Welcome back everyone. I need to offer you all my apologies, as it's been nearly a month, and I've not been able to post anything online. I've just moved into a new flat, (with all the chaos and problems that ensue during such an ordeal), and have started a new part-time job as a waiter too. (It's not much, but it brings in a little bit of money!) On top of all of this, I don't have internet access at all, other than at a local library! For my own security, I won't mention where in the UK this actually is, but they have that horrible Symantec "Nazi" software installed on it, preventing users from accessing anything even remotely risky, subversive or controversial. As such, even my own blog can't always be accessed! Mores the pity! (These librarians don't know what they're missing!) Until I can get this sorted, I'm afraid posts will not be as frequent as I would have hoped (at least once a month), but if you will all bear with me, it would be very greatly appreciated. I am not abandoning this blog, nor any of the 200+ people who are reading it, so please don't think that you aren't all very important to me. The third part of my report and analysis on Pornography will be online in due course... at some point, I promise! Lastly, to the miserable ---- who keeps posting comments about "Free Viagra" and "Chialis Pills", can you kindly go immolate yourself?! I'm sure you're just a damned spambot, in which case none of this part will ever be read by you, but I don't need your crap filling-up my lovely little blog, thank you very much! To leave you all on a high, I am posting a trailer for a classic horror movie, Brian Yuzna's lovely little gore flick RE-ANIMATOR (Brian Yuzna, 1985), which I adore! If anyone knows where I can obtain the original soundtrack from, I would be very much obliged if you'd get in touch with me, via this blog. Enjoy the trailer, and I'll see you all again soon...
Hello All, I hope everyone is enjoying their weekend, and the rather amazing weather we're currently relishing over the majority of the UK. (Apologies, of course, to all pollen-sufferers!) I've been notified that the old-VHS/DVD company Redemption Films is making a comeback this year, and one of their first releases, will be of the Argentinian rape/revenge flick NO MORIRE SOLA / I'LL NEVER DIE ALONE (Adrian Garcia Bogliano, 2008). Supposedly more controversial than titles like I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (Meir Zarchi, 1978 and/or Steven R Monroe, 2010) or IRREVERSIBLE (Gaspar Noe, 2002), Bogliano's movie is an exceptionally violent thriller set in the La Plata region of Argentina, (actually the capital city of the Province of Buenos Airesa): a desolate, outback place, and deals with the shockingly vile revenge dealt out by a group of three young women, after a girl is left dying on the roadside and the three women attempt to rescue her. Not long after, they all find themselves being raped and attacked by three savage men, deprived of all morality, but survive the ordeal. Afterwards, the women head-out for revenge, at any costs! The IMDB doesn't rate it more than 5/10, but then it only has four reviews listed, all differing quite wildly in their praise/loathing for the movie. Other information is surprisingly scarce, so until this gets shown at a few film festivals, I'm afraid all I can offer is the trailer, shown below, which certainly peeks my interest, although the film has yet to be considered by the BBFC. Therefore any release is yet to be determined, despite Amazon claiming a street-date of June 2011. Still, if this does get passed uncut in the UK, or gets an uncut and English-subtitled friendly release anywhere else, I for one, will certainly be reviewing it for this blog.
Those of you waiting for Part 3 of my pornography article, it's coming soon! See you back here soon, my little gorehounds!
Hello, and welcome back! What would you define as pornography? Do newspapers like The Sun's Page 3 pictures of topless young women, or the now deceased Daily Sport newspaper count as pornography? What about magazines like Zoo, Front, Loaded, or Maxim? Are films like SALO, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (Pier Paolo Pasolini,1975) pornographic, simple because they are based on a classic work of literature that details explicit sexual acts? In the second part of this extensive, multi-part article, I will focus on the rise of pornography, and the social issues it raised. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, pornography is categorised as being "printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate sexual excitement". If we go by this rather broad definition, then - in theory at least - cinematic works like BASIC INSTINCT (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), NINE AND A HALF WEEKS (Adrian Lyne, 1986), or 9 SONGS (Michael Winterbottom, 2004) could technically be "pornography", or at least "pornographic". Yet, these three works, irrespective of their merits or critical status, would not be - to most people - what they would label as pornography. Even more adult mainstream titles like DESTRICTED (Marina Abramovic and Matthew Barney, 2006) would fit this limited definition, and yet, we all know that they are not pornographic. By that, I mean their primary motivation isn't an intention to "stimulate sexual excitement" in the viewer. The films may contain material that could be erotic or sexually arousing, but then many older men found the animated depiction of Jessica Rabbit in the Walt Disney classic WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? (Robert Zemeckis, 1988) a turn-on when she uttered the immortal line "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way"! So such a narrow definition is both flawed and open to interpretation that is unrealistic. In fact, if you examine the world of sexual fetishism, then even the most mundane things can be a turn-on for some people. Bread, tobacco, dressing up as a furry animal, bricks. You name it, someone out there in the Earth's population, is getting sexually excited by it! So let us re-define what we mean hear. I am going to use the term "pornography" to refer to material whose content is predominantly of a sexually explicit nature. And by predominant, I mean over 75% of its entirety. That way, we can safely ignore films like DESTRICTED where the intent was not to arouse the audience but to document for the audience material that may be sexually exciting, as a secondary emotion. With the definition now in place, we are able to examine at a much more intense level, why pornography has become a modern phenomenon! And it is a modern phenomenon, even though pornographic literature and film existed from the 1800's, as demonstrated in Part One of this article. Whilst pornography has always existed for over 200 years, it was only in the late 1970's and onwards that the "Porn Industry" really began to gain a foothold in society. After the headiness of the Sexual Revolution from the 1960's, there was the Feminist Uprising - not a bad thing - and then society began to allow itself to be more sexually open. People became sexual beings. Free love abounded. Sexuality of any kind was considered "cool", "right-on" and for anyone, irrespective of who they may have been. If you ignore the early European pornographic magazines that filtered into Britain through Soho in London, via underground importation, then pornography really became public knowledge with the infamous Obscenity Trial of the D.H. Lawrence novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover" in 1960. Whilst Soho had its own reputation as the den of sin, with all the XXX erotic and adult films, burlesque theatres, sex cinemas and prostitution being rife, other than for those men "in the know", most people only heard of pornography, without having any real experience of it. Here then, a book was available: something small, insignificant and yet so utterly daring, that the law was telling people that this book was a bomb! A bomb that would (supposedly) corrupt and deprave anyone who read it or owned it! The beauty of it, was that although it was being judged to be an incendiary piece of work, everyone suddenly wanted to buy it, simply because of its notoriety! (How many of you sought out information and clips, when A SERBIAN FILM started creating headlines on the Internet? I know I did!) If the novel had been published, and no one had mentioned its content, I suspect it would not have been the cause celebre that it became. It would simply have been a peculiar little novel that only the most enquiring minds and classical thinkers would have bothered with. Certainly not the public-at-large, that's for sure. Suddenly everyone was talking about that book, those paragraphs, and that scene with the green-keeper in his shed, and the novel rocketed to sell over two million copies by the end of 1960, with a further 1.3 million sold over the following 12 months. Pornography had arrived, and had gone mainstream in the public consciousness! And they loved every sordid moment of it! As other forms of pornography began to go mainstream, cinema did so too. In the United States, you had DEEP THROAT (Gerard Damiano, 1972), THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES (Damiano, 1973) and then Hollywood decided to get in on the action, with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider starring in the arthouse drama LAST TANGO IN PARIS (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972), followed not long after with EMMANUELLE (Just Jaeckin, 1974). Now, pornography become chic all over the globe! It was acceptable for couples to view it.. and to view it together! No longer was this form of - and I use the word hesitantly - entertainment, just for old men, to discover in back rooms, behind closed doors. Society was saying this is okay! Be young, be hip, and be cool! You are now a hedonist and a modern man too! As cinema became awash with pornography, a new technology was in the wings: home video recorders and players. Why pay to watch a movie in large theatres, filled with the detritus of your fellow human beings, the stench of alcohol, drugs and urine on every seat, and have to worry about transportation, when you can do the same in the privacy and comfort of your own home, for a fraction of the cost? Suddenly Betamax became available, and then VHS. Now, you could rent what you wanted, whenever you wanted, and view it however you wanted. Whilst Hollywood slowly released a few big-name films, thousands of fly-by-night businesses decided to raid studio archives and release films no one had ever heard of before. And as home videos weren't stiffled by the British Board of Film Censors (as the BBFC used to be known), now anyone could release anything, and the law was old-hat! Horror films began seeping through, including many infamous films like CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, S.S. EXPERIMENT CAMP (Sergio Garrone, 1976), and THE EVIL DEAD (Sam Raimi, 1981) uncut and withotu State interference, but it wasn't long before porn began to gain a foothold too, with the likes of Playboy and Electric Blue releasing adult erotic videos, for people to rent and take home. Sex was now definitely the norm! Next time, we'll look at the rise and rise of pornography, and the self-made base of the porn industry itself, in California, which now produces thousands of adult films every year. We will examine how porn has gone from being a grubby and discrete field of work, to a relatively acceptable form of employment for many people, raising millions in taxes, and making millions upon millions in profit; as pornography became normalised, what direction did the industry decide to take, and why some of the decisions it made, backfired horrifically.
