Porno Apocalypse: Hardcore Classics Vol.1.

This Pornography is Haunted

  WARNING…just a quick note to the curious. The introductory section is a bathetic and sententious attempt to be provocative in the desire to confirm the author’s existence and attract readers. Unless you have done a cultural studies degree in the North West of England in the last two decades and remain unemployable you are directed to go to the first entry where the dirty bits start, and I promise they are extreme and plenty. For those who belong to the wretched alumni just mentioned, there may be a few things that stop your melancholic twitches. Remember, when you welcome death we are done. Hell, I don’t why I’m saying all this. You know this already. Anyway, I was trying to write fiction and couldn’t so I turned my attention to academic writing. That never happened as well but the two collapsed into one and so this.  If you persist in reading the introduction your experience may be enhanced if you imagine it delivered in the stentorian tones of James Earl Jones. In the name of truth and humanity you must distribute the list of what are alleged to be urban myths; it is your duty to make reality will out.

Introduction

What I propose here is an alternative porn canon, a mythical one for us to share and cherish. A collection of films that never could and in some instances never should be made, such as the Super 8 endgames that flow from the collective psychosis at the heart of popular culture that is hardcore. I propose we become minor agents of disinformation, in thrall to the grand masters Assange and Jones. A modest fake wiki entry or a tinkering of a database record here and there will do in this instance.  Only to pass time. Just for jolly.  We live in times of digital hokum, of textual anarchy and semblance instead of substance. An age of virtual shrieks and mocking whispers, of rage and sterility, where paranoia is a sacrament and fables conspirational.

Vril occultists facilitated the holocaust.

Jimmy Saville was involved in the Yorkshire Ripper killings.

LBJ tapped Agent Hickey to kill JFK.

Julian Assange is Putin’s useful idiot of choice

Alex Jones is on the CIA payroll….they have their reasons.

Six million didn’t die.

Peter Sotos is involved with a snuff film gang who do shit to order

 Daniel Pearl was an FBI patsy.

The Vatican is a cover organization for a group of satanic cabalists, who possess and practice ancient and dark occult knowledge.

Strain all urine…Project MKUTRA was a mind control operation carried out by the CIA. They experimented on kids and abused them and all sorts of stuff.

The Dnepropetrovsk maniacs enacted Three Guys One Hammer as a blood sacrifice for a black magic sect who had links to the judiciary and government.

Lucifer is God and Adonay is also God, you must pray for the spirit of Jesus to be in you. We have run out of time.

Thomas Hamilton was a pimp and procurer who provided services to a wide ring of establishment paedophiles who were protected from investigation.

David Irving is a fervent Zionist who has been on the payroll of the Israeli government for years, a mirage man who pushes revisionist Just So Stories to keep the holocaust sympathetically contested.

Hollie Grieg was had by everyone and it all went straight to the top.

David Icke is a mental prestidigitator of unusual adeptness and was placed securely in the middle ranking of the Illuminati by the Greys for latent reasons.

The theater 9 shootist was P.T.K; an Oswald of grubby stature.

Glen Beck is the real dope when he foresees the creation of a New Caliphate through the insurrection of Marxists and radical Islamists.

Exposing the dream world we believe to real, the Dark Gods have been corrupters of the human psyche throughout history, their influence toxic to the creative spirit.

All the above, of course, are perfidious and repellent lies, except the first and last examples.  Maybe the Vatican one at a pinch. Yet they help us get by in the age of helplessness. So back to the other stuff.  Most of porno life is to be found here.  Gonzo mayhem, shit happenings, multiple penetrations, ass to mouth, squirts and enemas, bukkake, sado-masochism, gang bangs, freak shows, circus hardcore, gag factors and ass poundings, inter racial, prostheses and mutations,  attended by the spectral echoes of the living and dead from the golden age of porno chic.  So here is a mix of what is purported fact and muddied fiction. In no particular order. The motive is meaning.  And don’t pretend otherwise. The virus has already infected you. Else you wouldn’t be here. So no need to be coy.

Won’t you come in?

In ictu oculi

And lo….In the late 60s and 70s there came from the shores of North America and Scandinavia the 8mm hardcore porn loop. Short films about fucking, they were crude but effective delivery systems of explicit sexual representations for consumers. Blinking in the censorious light, the loops were the modest and commercially viable seeds from which the cultural and economic behemoth that is the modern hardcore industry sprang.  In the beginning, it was enough just to see the screwing and eating simply because no one had seen it before, it was a titillating novelty. It soon became apparent that sucking, fucking and discreet cum shots were never going to be enough.  So the loops got bawdier, spiced up by anal sex and exotic permutations of the meat puppets that acted in them, splashy facials, oral creampies and rimming. One of the divine Ms. Millington’s early porn shorts Miss Bohrloch (1970), directed by the self styled hardcore freedom fighter John Lindsay, is still a surprisingly raunchy viewing experience, though she doesn’t take it dans le cul.  Yet the fetishisation of porn and its transgressive offshoots was led by porn consumers looking for more abstruse thrills to release their creativity; they weren’t sold anything. Many of the fans were into the effluvia in the first place and they imposed their tastes on the producers. From the early 70s onwards production and distribution companies like Color Climax and Tabu in Europe and House of Milan in America were merely conforming to the supply and demand. There was a niche market for pissing and shitting games along with rape and torture in the spirit of the grand guignol. And other stuff, too horrible for words. However, this was all in the shadows, out there on the periphery. In the USA and more liberal parts of Western Europe this was the era of porno chic, when hardcore had relatively high production standards and was considered seriously by critics . This golden age was ushered in by feature length films which intermittently fulfilled their artistic pretensions like Behind the Green Door (Mitchell Brothers, 1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (Gerard Damiano, 1973) that courted but never fully achieved mainstream acceptance. And these films had a heavyweight production company behind them. The mafia. Most porn during the seventies was vanilla, but the dark side was always there; porn both celebrated sex and offered a more downbeat interpretation. Linda Lovelace, the first hardcore superstar thank to the rudimentary and sophomoric Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972) flirted with mainstream Hollywood, a flirtation that allegedly included being a masturbatory aid for Sammy Davis Jr.,  but was also filmed fucking a dog. For every glossy confection like The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Radley Metzger, 1976), which offered an explicit take on My Fair Lady (and featured female on male pegging which links it to our first canonical entry),  there was a roughie head fuck like Shaun Costello’s chronicle of sexual psychosis Forced Entry (1978), where Harry Reems’ Vietnam vet finds recreational solace in rape and murder, lurking in the night and fog. Porno chic Eros, harder core Thanatos.

The Golden Age of Porn was effectively finished by the rise of home video in the 1980s. Porn got more egalitarian, tough and cheap.  The coming of gonzo made things grungier, more intimate, even straight porn was now a rough old trade, with the emphasis on anal piston shots, multiple penetrations and ass to mouth. Gonzo evolved into something more perverse and grotesque, embracing the circus to escape the stultifying confines of its form. Static camera angles, no narrative or context except the fucking, the mundanity of the micro spectacle, people in a room screwing. The fourth wall was torn down and any deadbeat by dawn could be a porn star if they had access to a video camera and willing performers. Daintily skipping ahead (you’ll be spared a full history lesson, we just need a few bones to work with) the emergence of new media and the Internet meant fetishisms became specialised. You could now get exactly what you want. So, you want a certain type of cumshot, oral, vaginal and anal creampies, facials, you want two dicks in the ass, you want amputees jacking off on dwarfs. You got it: sex midgets, merciless gang bangs and celebrations of ejaculate. There were popular crossover fetish titles such as the self explanatory Bukkake Girls Piss Cleaning Squadron (Golden Dream Films, 1998 to 2001) which ran to nine volumes. Rather than satiating viewers, the seemingly limitless supply of porn and its endless varieties led to the the pursuit of more diverse and esoteric thrills. Also, the internet served as a cultural necromancer, offering a digital afterlife for cultural artefacts that had been presumed forgotten. At websites such as AV Maniacs and Olaf’s Fuck Hut, paracinema became a rich source of conjecture, while bizarre porn obscurities became filleted for their most transgressive sequences to be posted as MPEGS on shock sites like Consumption Junction and Stile Project, with orange juice enema art standing alongside the aftermath of terrorist atrocities and peeks under post mortem blankets. As the milleneum dawned hardcore porn was just another aspect of freakish spectacle and body horror alongside footage of real life violence and death. This trope endures to the present where shock sites will showcase beheadings carried out by Mexican drug cartels on rich menus supplemented by the dissection of Lin Jun and the emetic pleasures of 2 Girls One Cup. Our first entry on the list Granny Ass Lickers, benefitted from the restorative powers of the web, being brought back into cultural significance by discussion on the AV Maniacs forum and the subsequent dissemination of the film’s ‘corpse pegging’ sequence which was sufficiently outrageous and other worldly to gain the short feature a modest degree of notoriety.  It was an unlikely rehabilitation as the title had been sketchily distributed on its original release (this was possibly a deliberate tactic to keep it ‘underground’ because of its contentious nature and not due to commercial incompetence) and only noticed by a handful of shock cinema fanzines.  Years later, its macabre cocktail of incongruous sexuality and scatological hijinks (which prefigure Jackass (MTV Television Productions, 2000 to 2002) appealed to the natural appetites of the web. Anyway, I’m jumping forward now, so here we go.

Hardcore Classics #1 (of 30)

Granny Ass Lickers

Dir: P.O.V.  Rimmer

USA, 1993

Porn normally lends itself to easy demarcations like vanilla, roughie, sicko or fetish, but some hardcore is different and transcends its visual straight jacket through imagination, extremity or, in the instance of Granny Ass Lickers, utter strangeness. Granny Ass Lickers is a slice of eerie American gothic, an existential puzzle box that lingers in the mind as a fundamental statement of loneliness and alienation. It is only twenty minutes long but watching it you think what sparseness or desperation in the participants’ lives brought them to this. Due to the limitations of its initial distribution and the obscurity of the cast and film maker, there is no precise release date attributed to the title. It has been tagged at 1993, as Internet forums have deduced that the film was first available commercially in the fall of that year, cryptically offered for sale in the classified sections of half a dozen or so exotic porn magazines and avant-garde cinema journals. Stylistically the film has a gonzo vibe, shot on video with subjective camera techniques and interaction between the performers and the film maker which dispel the possibility of an imaginary detachment between the work and its audience. The film opens with the title in gold letters and a flamboyant typeset which drift across the dilapidated farmhouse on screen. It is a pattern book house made from white clapboard with a screened porch. This is followed by the feature’s solitary credit ‘Captured by P.O.V. Rimmer’, which flashes on and off in black gothic lettering.  A long shot of a Dodge Warlock floating on a dust cloud as it ploughs along a dirt track is accompanied by a soundtrack of floorboards creaking and children’s laughter, an unsettling overdub that is the only piece of non-diegetic sound in the film. Then a clumsy edit to a shot from the back of the pick-up truck, as it cuts through deserted acres of land. Punctuating the sterile and forsaken landscape are a water tower and barn in the fruition of decay. Now an on foot approach shot to the farmhouse; warped boards form a walkway onto the porch where the stairwell has fallen.  You don’t really get a good close up view of the building,  just a glance over, but it is conspicuously disused , white paint yellowed and weeds starting a mission creep up the walls. It looks like someone is staring out of an upstairs window. On the porch, we meet the two main cast members.

“Welcome to Georgetown, Texas,” drawls a grand Southern dame, flame haired, and curvy. She is wearing a scarlet dress slit at the thighs.

“I’m Blanche’, she breathes.  More milf than gilf, she’s ageing well in the middle. Her make-up is good, striking but not too brassy; Blanche knows how to sell her high cheekbones and smoky eyes. Her co-star is leant against the front of the porch, eating a hot dog and washing it down with a bottle of beer. 

“Introduce youself, Stanley,” comes a thin reedy voice from behind the camera; it is now apparent that the camera man is the sole member of the film crew.

A zoom in on Stanley.  He has a peculiar build, tall with skinny arms and legs but with a paunch and fleshy buttocks. Stanley belches and wipes the back of his forearm across his mouth. He has a black mullet haircut (later hints at an authorial identity suggest this was a deliberate and ironic styling) and affronted eyes with a mean little mouth topped with an unconvincing moustache woven from soft downy hair.  He’s wearing black chinos and a grey t-shirt with a print of Butthole Surfers’ Locust Abortion Technician album cover on the front. This may seem anal but these details matter. All these signifiers; the referents. Stanley turns his back. Jump cut to the inside of a dingy cramped room illuminated by a bedside lamp and long thick candles dotted on the bare floorboards, wax collecting in pools at their bases. Thick dark blue curtains are shut, a constellation of sharp tiny pin pricks of light betray the sun’s obdurate glow. Blanche is wearing a baby doll night dress and is lying on a mattress that is too small for the four post iron bedframe it is placed upon. Her legs are wide open while the naked Stanley eats and fingers her ginger pussy efficiently.  There’s a close up of the cunnilingis then the camera switches to her face and becomes almost preternaturally still. He keeps at it, groaning a lot, but she is still and silent. The camerawork is monotonous and focuses on her face. For a moment it looks like a photograph, only a cough off camera punctures the illusion, two mannequins placed in an obscene pose. Screen blacks out and reopens. Blanche is licking his anus and giving him a reach around. He looks ashen and distraught. She is methodical, smiling and licking, the odd wink at the viewer, a real trouper.

“That is sure one fat hairy ass,” comes the off stage observation.

“Shut the fuck up,” spits Stanley staring down the camera, his voice nasal and petulant.

“Finger his asshole.”

Blanche inserts a well pedicured index finger up Stanley’s anus causing him to twitch with a mixture of pain and pleasure, face dreamy and teeth nicking his lower lip.  She is working his cock hard with her other hand.  It is static and hypnotic in the manner of Warholian cinema, the fingering and masturbation, she is just gazing at what she is doing now like she has just realised where she is and what is happening. Blanche looks distractedly past the camera every now and then, like the evil camera man is pointing a gun at her.

Watching the scene go on and on, you realise how flexible the symbolic meaning of heterosexual  rimming is in porn.  Is it meant to degrade the man or woman, or both;  an act of erotic supplication for the woman yet for the male performer it touches on a troublesome homo-erotic taboo, like double penetrations where they go in dick by dick. Gauge, the hardcore imp whose hyper real performance as ‘bitchy stranded girl’ in Gang Bang Girl #32 (Biff Malibu, 2002) and ultra-sexuality create a pornographic theatre of the absurd. Rimming here, where Gauge voraciously licks (amongst others) a corpulent and hirsute middle aged man’s glory hole, is a subversive feminist act, where her knowingly overwrought delivery of the anilingus is a  parody of  the notion of uncontrollable female sexual desire coupled with a lack of distinction in erotic partners.  The guy, a regular porn Joe perfectly suited to his role of an anonymous garage mechanic who is part of a gang bang crew, looks vaguely embarrassed at first and then doesn’t even bother to look interested, like he’s a bystander to his own body, it’s all happening to someone else.Gauge nuzzles and guzzles, enthused by her sheer life force and the ridiculous inconsequentiality of it all, and her disdainful and mocking eyes seem to ask, Are you really digging it? You are pumping your cock to this?  Gauge tells you that porn myths are horseshit while simultaneously facilitating them. She is brutally debased for the rest of the film but remains oddly triumphant, something we shall return to when we discuss Abu Ghraib Ass Pounders (Jim Powers, 2004), which is entry number ten on our list.  In Granny Ass Lickers rimming seems to go beyond sex, acquiring an occult significance. Then the money shot, shown as a sort of afterthought, a close up of his leaking glans.  Blanche stares at the ejaculate on her hand.

The screen darkens again before a barn door wipe opens up the blackness. Another room. The camera meanders letting the viewer take it all in.  No one is here yet, except the cameraman, who is quietly singing the lyrics to Dead Kennedys California Über Alles as he compiles a visual itinery of the room.

“My aura smiles, and never frowns. Soon I will be president...”

The room is large and spacious with a high ceiling, musty with the weight of empty years, the heavy drapes adorning the window parted to allow in the sun.  A wooden rocking horse, its head partially covered by a cot blanket, is saddled by a life sized doll with a broken face.  Not much else in there. The pale blue walls are unadorned apart from a framed print of Grant Wood’s Daughters of the Revolution which is hanging on the right hand side of the window. This hints at a slyly intelligent, nascent auteur behind the camera, its bleak aesthetic and embrace of oddball Americana suggesting a no wave film maker transplanted out of space and time into Georgetown, creating a deep South horror with satirical pretensions that is reminiscent of Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine, 2009).  Yet the film maker, whose likely pseudonym P.O.V. Rimmer is pithier than most hardcore noms de guerre, was never identified, never came forward to claim his awaiting cult status. On.  This time a sweep wipe drags across the screen the scene that became beloved of shock sites and paracinema forums, which became commonly referred to as the ‘corpse pegging’ sequence.  Stanley is naked on all fours and he is being pegged by what appears to be a reanimated corpse. A skeletal woman outside age with terrifying pisshole eyes,  liveried skin hung on angular bones, a blonde beehive wig somehow not toppling off her her head. Wearing a white pearl necklace and nothing else, the hips grinding now and again to shove the strap on up his anus, she is an uncanny automaton in the throes of decomposition, and no one knows how she is worked. The woman looks fragile, like a brittle photograph that crumbles under the touch after being removed from cellophane wrapping in a forgotten portrait album.  Stanley is distraught.  The corpse starts coughing and the dildo falls out of Stanley’ rectum. He stands up and parts his ass cheeks and presents them in her face, loosing a fart as he does so.  The wig finally falls off the living corpse, white hair falling everywhere, sound of a stifled giggle.

Stanley looks at the camera, a single tear running down his cheek, “Some fun.”

Chilly, abandoned laughter wells on the audio.

Cut to the porch. Blanche is now barefoot in a baggy jumper that reads ‘Property of Georgetown Eagles’, the camera settling on her bright red toenails. She seems playful and relaxed. Her co-star Stanley is smoking a cigarette and pulling his Texas Longhorns baseball hat over his eyes. The camera man seems a little wary of him. Stanley finishes his cigarette and lights another. They are sharing a six pack of beer. Blanche holds her can high and bids farewell, ‘Hope you all have champagne wishes and caviar dreams.”

At the back of the porch sits the living corpse in a rocking chair. She looks better in the daylight, costumed in a pillbox hat and wedding dress. Her mouth is scrunched up and daubed with crimson lipstick with her long white hair brushed straight and resting on her shoulders.  There is a close up of her snoring lightly in the dry heat.  Screen goes black for the final time.  The end credit reads ‘A Maldoror Production’.

Nobody owned up to Granny Ass Lickers and nobody knew anyone connected to it. It lay untaken, as it became a curio discussed on Internet forums which attracted the usual dissembling and fancies, leading to it to enter the doubtful realm of creepy pasta.

A picture of the purported director showed an androgynous youth in a leather jacket and too much eye liner blowing a smoke ring while running his fingers through his thick black hair.

Blanche worked in a local diner and went to church.

The house had lain empty between 1987 and 1994. A businessman inherited it from an aunt but after emptying it prior to renovation he surprisingly lost interest in the property and it fell into neglect.  He sold it years later when his fortunes soured. The aunt had been widowed by Saipan when she was just out of her teens and never remarried or bore a child, something which began to destroy her in late middle age. They say a doll of a little girl, compliant to the proportions of the average toddler, porcelain faced and with shoulder length strawberry blonde hair, became the child she never had. The aunt had expensive hand crafted toys brought in and would spend hours nudging her ersatz child backwards and forwards on a wooden rocking horse.  In her dotage the aunt dropped the doll breaking its face. Her loyal and decrepit housemaid found her cradling the doll in her arms, inconsolable.  The aunt quickly declined and was buried with a meagre audience a few weeks later. Everyone freaked out who entered the house soon after, hearing rocking horses creaking and seeing a little girl with a black void where her face should be. It is said the film was shot in the parlour and the housemaid’s old room.

The film maker went to Hollywood to shoot gay pornos and was murdered by a hustler.

Stanley was seen as a crowd extra in a number of Troma films.

A geriatric woman had bafflingly vanished from Sun City Texas around the time the film was asserted to have been filmed and  turned up just about alive, inchoate and wearing a wedding dress, in a dumpster in Kingsland.

Only one of these anecdotes was ever validated. Someone may yet come forward to provide a banal account of the film shoot, tethering Granny Ass Lickers to everyday depravities, but for the moment it keeps its mystery, offering the hardcore poetry of a haunted house, its ghosts holding their secrets tight.