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
Good Will Humping

Genius 

[Dr. Whom]

Fruits of Passion (1981)

Ostensibly an adaptation of Retour à Roissy, the sequel to Histoire d'O, but set in 1920s Hong Kong. Sir Stephen lends out O to a brothel (to prove her devotion or something), while he takes care of his casino.

The plot (using the term loosely) is mainly a device for showing a series of set pieces of kinky sex, with some surrealist elements thrown in for arthouse cred. Klaus Kinski is very convincing as someone who likes to publicly humiliate his girlfriend. He also claimed later that his sex scenes weren't simulated. Isabelle Illiers has nothing to do but look sad and be naked. Arielle Dombasle later regretted this movie, and said she was too young then. As she was 28 at the time, I think she was well past the 'I was young and needed the money' stage.

There also are a surprising number of taxidermied animals in this movie.

[The Burgomaster]

THRILLER . . . A CRUEL PICTURE (aka THEY CALL HER ONE EYE)

This has been released in several versions and under several titles and the shorter versions are missing the hardcore penetration close-ups. It's not really a porn film . . . it's a revenge movie. But there are scenes of hardcore sex in it.

[M.10rda]

Reviving this thread for a film that looks at a glance like porn but absolutely isn't porn. I'll give it a quick "review" and then post additionally on why this film is so darn interesting. I mean, besides all the nekkidness.

THE UNASHAMED aka UNASHAMED: A ROMANCE (1938):
An uptight Clark Gable-lookin' salaryman consults a typically squirrelly/eccentric 1930s "criminologist"-type doctor, who confidently advises one likely cure for his patient's ennui: a vacation at a nudist colony! I dunno everything about the hypocratic oath, but seeing as the doctor is also a charter member of said nudist colony and dispenses nudist medical advice to the salaryman's smitten secretary... well, it doesn't entirely seem kosher to me. But I digress! "Rae" the secretary (played by actress "Rae Kidd", which is the sort of metareference that often  weirds me out) surprises her boss by greeting him at the colony - totally starkers, natch - and much happy nude frolicking commences....... for the film's first half, anyway.

Okay, UNASHAMED starts off like a foreboding REEFER MADNESS-style cautionary docudrama, but then transitions into full-fledged nudie-cutie/"nature doc" exploitation, w/ a solid stretch of silent nekkid lifestyle footage (hiking, swimming... archery!). So its just a very early excuse to see ladies' boobs + buttocks, right? Oh no. UNASHAMED is quite a bit more...

The first (and more bizarre/hilarious) thing I will mention is the arrival of a creepy ventriloquist ("Dad") and his dummy/"son" ("Woody"), who is forced (de rigeuer) to strip down like all the other campers, thus spends most of the movie as a talking head on an unfinished wooden box.  Nevertheless "Dad" and "Woody" are quite a hit w/ the other campers, leading them in a rousing musical number that must be seen to be disbelieved. Around the same time, Rae and her boss/new boyfriend (holy HR!) pick up a newspaper and read a headline about a scandalous heiress... and then there's a zoom-cut to the heiress in her penthouse apartment having screwball repartee with her Gal Friday. Okay, thinks I, UNASHAMED is filling out the time w/ found footage from some unrelated feature. But no!!! The heiress and her lady-in-waiting pack their bags and travel to the nudist colony! And then...

Just as UNASHAMED seems to be settling into cheeky surrealism and/or ribald farce, it resumes the more foreboding tone of its early scenes. A love triangle rather predictably develops, and then - things get dark... like, dark dark, like Whoah... like much darker than any other non pre-Hays Code film from the 30s I can think of.

UNSHAMED is quite something to behold if you know nothing about it, and even more of a curiosity when you know just a little about it (and alas, "a little" is all that there is to be known about this mysterious object). Rae Kidd and the actresses who play the heiress and her friend are all nice to look at, and the stuff with "Woody" the dummy is as weird as anything ever uncovered and riffed by MST3K. But UNASHAMED is also, most shockingly, a film with Themes and an Agenda. Not to oversell it, nor to damn it with faint praise... but UNSHAMED is very, very....... interesting.

3.5/5    Go into it blind if you're intrigued, or, read on for more context.......

[M.10rda]

I will try to discuss what's interesting about UNASHAMED w/o spoiling the ending (as I do think the film deserves to be seen) though I will spoil several key plot points.

First of all, UNASHAMED is not poorly made. The naturist footage is pretty typical, though w/ some artistic compositions. The early scenes are competent, but the "screwball comedy" scene in the middle of the film is surprisingly sharp and looks like anything out of a major studio during the era. Then the final stretch of UNASHAMED is... very well-handled and rather lovely in its bleakness.

So, who made this movie? No one appears to know anything about the director - "Allen Stuart" - though the writers and technicians have an assortment of credits at "budget" studios of the 30s and 40s. (Reviewers and researchers suspect therefore that "Allen Stuart" is a pseudonym, but for whom?) The actor who plays the boss (and shows his chest and butt, though no ween) has other credits, but the three female leads - Rae Kidd, Lucille Shearer, and Emily Todd - are all beautiful, have got great bodies, and are good actresses - and yet have no other credits. I realize that appearing in a nudie flick might get a young woman blacklisted from doing "serious" films, but a beautiful woman willing to work nude would have at least appeared nude elsewhere and would have therefore (as hot as they are) developed some kind of fringe following from fappers. Nevertheless, no one seems to know anything about Lucille Shearer or Emily Todd - including whether they ever appeared elsewhere under other names (which is the kind of thing that guys who spend a lot of time looking at nude ladies online tend to find out about).

But, a little is known about "Rae Kidd". She has her own Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rae_Kidd
...And you can track down additional details about her elsewhere. Apparently she claimed to be a descendant of Scottish pirate "Captain Kidd"", which no one has verified. She had an undergraduate college degree, was involved in live theatre, married twice, had several children, and died fairly young. She was an actual and avid naturist, as were (unsurprisingly) several of the extras and bit players in UNASHAMED... including the actor who played "Dad" the creepy ventriloquist. That actor would become (following production) Rae's second husband and father to some or all of her children. That really surprised me, as "Dad" is way below Rae's league....... but I guess they bonded through their shared "lifestyle".......

What is unknown about Rae Kidd, who shares her name w/ the character she plays in UNASHAMED, are the factual details of her ethnicity or racial background. Of course she claimed to be Scottish, and looks (clothed and unclothed) like two women I used to date - one 100% Irish, the other 100% Latina. She is tall and strong, with large lovely breasts, and let's say "strong" facial features, pale skin, and black hair. The reason I describe her in such detail is because other characters describe her in great detail in the early scenes of UNASHAMED. Her catty female co-workers describe her as having a great body but an ugly face and hair. (Several reviewers on letterbox call this out for what I think it is - jealous bull$#!t.) Those women also imply something that the weirdo nudist doctor then makes explicit in dialogue - the character "Rae" isn't "white".    She is, according to the doctor, the child of two "Caucasian" parents, but somewhere in her genetic ancestry there is some non-white blood. (Oh horrors!  ) "Rae" the character is therefore coded in the film as "The Octoroon", the 19th century tragic melodrama heroine who can never be fully integrated into Normal Society, as - though she looks white and all the white men want to bang her - everyone somehow knows she is somehow not white. 

Whether Rae Kidd the actress was also biracial or mixed is unknown/unconfirmed. She could be part Latina or Indigenous. It doesn't matter to me, of course, and it doesn't matter onscreen to the character of her boss, who is quite happy to frolic nekkid w/ his stacked secretary. However, once the wealthy heiress enters the scene midfilm... the boss' head gets turned, and this spells tragedy for poor "Rae". Some scholars have read the film, therefore, as a critical and therefore somewhat progressive text on racial discrimination (hence the cruelly ironic title, which initially just seems to address the naturist lifestyle). The most prominent and comprehensive essay I've found on this was published in Film Quarterly. I recommend it, though it does spoil the ending:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1213626?seq=9

But HERE is the bit that I continue to find HIGHLY enigmatic and elusive, even following the exhaustive and thoughtful FQ essay....... the author Robert M. Payne argues at length that Rae's boss ultimately rejects Rae in favor of the heiress "Barbara" because Barbara is (like the boss) white, and Rae is less white. But I swear to you, my automatic first reaction to seeing actress Lucille Shearer (who plays Barbara) when she appeared was to think: This is another non-white actress! I thought this in a positive yet surprised way, as the character is introduced as a famous heiress. Lucille Shearer automatically struck me - with her light yet freckled complexion, curly reddish-seeming hair, and vocal inflection - to be a person of mixed black and white parentage. In his FQ essay, Payne never addresses this, only mentioning in a single sentence that Barbara's friends call her "Pinky"... which Payne does briefly acknowledge is a traditional nickname for a mixed race person!!!

Alas, as nothing is known about "Lucille Shearer", there is no way to confirm that she is not entirely white... though, again, a beautiful and talented non-white actress in 1938 would be something that people would know about!!! Why does it even matter? Two things:

1.) My deep read on UNASHAMED is that it isn't a film about race or racial discrimination... but that it is an even smarter film that uses race to illustrate the even greater, more unbridgeable divide in human existence: the divide of Class and Capital. The boss doesn't dump "Rae" and get w/ "Barbara" because one is white and one isn't - he dumps "Rae" and gets w/ "Barbara" because he's Management selling out the Proletariat and getting w/ the Bourgeoisie.

2.) The idea that UNASHAMED might be one of the earliest feature-length sex (or sexploitation) films and it stars a non-white lead actress is kind of a big deal. The idea that UNASHAMED is one of the earliest feature-length sex (or sexploitation) films and it stars TWO (2) non-white lead actresses is AN ENORMOUS DEAL.      Like, historically and from a critical perspective. Maybe someday we'll know more... I don't know how, but....... 

Finally... again, we don't actually know if Rae Kidd was only part-white, or just looked sufficiently exotic to fit the dialogue. We do know that she was a True Believer of the Naturist lifestyle... and (like "Rae") we know her life ended earlier than it should have. I don't think it's known how the Rae perished IRL... but I hope it wasn't the same unhappy ending as "Rae".