that creep into the frame during those sex scenes, but I don’t think it’s out of line to say the sex itself could’ve been a little more sincerely steamy.

Overall, this is a much classier picture than the only other title I know from director Shaun Costello (credited here as Warren Evans): the infamous 1970s enema-kink geek show Water Power (credited there as Helmuth Richler).  The gauzy soap-opera cinematography, ambient synth soundtrack, and urban fairy tale premise all add to its mystique as one of the eerier outliers of narrative pornography’s Golden Age, at least in the wraparound story that connects the less satisfying tangents of cosplay group sex.  It’s the sex that makes the picture an outlier in the larger canon of haunted mirror movies, though, so it almost doesn’t matter that none of the performers can seem to go down on each other without using every tooth in their jaw, or that Costello has seemingly never seen a functional dildo before.  Just the mere fact that they’re fucking on camera at all is enough.

-Brandon Ledet

Both Ways (1975)

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Long before New Queer Cinema directors like Derek Jarman, Todd Haynes, and Gregg Araki were praised for their confrontational depiction of queer sexuality onscreen in the 1990s, there was already a strong, decades-long independent filmmaking tradition of doing just that in hardcore gay pornography.  At least, that was the central thesis of Liz Purchell’s archival work in the Ask Any Buddy project, which is where I first heard of Jerry Douglas’s 1975 bisexual romance thriller Both Ways.  Although the review of Both Ways on the Ask Any Buddy podcast was less than glowing, it still felt like a necessary purchase when I ran across a used DVD copy of the film in a Minneapolis record store, since its X-rated onscreen sex meant I’d unlikely be able to access it on any mainstream streaming service in the near future (which is the exact kind of false scarcity logic that’s led me to collect a modest stack of vintage porno titles like Pink Narcissus, SexWorld, Bijou, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street).  On its surface, Both Ways is a fairly straightforward—pun unintended—porno drama about a closeted bisexual man living a double life, but between the director’s commentary track on the Vinegar Syndrome disc, the supplementary insight from the Ask Any Buddy pod, and the plot’s last-minute swerve into Hickcockian violence—okay, pun obviously intended that time—it ends up feeling like a surprisingly substantial work of outsider art.

The first sounds you hear in this Golden Age porno is a child giggling as his father tickles him on a carnival Ferris wheel.  Gerald Grant stars as a straight-laced family man: a Harvard graduate (which he’ll remind you of frequently) who’s built a tidy suburban life for himself as a high-powered lawyer and a loving father of a young son.  All is not well in the bedroom, though, as his sexually neglected wife, played by Andrea True (likely the most famous member of the cast, due to her disco hit “More More More”), confronts him for being distracted by a secret affair outside the house that she can’t quite figure out.  She’s correct, of course, as her husband has been sneaking around with—shocker of all shockers—a Yale student played by Dean Tait.  Now, you might expect that vintage pornography about a closeted bi man’s infidelity would mean double the variety of onscreen sex, but it really just doubles the amount of couples bickering.  This is the kind of porno-chic relic that speeds through rapid edits of sex scenes so it can really dig into its domestic melodrama, making for a shockingly sincere representation of male bisexuality for its era … until it takes a wild swerve into psychological thriller territory.  After all of its cheeky humor about collegiate rivalry between Harvard & Yale and all of its sentimental homelife drama in which the father figure constantly buys his cavity-sweet son handfuls of balloons, Both Ways gets really dark in its final twenty minutes, making for a chilling ending to something that’s ostensibly supposed to heat couples up on a naughty date night.

In filmmaking terms, Both Ways is surprisingly playful for a hardcore porno.  Douglas does a lot to mirror the domestic scenes in both of our antihero’s competing relationships, even going as far as to symmetrically pose his actors in front of wall-hung mirrors to drive the point home.  During early domestic squabbles where both couples recount how they first met and during a later pornographic montage of the cheating husband alternating between his two partners in two separate beds, the threesome’s body language is exactly copied in direct contrast to underline how little meaningful, physical difference there is between the two relationships.  Douglas also plays around with insert shots of artificial exteriors to simulate intimate dialogue when characters are navigating the world outside their bedrooms, shooting his actors against a surreal blue-void “sky”.  He also tries his best to ground this tale of extramarital romance within the context of Free Love looseness, setting a major couple’s spat at a swingers’ wife-swap orgy and meticulously framing a lit joint at the center of a male performer’s buttcheeks.  Other visual details & directorial choices are more inscrutable, such as the frequent cutaways to a frumpy housekeeper during the aforementioned wife-swap, the repetitive focus on yellowed copies of New York Times headlines to mark the timeline of the couples’ pasts, and the Ivy Leaguers’ obsession with ceramic beer steins – which only become more noticeably bizarre the more they become directly involved in the scene-to-scene plot.  It’s all baffling in its distraction from the presupposed purpose of hardcore pornography, but it also all adds to the feeling that this is a personal, thoughtful, creative project for Douglas instead of a quick cash grab between writing his off-Broadway stage plays.

I’m fond of Both Ways despite all of its lopsided plotting and its confused representation of Normal male bisexuality.  Even after the domestic melodrama gives way to crime-thriller psychology, the movie still has an oddly light tone to it, present both in the generic funk-guitar background music and in the nosy investigations of a local antiques dealer who mistakes the husband’s sneaking around for living a double life as an undercover Commie spy.  It may not be the artistic pinnacle of Golden Age pornography, but it does function as a clear, standalone example of how porn from that era has unique cultural value as independent filmmaking.  If nothing else, it’s difficult to imagine any mainstream Hollywood studio dramas of that time depicting male bisexuality with so much candor (even if it is easy to imagine a Hollywood version of this film choosing to conclude with the exact same act of domestic violence).  I got the sense that the reason the Ask Any Buddy crew were less enthused about Both Ways in their much better-informed review is that Jerry Douglas had previously contributed to a much more accomplished bisexual porno as the writer of Radley Metzger’s Score, which makes this one suffer by comparison.  I cannot personally speak to that comparison, as I have not yet scored a copy of Score while killing time in second-hand media stores on vacation, but I also never expected to find Both Ways through that method either, so never say never.

-Brandon Ledet

Amateur (1994)

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“How can you be a nymphomaniac and never had sex?”
“I’m choosy.”

The Criterion Channel has been doing a great job of resurrecting a forgotten generation of once-respected Gen-X indie filmmakers whose work has been weirdly difficult to see in recent years – names like Atom Egoyan, Gregg Araki, and Hal Hartley.  During the glory days of independent film festivals and college radio chic, these low-budget, mid-notoriety auteurs enjoyed a surprising level of cultural mystique that has faded as the distribution of their work has effectively trickled into non-existence.  Maybe that break wasn’t all so bad for their memory & reputation, though.  Revisiting Hal Hartley’s filmography as a Criterion Channel micro-collection in the streaming age feels like taking a time machine back to the Classic Indie Filmmaking days of the 1990s.  In particular, there’s something charmingly quaint about how his low-effort crime picture Amateur functions as a relic of that era.  Every one of his characters loiter around public spaces smoking cigarettes, flipping through porno mags, and making deadpan quips over background tracks by PJ Harvey & Liz Phair.  It’s cute in its own grimy little way, a dusty souvenir of 90s slacker kitsch.

The “amateur” of the title could refer to any one of the main players in Hartley’s off-Broadway, on-camera stage drama.  Isabelle Huppert plays an ex-nun who’s learning a new trade as a writer of porno-mag erotica.  Elina Löwensohn plays a video store porno actress who’s trying to break away from the industry by making big moves as a self-employed gangster.  Martin Donovan is caught between them as a total amnesiac with a violent past – an amateur at basically everything due to his newfound medical condition.  The unlikely trio eventually find themselves “on the run from bloodthirsty corporate assholes” as they cross paths with the gangsters at the top of the porno industry food chain, a mistake that has them evading handcuffs & bullets.  This premise sounds like it might make for an exciting, sordid action thriller—and maybe it still could—but that kind of entertainment is not on Amateur‘s agenda.  Mostly, Hartley uses the plot as an excuse to have his characters lounge around in hip NYC fashions (styled as a relapsed Catholic pervert, a soft goth, and a business prick, respectfully) while listening to college radio classics by the likes of The Jesus Lizard, Pavement, and My Blood Valentine.

There might be some genuine thematic heft in Amateur that I’m not taking seriously here, something about how New York City is a dangerous playground where desperate transplants reinvent themselves.  That might have resonated with me more if it were NYC community theatre instead of a Hal Hartley film preserved in time.  I mostly found myself distracted by just how Totally ’90s the movie was in its search for contemporary cool cred.  Its gigantic cellphones, breakfast diner ashtrays, and business cards for phone sex lines were all just as specific to its status as an Indie 90s relic as its single-scene cameo from a loud-mouthed Parker Posey.  This is a movie with multiple recurring arguments about why “floppy discs” are neither floppy, nor circular.  Everyone is either absurdly angry or wistfully despondent in a perfectly Gen-X 90s kind of way, and there’s a lot of easy humor pulled from the clash between those two default attitudes.  It’s an easy era to feel nostalgia for as a movie nerd, if not only because people like Hartley, Egoyan, and Araki used to get relatively robust distribution & critical attention, as opposed to the current cinematic landscape where you’re either making over-advertised corporate IP slop or disposable streaming service filler.  We used to be a country, a proper country with a proper indie cinema scene, and the proof is currently streaming on Criterion.

-Brandon Ledet

Bijou (1972)

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I’ve been trying out a new strategy when purchasing Blu-rays & DVDs lately, and it’s resulted in my modest collection quickly filling up with smut.  Instead of prioritizing tried-and-true personal favorites I know I’ll revisit in the future, I’ve pivoted to blind-buying movies I assume will never be accessible on streaming.  The plan was to finally see some independent, arthouse obscurities that fall through mainstream distribution gaps and, thus, eternally gather dust of my watchlist, but in practice it’s only prompted me to purchase more & more vintage pornography.  I can pretty safely assume that titles like Bat Pussy, SexWorld, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street will never populate on Hulu or Netflix, so I figure the best (legal) chance I have to see them is to own them.  That’s not to say there’s no overlap between high-brow experimental art and vintage porno.  In my casual, sporadic splurges on discounted discs, I’ve found plenty of artsy-fartsy filth to help refine my porno palate, including heavy-hitter titles like Equation to an Unknown, Pink Narcissus, Luminous Procuress, and, most recently, Wakefield Poole’s seminal classic Bijou.  There is a three-way intersection between D.I.Y. independent filmmaking, pretentious arthouse mindfuckery, and prurient perversion in these films that you can’t find anywhere else in cinema, which somehow makes owning them feel like an academic pursuit rather than a masturbatory one.

In that arthouse porno context, Bijou is considered by many connoisseurs to be the best of the best.  There’s a girthy stretch at its warped, misshapen center where I totally understand that claim.  I can’t fully vouch for its most stunning sequence’s lengthy bookends, though, which occasionally tested my patience despite their flagrant obscenity, as if I were watching Apichatpongian slow cinema instead of vintage smut.  The opening sequence is effectively a non-sequitur, featuring our main POV stud (Bill Harrison) leaving his construction site job, witnessing a deadly car accident, and snatching the purse of the woman who was run over.  He shakes off the guilt of that petty theft by masturbating in the shower, attempting to focus on the porno mag centerfolds hanging on his apartment walls instead of the tragedy he got himself needlessly involved in.  It takes 20 languid minutes for our well-endowed construction hunk to give into his obsession with the mysterious woman, following an invitation in her purse to the titular Bijou theatre, when the movie finally comes (and comes and comes and comes) alive.  The Bijou turns out to be less of a secret sex club than it is a phantasmagorical otherworld.  After following a few Alice in Wonderland instructions (signs flashing “Remove shoes” & “Remove clothes” instead of “Eat me” or “Drink me”), our main man finds himself in an endless black void decorated only with smoke, mirrors, tinsel, and nightclub lighting rigs.  His descent into the subliminal bowels of the Bijou is a gorgeous, disorienting display, recalling the funhouse mirror freakout at the climax of Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai.  Then, a 30-minute orgy ensues among the “all-male cast,” gradually overpowering the D.I.Y. psychedelia with the monotony of a nonstop sex scene.

Wakefield Poole directed Bijou the same year that the Golden Age of Porno was supposedly kicked off by the mainstream success of Deep Throat, a film with much less pronounced artistic ambitions, to say the least.  His previous film The Boys in the Sand was a similar cultural landmark, covered like a Real Film by the trades in a way no previous gay porno could have hoped for, despite its weirdly muted legacy as a porno-chic landmark lurking in Deep Throat‘s shadow.  As a follow-up to that early critical success, Bijou seems less interested in mainstream attention than it is in academic pursuits.  The way Poole transforms his tiny NYC apartment into an endless liminal pleasure realm can’t help but recall the arthouse porno sensibilities of James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus, which was filmed on the same kind of D.I.Y. “studio” set (although much less efficiently).  In its best moments, Bijou plays like the scrappier, more brutish kid brother of Narcissus, doubling down on the abstraction & obscenity of Bidgood’s work instead of the sub-Technicolor beauty.  Poole includes self-portrait camera tests and screen-test cast interviews as side-by-side slideshow projections, the kind of visual experimentation that was making waves in that era’s art galleries, not its porno theatres.  The classical soundtrack makes even the orgy sequence play like a perverse parody of Disney’s Fantasia, the closest that studio has ever gotten to genuine pomp & prestige.  In its most transcendent moments, Poole’s version of pornography can only be compared to art film experimentation, more often recalling Kenneth Anger than Gregory Dark (although all three directors likely had major influence on the music video as an artform).  Unlike Pink Narcissus, though, Bijou isn’t entirely comprised of transcendent moments, and it takes a little patience to get to the core down-the-rabbit-hole sequence that makes it such a well-regarded all-timer.

I don’t know that I have the passion nor the stamina to make it as a full-on, well-versed porno sommelier (for that, I will defer to Ask Any Buddy‘s Elizabeth Purchell, longtime Bijou advocate), but I do think it’s a genre I owe more time & attention, so it’s one I’m likely to continue collecting.  Swampflix doesn’t have much of a guiding ethos beyond promoting appreciation for low-budget, high-art genre filmmaking, and there is plenty pornography that deserves to be discussed & exalted in that context, alongside more frequently cited genres like action, sci-fi, and horror.  In that canon, Bijou is clearly a central, definitive text, even if its loopy, unrushed entirety can’t live up to the psychedelic transcendence of its best stretch.

-Brandon Ledet

SexWorld (1978)

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I can only think of two feature-length porno parodies that I watched before catching the original films they “erotically” spoof: 1974’s Flesh Gordon (a parody of the 1930s Flash Gordon sci-fi serials and subsequent 1950s TV show, later adapted again into a fully clothed action-adventure feature in 1980) and now 1978’s SexWorld (a parody of the 1973 sci-fi Western Westworld, later adapted into a semi-clothed prestige series for HBO in the 2010s).  In both cases, I basically got the gist (and the jizz!) of their parodic targets from their loglines and through general cultural osmosis.  Besides, both of those vintage pornos are more interesting for how they reflect the mainstream sexual attitudes of their era than they are for their thin satirical commentary on their respective source texts.  For its part, Flesh Gordon plays like a corny softcore holdover from the Russ Meyer nudie cutie era, shying away from taking full, explicit advantage of the porno chic movement that arose post-Deep Throat.  By contrast, SexWorld is unmistakably porno chic.  The Anthony Spinelli Golden Age porno shares some of Flesh Gordon‘s wink-wink-nudge-nudge cornball humor in its hardcore perversions of the Westworld/Futureworld premise, but its polished production values, abbreviated sex scenes, and vague gestures towards social commentary make it feel deliberately designed as a date-night dare for yuppie couples to giggle through, rather than pandering to the trench coat brigade.  Both films soften hardcore’s harshest edges to make porno publicly palatable for curious-but-cautious mainstream audiences but, of the two, only SexWorld gave those audiences their money’s worth.

As you would likely assume, the titular SexWorld is an isolated luxury resort that simulates “a world devoted entirely to sex,” realizing its horned-up tourist’s “wildest” fantasies though sci-fi convention make-em-ups that are never fully explained in the plot (but are hinted to be a combination of hologram projections & shapeshifting animatronics).  What you might not assume is that SexWorld’s high-end customer base travels to that resort via bus, a detail significant enough that it gets its own shout-out in the titular disco theme song.  The bus itself proudly advertises the SexWorld logo to lookers-on—no brown paper bag covering the label in shame—which was apparently somewhat risky to stage, given that the bus ride montage is mostly composed of a few quick shots repeating in an endless loop.  During that bus trip and subsequent interviews with the SexWorld staff, we get some insightful flashbacks into the dysfunctional sex lives and escapist fantasies of each tourist.  The staff repeatedly remind their guests that the far-out, unexplained SexWorld technology can realize their wildest, most unfathomable fantasy fucks, referencing taboos like incest, BDSM, and water sports that no one takes them up on.  The most transgressive their fantasies get are in exploring interracial taboos (including a bonus mini-parody of Behind the Green Door), but the less said about those particular vignettes the better.  Otherwise, between the budget restraints and the presumed hetero POV of its audience, the actual sex in SexWorld is relatively tame, unless you’re somehow still shocked by mostly straight women indulging in some momentary bisexuality in an otherwise straight porno.

The sex looks great, though, and Spinelli makes the most of the production’s cheap sets with a few well-positioned gel lights and some complicated wallpaper.  There isn’t much to the sci-fi conceit beyond a few SexWorld employees milling around in white lab coats, pushing useless light-up buttons on a switchboard to nowhere, but it’s all in good, hokey fun.  As a cultural artifact, its greatest value is in imagining what hipster city couples were supposed to get out of seeing it publicly projected in its original porno chic context, besides the obvious visual titillation and transgressive thrill.  Most of its characters’ fantasies are presented as quick-fix resolutions for common marital conflicts, to the point where it’s just as much couples’ therapy for straights as it is porno sleaze.  I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the film came with its own pre-loaded discussion topics on index cards for audiences to sort through as they travel from theatre to bed after the credits roll.  Personally, my favorite two characters are the evil shrew wife who desperately wants her husband to be more forceful in bed and the phone sex addict who feels intense shame in her post-nut-clarity every time she enjoys a dirty call – the shrew (Sharon Thorpe) because she reminds me of Mink Stole’s legendary comedic performance in Desperate Living, and the shy phone-sex pervert (Kay Parker) because her pre-cure flashback scene is genuinely hot.  It’s kind of a perfect porno chic movie in that way: a little sexy, a little silly, a little offensive, a little historically insightful, and—most shocking to anyone who grew up watching porn in the video or internet eras—a little considerate in its lighting & composition.  You don’t need to have seen Westworld or Futureworld to understand the appeal of that.

-Brandon Ledet

X (2022)

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Considered in isolation, X is okay.  It can be a little phony & shallow in spurts, but it’s a decent enough slasher with novel themes & settings not usually explored in the genre.  Considered in a larger scope, it’s frustratingly stagnant. It’s getting extremely tired watching so many modern horror movies borrow their authenticity from vintage grindhouse cinema instead of genuinely attempting something new & risky.  Ti West directed his breakout calling-card movie House of the Devil thirteen long years ago, and he was already indulging this kind of 70s & 80s throwback aesthetic back then.  Hell, Rob Zombie directed House of 1,000 Corpses two decades ago.  There have certainly been better grindhouse throwbacks made since 2003, but I don’t know that there have been any transcendent triumphs that justify wallowing in that nostalgia swamp for this long instead of attempting something freshly upsetting.  Even when X excels in its go-for-broke moments of icky discomfort, I find myself questioning why this filmmaking mode is always set in the 70s or 80s now and buried under so many retro style markers.  It feels stuck, as if West and his contemporaries are outright afraid of modern settings & new tones, using disreputable vintage subgenres as a stylistic, contextual crutch.

Worse, X is outright condescending to one of the drive-in era subgenres it’s supposedly paying tribute to.  This is a grimy slasher film about a small crew of subprofessional pornographers who are slaughtered by elderly Evangelicals in rural Texas, 1979.  The film is most satisfying as a Texas Chainsaw-inspired creep-out, unleashing a long-isolated family of murderous weirdos onto the big-city “sex fiends” who invade their small town.  It’s also admirable in the way it highlights the true independent filmmaking spirit shared between horror & pornography in that era – two low-budget/high-profitability genres that were closely paralleled in their production & reputation.  It’s annoying, then, that X‘s view of late-70s pornography is so phony & patronizing.  Its six-person film crew is supposedly committed to creating porn that can be enjoyed & appreciated as legitimate art instead of disposable smut, but they’re working on a goofy cliché titled The Farmer’s Daughters, which they intend to distribute on VHS (despite shooting on film, a more expensive format).  There’s a bizarre dissonance there, as if they’re discussing the production of Equation to an Unknown but in practice filming scenes from Bat Pussy. The audience has no choice but to laugh at their artistic ambitions, since the conflict between their words and their work is played as a joke.  I hate to be such a scold about this, but presenting the concept of artful pornography as inherently funny is pretty hack & outdated at this point, especially if your recreation of it is the same funk guitar & screeching orgasms as a 90s sketch parody.  This goes doubly so if you’re borrowing the look & feel of vintage pornography—low-budget genre films made fully in earnest—to boost the entertainment value of your A24-distributed horror mainstreamer.  It’s insulting.

It’s a testament to Mia Goth’s fearlessness & “X-factor” appeal that X amounts to anything remarkable at all.  She stars in dual roles as a young porno actress and her elderly, sexually-repressed admirer: a lonely old woman whose Evangelical husband no longer desires her, so she violently seeks extramarital satisfaction with the unsuspecting youth they lure to their farm.  There’s something special about the intergenerational dynamic Goth shares between the two versions of herself.  She paws at her own flesh in lecherous hunger, willing to burn down the entire world just to get one last taste of youthful beauty before death.  The closest The Farmer’s Daughters’ crew gets to announcing X‘s central theme is when they lament “One day we’re going to be too old to fuck.” It’s an epiphany that doubles as a blanket excuse for hedonism and as a genuinely horrific vision of their sexless, geriatric future.  What I can’t figure out is why West felt the need to bury that vision under so much phony vintage-grindhouse cheese.  His heart really isn’t in the throwback genre markers anyway.  The porno recreations are treated as a joke, and the slasher scenes include cross-cutting transition techniques that have no discernible purpose besides feeling quaintly outdated.  It’s not enough that West mocks his pornographer characters for wanting to make ambitious art out of smut; he can’t even match their “avant-garde cinema” ambitions in his own work.  Only Goth comes through with anything worth championing here. At least she gets to do it twice.

As far as retro porno-horrors go, X is no Knife+Heart.  I’m not even convinced it’s the better Texas Chainsaw throwback from this year.  There is a great, discomforting slasher film lurking somewhere in the tension between those two genre divides, though.  It’s just a shame it wasn’t allowed to be its own thing without paying homage to an already overmined past.

-Brandon Ledet

Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop: How to be a Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps (1992)

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Before phrases like “sex positivity” & “kink” wormed their way into my vocabulary as a horned-up youth, Annie Sprinkle already embodied them in my mind as a sex-culture mascot.  Like other retro fetish icons like Bettie Page & Dita Von Teese, Annie Sprinkle has seemingly always been around in the public eye as a cheerleader for fun, adventurous sex – reaching me before I was old enough to access pornography without parental surveillance.  I don’t know if I first encountered her in a magazine interview or on a late-night broadcast of HBO’s Real Sex, but she’s definitely one of the first cultural ambassadors for kink & sex positivity that penetrated my sheltered suburban bubble.  Long before I had seen a single frame of her golden age pornos, she symbolized the ways that pornography could be fun & feminist in the right circumstances, which helped shape the ways I think of the medium.

While the mainstream porno Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle is likely her biggest commercial success, I don’t think Sprinkle peaked as artist until a decade later, when she was making avant-garde video art instead of traditional hardcore.  The cult VHS oddity Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop: How to be a Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps is a tongue-in-ass-cheek instructional video promoting kink & sex positivity, a wonderful document of the Annie Sprinkle ethos.  Co-directed with a young Maria Beatty (who still makes artsy fetish videos like Ecstasy in Berlin, 1926) and scored by experimental electronic musician Pauline Oliveros, the video is ostensibly a taped version of Sprinkle’s sex-positivity workshops that she ran in early-90s NYC but is something much stranger & more cinematic than that documentation implies.  In the video version of the workshop, Sprinkle lectures directly to the camera about the mystical slut/goddess binary. She promises to “awaken your inner slut” and “your inner goddess,” challenging cultural biases that a sexually enthused woman is somehow vulgar or immoral.  She walks you through this spiritual slut awakening in front of surreal green screen video-art effects while arhythmic keyboard flourishes, marching drums, and slide whistles trigger a kind of D.I.Y. psychedelic hypnotism.  Sprinkle declares that she wants the video to make sex “empowering, liberating, and healthy,” but in the process she also makes sex a bizarre psychotronic head-fuck.

While commercially marketed as a porno, the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop plays more like experimental video art than it does like pure erotica.  It’s telling that Sprinkle & Beatty tacked on a lengthy threesome scene at the end of the video as an afterthought, realizing late in production that their sex video didn’t have much actual sex in it.  And even that scene concludes with Sprinkle experiencing a five-minute, unedited orgasm, lecturing about the different levels of orgasmic pleasure in voiceover while a digital clock counts every eternal second.  Everything that precedes that mind-blowing climax lands somewhere between the high-art mysticism of Derek Jarman’s The Garden and the psychedelic sketch comedy of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!.  A kaleidoscope of vulvas undulates on the screen while Sprinkle instructs on how to find “your goddess spot” and makes cheeky puns about how genital piercings make you “holier.”  Brief sex acts shared between her crew of “Transformation Facilitators” are transposed in front of backdrops that are usually reserved for karaoke screens.  The video is often hot and always fun, but it’s less pornography than it is Dianetics for your clit.

As you’d likely expect, not all of Annie Sprinkle’s sex-positive politics have aged gracefully over the past three decades.  The Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop has some major blind spots when it comes to cultural appropriation in particular, encouraging superficial Orientalist engagement with yoga & bindis as cultural costuming instead of genuine spiritual practices.  In the audio commentary on my mid-2000s DVD copy of the film, Sprinkle shrugs off the insensitivity of these missteps, explaining that she didn’t even know what cultural appropriation was at the time of filming.  However, she also recounts that those aspects of the workshop caused some of the video’s more radical performers to walk off-set in protest on the first day of filming, so those conversations were very much being had at the time whether or not she chose to listen.  Still, I’d like to think that it’s worth squinting past Sprinkle’s political blind spots to appreciate her ambassadorship for good sex and good pornography.  After all, she does have an entire section on her Wikipedia page titled “Contributions to Feminism,” which should be some implication of how important her messaging was at the time, short sights aside. 

If there’s anything especially radical about the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop, it’s not necessarily in its erotic mysticism or in its video-art psychedelia.  Annie Sprinkle’s most invigorating contribution to pornography is in her D.I.Y. punk ethos, encouraging her audience to have more playful sex and even to make their own pornography at home.  It’s the same mobilizing energy that the Riot Grrrl movement brought to feminist bands & zines at the time, inciting women to make their own self-liberating art in defiance of the era’s cultural gatekeepers.  Sprinkle’s version just happened to allow her to experience a continuous 5-minute orgasm in the process, which is a pretty sweet bonus if you can achieve it.

-Brandon Ledet

Ecstasy in Berlin, 1926 (2004)

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EPSON MFP image

Usually, when I review outright pornography on this blog, it’s got some kind of vintage appeal. Somewhere in the back of my repressed Catholic skull, I must believe smut can only be assessed as Legitimate Art after a few decades have passed, whether it’s the exquisitely refined melodrama of Equation to an Unknown (1980) or the crass home movies amateurism of Bat Pussy (197?). 2004’s Ecstasy in Berlin, 1926 snuck past that personal bias in the most obvious way: by looking vintage in its 1920s setting & fabricated sepia tone, in contrast to standard mid-00s pornography’s flat, digital sheen. Ecstasy in Berlin is artsy BDSM erotica with an aesthetic that falls somewhere between Guy Maddin’s wryly retro film textures & Annie Sprinkle’s DIY video-art pornos. Its Black & White patina & ambient score announce its intention to be considered Art, but its 40min slack-jawed stare at lingeried women relentlessly spanking each other is a purely prurient indulgence. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

As you can imagine, there isn’t much plot to speak of here. A woman in Weimer era Germany shoots up in her boudoir, the camera lingering on the needle & her bare crotch for a relative eternity. Her subsequent doped-out fantasy is one of drowsy lesbian erotica – mostly consisting of spanking, bootlicking, and light bondage. Any motions towards storytelling are restricted to juxtaposition: our de-facto “protagonist” split-screened with her erotic fantasy; a corset fitting paired with an actual hourglass; lipstick smears contrasted against the razor-sharp arches of 1920s eyebrows. Meanwhile, director Maria Beatty is clearly having fun with editing room trickery, establishing an intoxicating rhythm with some intense vignette framing, triple exposures, and languid dissolves. The film looks great. Still, the spanking sequences are endless and never really escalate to anything substantial, which can test even the most dedicated kinkster’s patience at feature length no matter how many costume changes reset the scene.

I don’t know if Ecstasy in Berlin has convinced me to seek out & assess more narrative-free, post-VHS pornography as Legitimate Art, but it works well enough as a calling card for Maria Beatty as a filmmaker. There’s an exciting mix of aesthetic beauty & unashamed transgression at work here, even if it’s purely in service of erotic titillation. Like most long-working porno directors, Beatty’s got a couple horror films listed in her credits (lurking among titles like The Elegant Spanking & Strap-on Motel), which are now calling my name like softcore siren songs. I may not know how to properly approach a plotless, over-stylized porno, but plotless & over-stylized is my exact sweet spot when it comes to genre schlock.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Equation to an Unknown (1980)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer and Brandon discuss the vintage, oddly melancholic French porno Equation to an Unknown (1980), which is cited as partial inspiration for the recent giallo throwback Knife+Heart (2019).

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, TuneIn, or by following the links below.

– Brandon Ledet & Mark “Boomer” Redmond

 

Bat Pussy (197?)

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Bat Pussy has proudly earned two distinguishing titles in the annals of schlock history. It’s believed to be both the first feature-length Porn Parody film and the absolute worst porno ever made. The first claim is the most difficult to verify since no one knows exactly when Bat Pussy was made or who was involved in its production. The film was discovered in a Memphis porno theater store room in the 1990s. The only indications of its time of production are a 1970 issue of Screw Magazine featured heavily in its opening scenes and the fact that it was a contemporary spoof of the Adam West-starring Batman television show, which ended in the late 60s. Thus, the exact whos, whens, wheres, hows, and whys of Bat Pussy are likely never to be solved, other than in vague estimations like “sometime in the early 70s” and “somewhere in the American South.” What’s much easier to verify is that it is, in fact, a spectacular failure of a porno film and very likely the worst of its kind to ever achieve theatrical projection (and decades-delayed home video distribution through AGFA & Something Weird).

A bitter married couple have fumbling, non-starter sex after finding foreplay inspiration in an issue of Screw. They are aggressively Normal people working mostly unscripted, obviously just having a goof. As the couple feebly attempts to mutually perform oral sex, the man struggles to maintain an erection while the woman frets over the tussle’s damage to her beehive up-do. Unsure what to say or do as the sex is obviously going nowhere, they riff in a faux-agro banter, like a shittily improvised spoof of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where every other word is “motherfucker.” They’re incredibly Southern and likely just as drunk. The bedroom set where they’re fooling around echoes as if it were a cavernous warehouse instead of a private home. 35 minutes into the 50-minute runtime, the titular superhero Bat Pussy arrives to rescue the audience from these hostile, lazy sex acts. She’s immediately stripped of her superhero costume and joins the couple for an equally uninspired threeway, which continues until the production abruptly runs out of celluloid.

Obviously, the main attraction of this pioneering Porn Parody is Bat Pussy herself. The second she’s announced as Dora Dildo, aka The Mighty Bat Pussy, it registers as a huge relief, as her far-off Pussy Cave (later revealed to be an outhouse) is our only locational reprieve from the frustrated sex in the married couple’s “bedroom.” The hope is that Bat Pussy will break up the proceedings with some much-needed levity, but the reality is she takes her sweet time getting there. Apparently, her crime-fighting motivation is an urge to stop all citizens of Gotham from making “fucking movies” unless she is involved herself. Superpowered vaginal twitches alert her that the married couple is planning to make a porno without her involvement, so she dresses in her knockoff Batman costume (an awkward ceremony we watch in real-time), and speeds off to the couple’s “bedroom” via an exercise bouncy ball while nondescript surf rock drones in the background. It’s a hilariously vicious prank on the audience, then, that she’s immediately stripped of her costume once she arrives at the couple’s bed, joining the impossibly shitty sex instead of putting a stop to it.

Dora Dildo is too limited of a player here to totally save the movie from its aggressively unerotic tedium, so the remainder of its entertainment value lies in its Ed Woodian incompetence. The most alarming, memorable moments are when the three actors are unsure about what to do next in bed, and fearfully look to the crew behind the camera for direction (which is sometimes audibly shouted back to them mid-scene). Those frequent fourth wall breaks feel like a violation of an unspoken artist-audience agreement and add an even more sinister tone to the endlessly awkward sex that eats up most of the runtime. My favorite moment of the entire picture results from the mean-drunk husband repeatedly referring to Dora as “Batwoman” in the midst of their threeway, until his costars finally can’t take it anymore and correct him, “It’s Bat Pussy!”. Then they all laugh. It’s moments like that and the bouncy-ball Pussymobile that make me want to hail this film as classic underground schlock, but the eternal belligerent improv that fills the gaps between them are too torturous to fully forgive. Bat Pussy may very well be the worst porno film I’ve ever seen, bless its drunken Southern heart.

-Brandon Ledet