Porno

"Guys... When we watched that movie, we unleashed a sex demon."

The lack of new cinema releases is driving us movie fans to resort to desperate measures. We're watching stuff we'd usually avoid like the plague. Not me mind, I still watch the same amount of drivel as I always have. But sometimes you watch something so bad that you realise it's time to start re-evaluating your viewing habits.

Porno was that watch for me.

All hell breaks loose in a small cinema in a Christian town when a confrontation with a hobo leads to the discovery of a walled off screening room and a mysterious film reel. These sex starved religious teens let their curiosity get the better of them and delve into a realm of satanic and erotic imagery, the likes of which they've never seen before. Then things get weird and bloody. Very bloody.

Porno's a dreadful film. An exceedingly boring mish mash of genres that takes 80 minutes of it's 100 minute running time to get going before petering out into nothingness and ending in a manner that will make you want to punch something. It takes an intriguing idea, people raised in a fundamentalist environment getting their first exposure to sex in a pretty shocking manner, and then does nothing with it apart from use it as an excuse to gross us out with shots of mashed genitalia. Yup, mashed genitalia, there's a lot of that going on here. Between that and the film's oddly unquestioned negative stance on homosexuality you're left with the feeling that director Keola Racela is using this film to deal with his own issues. It's 1992 setting feels pointless too. We get mention of Encino Man (released as California Man this side of the world) and A League Of Their Own as 2 films screening in the cinema and that's it. The fact that America is still full of religious extremism makes the throwback setting totally unnecessary.

That aside the film hits every beat you'd expect from a bad horror movie. Characters you don't care about wandering off into the darkness by themselves looking for other characters who've done the same, all of them breaking the number 1 rule of a scary movie. Crappy jumps scares you can see coming from a mile away and most annoyingly of all it's a film that doesn't have the guts to stick to it's guns. Come the end, everyone is let off so easy you'll wonder what was the point of it all. It's a strange ending that sees one of the heroes walking down the street happily unimpeded by the fact that his scrotum exploded only moments before. Yeah...

One effectively icky moment of practical gore and a fun turn from Robbie Tann as the burned out film projectionist Heavy Metal Jeff aside this is dreadful stuff. If you are craving horror in a cinema setting go for Lamberto Bava's 1985 masterpiece Demon's instead. Now that's a genuinely good time at the movies.