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.