Pulpmovies Reviews

In the mid-to-late 1990s, thousands of Cuban refugees – using pretty much anything that would float – attempted to cross the Florida Straits. Unsurprisingly, the majority of these refugees failed to survive the crossing and many (an estimated 24,000) of them died at sea. This situation led to the formation of Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based volunteer group that patrolled the Straits in small civilian aircraft, offering aid to the rafters that they found and alerting the US coastguard to their presence.

In 1996, against a background of rising political unrest in Cuba and in the wake of a revised U.S. policy toward Cuban refugees, two Brothers to the Rescue planes were shot down by Cuban MiGs, killing four men.

Using a mixture of news footage and interviews, Shoot Down explores the run-up to and the aftermath of these events. It’s a powerful story and writer/director Cristina Khuly, whose uncle was one of those killed, has constructed a remarkably even-handed film.

The first half of the film focusses on Brothers to the Rescue and their mission and provides some very enthusiastic interviews, not just from the Florida Cuban community but from the coastguard as well. Where the shoot down itself is covered, much criticism is levelled at the Clinton administration for not doing enough to prevent it in the first place and for not doing enough in response to what was clearly the illegal shooting down of two civilian aircraft in international waters.

Jose Basulto, the co-founder and leader of Brothers to the Rescue is allowed to profess his innocent intentions and outrage at the events and we see a series of shots of Republican politicians railing against Castro for the crime and Clinton for his response.

Then Khuly takes a look at the other side of the coin.

In 1994, after the Clinton administration and Castro entered into negotiations over Cuban immigration, Brothers to the Rescue took it upon themselves to expand their mission. Not only were they seeking to help refugees, but they also started leafleting Havana, to expose the government “for creating the conditions that made it necessary for those people to jump on a raft.”

The date of the shoot down was February 24th – Cuban Independence Day, a date with huge political significance for the country. Although the Brothers to the Rescue planes weren’t over Cuban waters, they were approaching them.

Ignoring myriad government warnings, Brothers to the Rescue had moved from being rescuers to provocateurs. And Shoot Down is a documentary about an unjustifiable but avoidable crime.

It’s a powerful and important story told in a very well balanced manner. My only real criticism is that the heavy reliance on interviews and news footage does make the narrative a lot drier than it could have been.

Back in the 1990s someone noticed a loophole in the UK censorship laws that allowed soft porn films to be sold through normal channels as long as they included some educational element. There followed a small flurry of films which featured a series of sex scenes, each followed by a talking head discussing what had just happened – these were the films for which the fast forward button was invented.

Kama Sutra: The Secrets of the Art of Love is very much in this mould. What we get this time around is a series of couples simulating sex in a variety of positions while a breathy woman provides a voice-over commentary.

Beautifully shot and sensually lit, and presented in both standard and 3D versions, this film is clearly aimed at couples.

Between them, the three – very attractive – couples in the film work their way through a total of fifty sexual positions, each with the obligatory voice over. But in a 75 minute film, that doesn’t add up to a great deal of time for each position.

It also became noticeable as the film wore on that, although fifty positions are featured, there are a lot less than fifty ways to film them. The commentaries also ran into a similar problem. Individually, they were all very well done but, as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that there is a limit to the number of things you can say about any given position.

All of this makes it very much a film to dip in and out of rather than one to watch straight through. But, if you have a reasonably open-minded partner, this is also a film that could well inspire a whole weekend of fun.

Anthology films are often a mixed bag. Whatever the theme, some of the films in the collection will, inevitably, be better than others and – in this case – the question of whether the hits outnumber the misses really will come down to how you feel about both experimental films and pornography.

The first film in the collection is King of Porn, is a sympathetic – and often amusing - portrait of Ralph Whittington, government worker, devoted father, ex-husband, man of leisure and collector of pornography. The film allows him to speak for himself as he shows off his stash – which has pretty much taken over his house – of over 400 videos, thousands of magazines and a horde of articles on the subject. Whittington comes off rather well in this film. Rather geeky, obviously, but fundamentally no worse than anyone else feeding an obsession with collecting pop-cultural ephemera.

Then we have two films (not sequentially) which I’m going to deal with together because, for me, Blue Movie and Removed highlight the difficulty that many filmmakers face when trying to bring an art-house or experimental sensibility to pornography. Both films take vintage porn – stag films, in the case of Blue Movie, and a piece of 70s Euro-smut in the case the case of Removed – and then rework it, over and over again, until the pornographic elements are thoroughly obscured.

The problem that both films run into is that porn and erotica are not the same and by simply removing or concealing the pornographic, we are left with a pair of films that are neither pornographic nor erotic. And, I have to admit, that I was left wondering what the point was.

I almost included The Colour of Love with the above two films, but this one is distinguished by some genuinely disturbing imagery buried under all of the reworking. The film – heavily reworked again – is dedicated to Doris Wishman and revolves around two women having bloody sex with a dead man. It’s an interesting film and one that could have been very powerful if the footage hadn’t been quite so (deliberately) degraded.

Similarly, Downs are Feminine attempts to rework sexual images. This time around, the approach is to use cut-out animation of pornographic photos against a tacky 1970s background. It all drifts along in a dreamy, vaguely surreal fashion and – visually – there are some good ideas in there. But, ultimately, it really isn’t very clear what the film makers are trying to say, if anything.

The snappily titled The Influence of Ocular Light Perception on Metabolism in Man and Animal is a lot more effective. The film is built from a collection of seemingly random images, some of which are sexual and others more innocuous, thrown at the screen in rapid succession and it’s the rapid juxtaposition of the images that imbues the more mundane images with an often unexpected sexuality.

On a more cheerful note is Sneakin’ and Peekin’, which comes to us from 1976 and shows the results of two documentary film makers sneaking into a nudist camp. The film very successfully evokes the innocent sexuality of the George Harrison Marks’ early films.

Sexjunkie, the penultimate film in the anthology is by far the strongest. Both erotic and disturbing, this film takes the form of a video confessional of a nymphomaniac and her obsession with sex – not as love but as a physical craving.

The final film in the collection is Pacifier, an adolescent ode to porn. The premise is that when he was 13 Oscar Perez wrote a couple of stories for Penthouse Forum. Then, unable to find where to send them, he forgot about them. Years later when he rediscovered his stories, he decided to turn them into films.

While the script for Pacifier supposedly taken directly from the letter, the film is very much played for laughs and very effectively captures a 13 year old’s understanding of – and fantasies about – adult sex. As well as being very funny, this film more than any of the others, asks the audience to consider who consumes porn and why.

Overall, I found Xperimental Eros to be a very mixed collection and I think that, more than anything, this reflects the mixed state of art-house erotica. As such, it’s an interesting, rather than consistently enjoyable collection, but one that is worth seeing if you are both reasonably open minded and interested in experimental films.