Some reviews are easier than others.
I am here today to review a movie called Porno. While not technically pornography, it is a very unrated horror comedy filled with loads of gratuitous blood, violence, and nudity. It is the latest film to be released by venerable gorehound movie mag Fangoria, who have chosen to promote the film in their most recent issue with a full-page splash photo of a severed penis prosthetic (why, yes I do have a subscription). It is a film about a succubus, an ancient sex demon who tears her victims apart while having her way with them, and leaves very little to the imagination. It is, in short, a messy film.
But all of this isn’t why writing this review will be difficult for me. It will be difficult because I need to find a way to convince you that this film, whose excesses I just spent a paragraph describing, is honestly kind of adorable.
Set in the early 1990s, Porno takes place in a small two-screen movie theater in a god-fearing heartland town. Its teenage employees– jittery dweeb Todd (Larry Saperstein), pimply horndog Abe (Evan Daves), sullen goth Chastity (Jillian Mueller), and sensitive jock Ricky (Glenn Stott)– have been given free reign to watch the movie of their choice after hours, under the supervision of greasy straightedge twentysomething projectionist Heavy Metal Jeff (Robbie Tann). No sooner have they locked up, however, than they realize the theater has been infiltrated by a crazy old man in a filthy raincoat. They chase him out, but not before he leads them into a boarded up third screening room, where they discover a mysterious reel of film covered in arcane symbols. Not yet having settled on a movie to watch (the boys want to watch Encino Man, while Chastity prefers A League of Their Own, or, as she calls it, “Not Encino Man”), they decide to throw it on.
What greets them, however, is like nothing their sheltered, Christian lives have prepared them for: an artistically filmed sex magick ritual that looks something like a community theater recreation of a Kenneth Anger film. Jeff pulls the plug on moral grounds, but soon the theater is stalked by the mysterious, mostly-nude woman from the film. As the night wears on, our teenage heroes need to figure out what’s real, what’s illusion, and how to escape with their purity intact.
As described above, Porno is every bit as raunchy and outrageous as you’d expect from a movie about a haunted porn reel that is literally titled Porno. It doesn’t flinch at full frontal nudity, and the gore effects are extreme (including one scene that is simply something I’ve never seen in a movie before, and I have seen some shit). But what you might not expect walking into Porno is just how sweet it is. The characters’ innocence is played for laughs (they have an amusing insistence on saying things like “Oh my gosh!” and “What the H?!” even as their lives are being threatened by literal demons from hell), but their convictions are real, and director Keola Racela treats them with affection and earnestness. Perhaps even more surprisingly, while the story naturally exposes some of the hypocrisies inherent in ultra-religious society (particularly in the less-enlightened early ‘90s), it ultimately respects its characters’ beliefs. Not everything these kids think or do is agreeable, but it’s all part of a larger, mostly good whole– you know, like actual people.
Much of this is thanks to the engaging young cast. While none of the acting is necessarily “Good” in the Academy sense, it doesn’t need to be: the film calls for characterizations with a balance of knowing humor and genuine feeling, and the actors hit that sweet spot pretty much across the board. Particularly good are Saperstein, who plays his lines with a hilariously geeky panic even before the sex demons show up, and Tann, who embodies the cognitive dissonance of a straightedge burnout. The dialogue is clever, and feels like it comes from characters who have known each other since grade school (Sample: “The only naked woman you’ve ever seen is your mom.” “My mom is dead, creep!” “Prove it!”). These characters could easily carry a straight coming-of-age film, and are even more entertaining when forced to battle the forces of the unknown.
If Porno has a problem, it’s, well, the porno. At the risk of sounding prudish, the in-your-face presentation of the nudity and violence feels at odds tonally with the character-based material, which, if not innocent per se (unsurprisingly, we learn that few of these characters are as squeaky-clean as they appear), is for the most part fundamentally sweet and good-natured. It would be one thing if the scenes of the succubus stood out stylistically or were particularly erotically charged, but there’s a strange perfunctory nature to these sequences, as if the filmmakers are struggling to reach some sort of preordained naughtiness quota. It’s not impossible to balance wide-eyed suburban wonder with smirking indie-horror nastiness (see Mike Dougherty’s beloved Trick ‘r Treat for a recent high water mark), but Racela feels unsure, as if he wrote an homage to Amblin Entertainment before suddenly remembering he loved Troma too. Renting horror movies in high school I trained myself to always seek out the unrated cut; in this case, one wonders whether an R-rated version might actually be an improvement.
Ultimately, however, the film’s high points win out. Though it is perhaps ten minutes too long, and the climax chafes against the limitations of the budget (CGI blood and CGI fire, the twin banes of low-budget horror in the 21st century, both make appearances), it’s difficult to dislike a film with so much earnest affection for both its cast of small-town misfits and A League of Their Own. As I grow older, I find my enjoyment of horror comedies hinges less on their gross-out gags than their sense of gonzo enthusiasm, and Porno has that in spades. Having once been a small-town kid with a job at a local movie theater (complete with dumb little hook-on bow tie), Porno captures all the dorkiness and tedium of that particular little world– and I absolutely would have watched that haunted reel.
Porno
2019
dir. Keola Racela
98 min.
Now available through all major VOD outlets
Streaming is no substitute for taking in a screening at a locally owned cinema, and right now Boston’s most beloved theaters need your help to survive. If you have the means, the Hassle strongly recommends making a donation, purchasing a gift card, or becoming a member at the Brattle Theatre, Coolidge Corner Theatre, and/or the Somerville Theatre. Keep film alive, y’all.
