By Dominic Girard
A quick browse on the Internet will reveal an outrageous variety of home-grown porn.
Darryl’s Hard Liquor and Porn Film Festival held its fifth annual celebration of such smut last Friday. The crowds came out to moan and groan their way through a variety of home movies full of cheap jokes of the “pee-pee and boobies” variety.
The Mod Club played host to the collection of low-budget Sex Jokes and Videotape. A dress code (porn star, rock star, new country music star, or just your sexy self) was dutifuly respected and there were no shortages of bad wigs, French maids, bunny ears and all manner of 1970s fashion.
Once sufficiently lubricated, thanks in small part to the complimentary beverage ticket that accompanied the $25 cover, the audience took their seats to partake in an evening of filthy, funny, fun.
Rich-A-Rich, a 26-year-old who wouldn’t give his real name (“I have parents”), was expecting “really crappy films and really raunchy films.” The festival’s thirty short films, each of varying degrees of quality and humour, seemed determined to push the boundaries of bad taste. The films offered little in terms of production value or artistic merit, but there was the odd exception.
Most notably is Derek Lang’s Macho Baby, a riotously funny music video of the Village People’s “Macho Man”, done completely in stop-motion animation with tiny Lego characters playing the band members.
Dave McKay’s Counter Stroke used the popular Counter Strike video game characters and environments to enact an all-male gangbang, complete with a Gimp-like sex fiend. The Hungarian Tickle, Nathan Campbell’s fake advertisement for a “professional” hair removal expert who specializes in a particular area of the female anatomy, earns a mention, as does Lisa Fernandez and Ryerson graduate Rebecca Wood Barret’s Mating Rituals of The Whistler Mountain Cougar.
Many of the films were full of gross-out, gag-me-with-a-spoon jokes. The Milkman Cometh, for instance, is a five-minute ejaculation flick, about a man who takes advantage of the milk man and, well, milks him like a cow.
A few of the flicks failed completely.Neil Hollands produced a series of public service announcements, which peppered the second half of the evening’s program. Reconciling porno jokes with a starving African child is a ballsy move, but Hollands couldn’t pull it off, making the third PSA an awkward and offensive piece.
But, as Gold says, “controversial is in the eye of the beholder. Who cares? You know, it’s funny,” he said. “It’s just a joke.” Judging by the festival’s near sold-out attendance, Toronto is in the mood for risqu? events that promise a hot load of filth.
And Darryl’s Hard Liquor and Porno Film Festival’s lowbrow sex funnies get the crowd laughing.It’s obvious that the festival isn’t trying to be anything more than an excuse to party and trade sex jokes.
Gold said he has created an outlet for “normal boys and girls who want to make films. [The Festival’s filmmakers] are usually just the average Joe; give them a challenge and they’ll meet it.”
The crowd is deliberately tacky, the films are mostly awful, the jokes are contrived and clichéd. There’s bad lighting and bad acting and bad dialogue, too. But hey, isn’t that what porn is all about?
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