IS IT PORN? (reviews and discussions of films about which you're just not sure)

[Trevor]

I'm not a big porn scenester but I used to follow Caroline Pierce from "Night of the Giving Head" on Twitter. Really nice and intelligent lady. With a really big ass

😳😅🤣😀😀

[Trevor]

I remember when LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972) was considered to be boarding on porn by some. Ah, such innocent times.

The apartheid censor board also banned that one 😳

[M.10rda]

I probably should've known what I was getting into, watching something called

PHALLUS THE MAN (1999):
...But in my defense it's an early (pre-SUICIDE CLUB) film by the great Sion Sono. A guy doing Takeshi "Beat" Kitano cosplay and his long-haired buddy murder everyone in a back alley casino, including one dude wearing blackface.  The buddy gets gutshot, so TBK drags him out into the alley, makes out with his sucking wound      and then gives his mortally wounded friend a rough railing.  Then he picks up two male hitchhikers, watches them make out in his back seat, drives them to a deserted warehouse district, repeatedly has rough sex w/ both of them....... they bowl and frolic in a field...  and then
?SPOILERS IF ANYONE CARES?
he murders them for no reason. Then a second guy in blackface  has vigorous sex w/ a cute long-haired boy and TBK shows up and murders them in quite grisly fashion, then he seems to feel better.
?END SPOILERS?
In my defense, I had no idea the hour-long PHALLUS THE MAN contained nearly forty minutes of man-on-man action. Okay, now that I check its Letterboxd entry, I see that most reviewers outright call it "gay porn".  Maybe I should do more research before I watch weird stuff. There are no penetration shots and the actor who plays TBK seems to be going out of his way to signal that his sex scenes are simulated....... but man, this really seems like porn, and dark, mean porn at that.

I've called the lead character "TBK" in jest but other Letterboxd reviewers have picked up on this too and seem to think Sono is consciously commenting on (or criticizing?) Kitano's tendency to incorporate non-consensual sodomy in several of his major films. I guess one could also connect the dots to Tarantino, per the pawn shop scene in PULP. Also as in RESERVOIR DOGS, there's one female character who has no dialogue and she's dead moments after she appears. To be fair, there's very little dialogue anyway. It's a Sion Sono film so it has striking use of color, some nice shots, and there is a little humor amidst the depressing sexual violence.

2.5/5
Probably would score higher for those who like watching men have sex with men. Apparently Sono made some other early "porn" and though I'm a Sono fan, I can skip 'em.

[Archivist]

The Brown Bunny (2003) is an independent arthouse film which is pretty bleak and depressing, with one explicit scene and one nonconsensual but not explicit scene. Doesn't fall under the umbrella.

Caligula? Yeah, it has some scenes, but it's not at the level of Deep Throat or Debbie Does Dallas, which were directly intended to be smut.

Romance (1999) starring well-known adult performer Rocco Siffredi runs the line pretty close. In Australia, it was the first movie with unsimulated sex to be granted classification under R18+.

9 Songs (2004) is another mainstream independent art film which includes unsimulated sex, this time between the two leads. It's worth watching for an arthouse take on that aspect.

Nymphomaniac (2013) is still not quite on the porn level because it uses body doubles and digital editing to make it seem as if the actors are doing it. It is still a sex-heavy movie, though.

The wiki article will give endless hours of holes, rabbit and otherwise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsimulated_sex

[M.10rda]

Great link! I like 9 SONGS and I like Catherine Breillat, though I've never seen ROMANCE, somehow...

[Dr. Whom]

How would you rate Bilitis? There is nothing explicit in it, but it is all about indulging in erotic fantasies about schoolgirls. And Catherine Breillat was involved, although apparently she thought the whole thing was beyond idiotic (I agree).

[M.10rda]

Good call/question on BILITIS... and thanks for reviving this thread for at least a tangential yet related discussion! 'Cause honestly I don't know when might be the next time I watch quasi-porn...! 

I remember BILITIS fondly (quote-unquote) from a book of video capsule reviews I owned in my youth, which made it sound like the most salacious thing imaginable. By the time I watched BILITIS some years back, I was past the age at which it would've provided any punitive value to me. I found it dull and not very thoughtful (in spite of Catherine Breillat's involvement) and almost entirely lacking of the sort of sleaze value that I still sometimes enjoy about films of this era and sub-genre. If intent is important, it's definitely Porn-y, as I think the director and distributors were attempting to attract creepy older men and pubescent lads, but there's no sex of even the softcore variety iirc and very little nudity. BILITIS seems like the kind of lite fare I'd have stayed up late in junior high to catch on Skinemax, and even then I'd have felt disappointed. I motion that we need a new category for films like BILITIS - "Faux Porn"? "Failed Attempt at Porn"?

I've watched several of Breillat's directorial efforts and I like them as character studies and mild art films, but all those I've seen also always under-deliver on the explicit content, at least based on their premises. ANATOMY OF HELL is 90 minutes of the infamous Rocco Siffredi and his partner laying around naked having serious conversations.  That said I skipped ROMANCE somehow thus that must be where Breillat exercised all her urges to get proper filthy...

[Dr. Whom]

I disagree with you on the sex and the nudity. For a movie for general release, you've got plenty. True, there is just the one sex scene, and that is filmed in a restrained way, but the actresses are constantly taking their clothes off, or wearing transparent or revealing things. Rather than having a couple of nude scenes, here you have systematic fan service on a level I haven't seen since Special Agent Aika. This not 'let's make a horror/action movie and stick in some sexy scenes', this is, 'let's leer at women on every possible occasion.'

Compared to true erotic movies, it is tame I agree, but David Hamilton went as far as he could, while still retaining some plausibilty as a romantic movie you could go and see in a normal cinema.

It is unwatchable, though.

[M.10rda]

I concede the point to you - it has been as many as 10 years since I watched BILITIS - and I only remember being bored and not in any way titillated... nor do I even recall the sex scene! I do recall the rather pointless/undermotivated nudity, which is nothing I haven't seen in most slasher films or WIP movies.  Perhaps that's why I prefer the Horror genre or Crime genre to Erotica when it comes to screen Exploitation... at least in Horror or Crime I'll get some story and violence to entertain me if the sexy parts ain't all that!

[Dr. Whom]

Fair point. And this is also why I would class Bilitis as porn, because aside from the erotic fantasies, it really has nothing else to offer (or even tries to)

[LordGraal]

"Night of the Giving Head"

    

Romancing the Bone
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