Filth on 42nd Street (2008)
After Hours DVD (region 1)
d. The Trash Brothers (Adam and Eric); pr. The Trash Brothers, Michael Razo; scr. The Trash Brothers; cast. Biafra Bayne, Tracie Hayes, The Trash Brothers (180 mins)
There was a time, back in the 1970s, when sex films were shown in cinemas. Movies like Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones were making headlines, attracting mainstream audiences and getting reviewed by the film trade press. This was the up-front presence of pornography in American filmmaking society. For a brief period, immortalized in the mainstream hit Boogie Nights (based on the relationship between porn star John Holmes and film school grad turned pornhound Bob Chinn), porn was legit. The home video revolution killed porn’s ambition in favour of easy money, although such recent directors as Andrew Blake and Michael Ninn cumulatively strove to bring the disreputable genre a sense of class, sophistication and an attraction to couples.
Today women watch porn in increasing numbers and are gaining a greater foothold in the behind-the-scenes creation of the industry. But there is a side to the sex film which is even more disreputable, if that were possible. These are the sex films euphemistically known as “dirty movies”. Growing up alongside the revolution of porn in features, these were films which bypassed the reviewers and played exclusively in dingy sex cinemas, for the type of men inclined to jerk off as they watched. This type of movie was known as a “storefront feature”. Storefront features were porn quickies, hastily assembled on 16mm and shown in back rooms in seedy parts of town which were converted into makeshift cinemas by setting up a screen, adding some chairs and barely concealing the projector noise. These were pure, hardcore, dirty movies: any plot was a sham, the men were usually unattractive and grubby “everyman” types inclined to voyeurism and the focus was on the women these men looked at with an eye to screw.
After Hours Cinema have on DVD explored this disreputable, “lost” cinema culture in its range of porn grindhouse classics released via 42nd Street Pete (the most recent being 42nd Street Pete’s John Holmes Collection) and in Filth on 42nd Street have proven themselves a name to rely on for quality filth for the pornhound and dope fiend. Filth on 42nd Street is a triple-feature. It contains two original storefront movies from the 1970s heyday – The Apartment and The Girl Next Door – as well as a brand new storefront feature The Sex Deviates. Many film genres are treated to generational re-interpretation and it is always intriguing to compare the differences and similarities between the original form and its recent re-invention. Apparently, enough time has passed for even the storefront film to be looked at afresh in this nostalgic manner. That’s the appeal of The Sex Deviates for the true pornhound: a contemporary version of a peep-show jack-off dirty movie featuring slobby young men leering at naked women and then displaying and fucking them on camera, watching them bathe and then playfully insert a few vegetables after getting done with their own dicks.
The women in The Sex Deviates are young and playful. The men are sleazy, though having fun both reproducing and sending up the sex films they obviously adore. It’s nostalgic porn – envisioning what a contemporary low-rent, down and dirty storefront stag film might look like. It even looks like a grubby print that’s been shown so often as to be lined and almost worn out. Here the DVD transfer does a dependable job, ensuring that what is meant to look like an old 16mm porn loop reproduces the sense of peep-show validity intended. There is some humour in the set-ups and the sex is crude, harmlessly manipulative and dirty rather than erotic. It’s fabricated degenerate grunge, greasy and even ugly – but that is true to the genre of the storefront film and on that level The Sex Deviates delivers.
There’s actually a cleverly, jovially subversive intent to The Sex Deviates, found in its recreation of the degenerate lives of dope fiends and loose women. There’s a relish here for the look of old fuck films and the people who would do them, and in the film’s rather haphazard structure is a desire to pull apart the storefront feature for its style and influence – hence, in one scene an old stag loop is projected onto the wall behind a couple, the film drawing constant comparison between old and new through the juxtaposition of the authentic storefront footage with the recreated version. The tension between the desire to simply make another stroke film and make a comment on the medium of the stroke film itself makes The Sex Deviates an engaging and self-conscious attempt to rework a peep show genre though ultimately providing a mere update of the same stuff; proving that perversion is timeless.
Comparison of The Sex Deviates to the other two films on this triple-feature DVD makes this clear. The formula is virtually identical and both The Apartment and The Girl Next Door reveal that for what it seeks to do, The Sex Deviates knows the genre very well. Admittedly that ain’t the same as modernizing the French New Wave, but in the porn ghetto, even the smallest invention is something to be cherished. The original storefront flicks are cheesy, grimy films though. They were made for deviants and their naturalistic style and minimalist editing seems of all things to evoke the experiments that Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey were doing in the avant-garde scene with Joe Dallesandro as the junkie gigolo of Trash and Flesh: there though, it was art and in the jack-off cinemas on 42nd Street it was just a dirty movie, pure and simple. If you got hard, the film did its job: if you got off, you got your money’s worth.
The Sex Deviates tries to recapture the innocence of degenerate sleaze you might say; though finally too much time has passed and it is too knowing – playacting a little harmless degeneracy rather than the real thing. The intent is there though, and maybe the makers of The Sex Deviates, the appropriately named Trash brothers can take this field further – no-one seems inclined to do so (probably for good reason). A special feature interview with porn starlet Biafra Bayne, a pert long haired brunette with tiny breasts, indicates her deliberate role-playing here as well as her sense of fun. Along with a knockout set of trailers for films which had this pornhound bold upright with attention, it’s a not-bad extra, though ideally it would have been nice to get the Trash Brothers’ perspective on their nostalgic stroke cinema.
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