DARRYL’S HARD LIQUOR & PORN FILM FESTIVAL
Rating: NNN Rating: NNN
This year’s edition of Darryl’s Hard Liquor & Porn Film Festival is being held at the Bloor, which pretty much kills the hard liquor part unless you’re prepared to sneak in a mickey, which I, as a responsible journalist, would never advocate. Too bad, because a few shots of Jack might jack up the laughs.
And that’s the point here porn and/or sex is merely the subject matter. But the laughs are mild if the four shorts included in the fest’s screener reel are anything to go by, and the porn is soft.
Nature Boy, directed by Steven Leonard, presents a nude nature show that reveals an unlikely erotic potential in the common earthworm to make one simple satiric point.
Yakov Levi’s Shameless goes for the gross. Three schoolboys dare each other to carry out ever-viler acts with an outstandingly repulsive whore. The satire may be very sharp to the film’s Ukrainian home audience, but here it’s just low comedy.
La Femme Fellatio, by Gudrun Heinz, does an elegant job of silent movie parody. It’s also the only one of the four shorts with a feel for the erotic, which rubs up nicely against its sense of disgust.
Krazy Kock, by Bill Plympton, brings good comic drawing but only so-so animation and gags to its slapstick tale of a high-schooler in a chicken suit run amok.
All these films are decently made and mildly funny, but none comes near the loopy delerium that sex and humour together can produce. Anyone remember the climax short in 1974’s Best Of The New York Erotic Film Festival? (Saturday, October 16, at the Bloor)
