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PORN OF THE DEAD (2005)
Metro / Loaded Digital DVD (region 0 NTSC)
d. Rob Rotten; scr. Rob Rotten; cast. Jenner, Buster Good, Trina Michaels, Rob Rotten, Hillary scott, Sierra Sinn, Johnny Thrust
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Pornographizing George A. Romero's Classic Zombie Movie Legacy
Director George Romero made a name for himself with his zombie horror movie trilogy Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. Dawn of the Dead in particular was considered a masterpiece of modern horror, a satirical indictment of the American consumer mentality.
Twenty five years later, Dawn of the Dead was remade by Zack Snyder as a fast and cynical horror film which lost none of its power to both shock and entertain a new generation of viewers. The success of the remake of Dawn of the Dead in turn enabled Romero to make Land of the Dead, his own contribution to the modernization of the ethos he helped create. Indeed, the zombie ethos of extreme gore and yet for Romero also a kind of doomed romanticism had been incorporated into the anarchic, nihilistic modern punk subculture of thrash metal music and aggressive sexuality. It is this ethos that chose to pay pornographic homage to Romero’s work (and the recent remake) in the gore-porn movie of Porn of the Dead. It is a tradition in adult cinema for porno movie parodies or homages of mainstream hits to take the raw material of the mainstream film and re-envision it in adult film terms. Although its title suggests this as a due course of action, as directed by Rob Rotten, Porn of the Dead is much more concerned with indulging the aggressive and anarchic context of the splatterpunk subculture than on too knowingly addressing its precursors.
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Synopsis (contains spoilers)
PREVIEW EXTRACT
Porn of the Dead begins on a deserted street somewhere. A nurse, seemingly decaying, shuffles around.
A man in a car notices her and puts on a mouth mask as he stops and gets out of the car, putting her in the vehicle and abducting her. He takes her to his home and living room, a sinkhole protected by newspapers and plastic on the floors wherein are human remains. He is a serial killer who intends to chop her up. He strangles her but she returns to life and attacks him. She screams as she reaches for his penis but then her attack turns sexual and she fellates him. At the conclusion of their sex, she bites his penis off and he lies in agony. In a seemingly unconnected episode, a young woman masturbates and has an erotic fantasy wherein a male zombie performs cunnilingus on her – she soon awakens from her dream. Meanwhile in the woods a bare film crew is filming a cheap porno flick in some person’s backyard when three male zombies climb over the fence. The zombies bloodily devour the crew whilst they set about having sex with the girl, who does not apparently think to flee them. A man carries a female zombie into a barren room and molests the corpse. She comes to life and they have sex. Finally in a padded cell of a room supposedly in what may be a psychiatric hospital, a man has sex with a bloodied corpse in punishment for its biting his finger off. She eviscerates him, writhing in his intestines.
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The Aesthetics of Grunged-Up, Death Metal Scored Nihilistic Pornography?
It takes some daring to dive into the limits of modern obscenity as vigorously as Porn of the Dead seeks to do.
That admitted, the film is mostly a disappointment, especially for anyone lured into expecting a sustained and knowing homage to George Romero. Instead, despite a convincing opening, the film segues into a conventional episodic structure with the novelty of corpses being sexual participants. Necrophilia is rife in this film as it effortlessly spins explicit variations on the joint theme of the little and the big death. Thus, an orgasm is followed by graphic castration and evisceration in the book-ending scenes. It is difficult to know what sort of affect the filmmakers were hoping for here as the sex is raw and rough and hardly erotic considering the hastily and cheaply applied zombie makeup. The film begins by evoking the traditional zombie movie and effectively sexualizes it in the opening sequence but thereafter loses and dissipates its momentum by being unable to develop any sustained plot or narrative connecting its several episodes. The episodes are thus elaborations of the film’s central premise – sex with zombies – but without any context they remain just disconnected vignettes and the genuinely enthralling and creepy mix of eroticism and disgust in the opening sequence is slowly dissipated. Still, what remains constant in Porn of the Dead is the rather radical aesthetic desire to mix counter-pointed affectations.
Sexuality has always been a part of the horror movie, especially in European cinema but even in the reactionary ethos of slasher films.
Horror, however, has never really been fully integrated into the adult genre, except perhaps in some of the discredited rape films of the 1970s and the explicit Italian Nazi sexploitation films. Only Italian director Joe D’Amato in such films as Emanuelle and the Lost Cannibals and Erotic Nights of the Living Dead has sought to combine explicit horror and explicit porn, to often censor-baiting effect. Rob Rotten here may be attempting the same but does not have the command of sustained narrative that would allow him to milk the mix of disgust and eroticism he seeks. The effort is there but as usual for so much porn, not enough forethought or planning has gone into it, as if such a thing as narrative coherence were an unnecessary adornment. However, in that it does effectively combine counter-pointed affectations, Porn of the Dead is the use of obscenity as what might be called radical aesthetic revisionism. Living death and sexual desire are paralleled and the film is riddled with unattractive, anarchic raw and rough sex which, although never as extreme as it could be with more forethought and structure, is testament to the anarchic and nihilistic sentiments of the grunge / death metal / contemporary punk scene to which this film is mostly aimed towards. For that market, it may work better.
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Pleasure and Pain as Prosthetic Make-Up Effects
The transfer is a fine anamorphic widescreen which preserves the many artifacts in what was apparently filmed using degraded and faulty stock.
It has a shot on film look which is raw and murky making much of the film seem unattractive and de-eroticized. The film’s opening sequence has a remarkably professional look and is far more promising of what is to come than what eventually emerges. In its pursuit of extreme affectation, the opening fellatio is followed by the usual facial cum-shot but immediately followed by explicit castration – though in barely competent special effects – so that squirting cum is replaced by squirting blood, recalling some of the work in German underground horror (think Jorg Buttgereit for instance) often deemed obscene by authorities. Makeup effects are moderately effective but the film loses much eroticism by presenting women’s bodies in vividly decay-colored makeup (which smears during the sex scenes no less). Bodies are often bloodstained during the explicit sex scenes and there is thus a context of pain to supposedly pleasurable sex acts – indeed, sex here is raw instinct preserved even after death less than any real source of pleasure: it is thus vivid but unattractive and un-erotic – grungy. Dream-like soft focus is made use of in one scene as are colored lights in another. Set design is a kind of barren expressionism in the latter scenes and makeup is confined to body paint rather than prosthetics.
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Thrash Metal Porn Rock Video Scoring
The sound transfer may be a routine Dolby digital stereo although has little distinction from mono.
It starts off on a note of sly horror, establishing the use of radio broadcasts, the flies buzzing (which functions as a nice, slyly amusing motif of decay) and an eerie piano score which alternates with the frantic screaming angry rage of deathly thrash metal punk music. This all works to sustained effect in the first number, where the sounds of fear and pain mix with those customary moans of pleasure, flesh on flesh and oral gurgling so common to porn as a genre. When the film moves into its second segment, this is dissipated and much of the film then becomes dominated by a succession of thrash metal tracks, the film at times edited as if intending to be a porn rock video. On that level it sporadically works but without any real dialogue and with far more pleasure than pain in the scene with what should be a violation by three zombies, the film emerges as haphazard and ill-planned. It becomes clear that the participants aspire to the punk-grunge subculture and feel that mixing noises of pleasure and pain and porn and horror will carry it through. Thus, it has a concept but sadly is presented without too much thought to its execution. The result is a wasted opportunity to truly radicalize aesthetic uses of obscenity. The visual variety in look and design of the sex scenes does not transfer to any aural design.
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And a Bonus for the Enthusiastic DVD Collector Completist
There are various special features.
There is a slideshow of stills from the movie as well as an “Adult Fun” section which offers promotional advertisements for the distributor’s website and for various phone sex numbers. “Popshots” offers a recap of the movie’s unspectacular cum shots (despite an optically treated opening squirt not in the movie) and there are trailers for Black Trash 2, Bottomless 5 and Big & Bouncy 2 – but not for Porn of the Dead itself. Of main interest is a Behind the Scenes documentary without credits and filmed in a home movie wandering video camera style. It is a customary cinema verite making-of filmic profile which although entertaining offers little of insight into the film and confirms what is really a terribly superficial venture. Much of what the camera uncovers are mundane relations between the crew members. There are some scenes of makeup being applied (oatmeal pasted onto a nude body) and there are brief interviews with the female performers (mostly all newcomers either debuting or just in the industry for a couple of months) who also show off their bodies for the camera. It does present the opportunity to see these young women without awful body paint and fake blood smearing their bodies. There is some humor and it is clear that Porn of the Dead was made in a spirit of banal improvisation rather than true scripting. There is some footage of filming the sex and gore scenes.
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