K3: Prison of Hell

Director: Andreas Bethmann (2009)

Starring: Suzi-Anne, Candy-Sue, Bianca Germany

Find it: IMDB

Describing the plot of K3: Prison of Hell to a relative, I may have accidentally given off the impression that I am something of a psychopath or serial killer in training. In fact, as I tried to tactfully describe this movie to my Dear old Dad, the question "it's not a snuff film, is it?" may have been asked. It didn't help my case that K3: Prison of Hell was delivered to me via a friend, ordered from Germany and given on a nondescript DVD-RW. "It's definitely not snuff," I insisted, "snuff doesn't have an IMDB page."

That said, you won't find K3: Prison of Hell on Amazon, less because it's a snuff movie, (honest Dad, it's not) more because of all the giant cocks being sucked all over the place. Also, what with all the hardcore sexual violence, it's probably illegal here in the UK. Not snuff, though. The word 'torture porn' is bandied around horror movie territories with depressing regularity (not by me, except for when I use inverted commas) but in the case of K3: Prison of Hell, that's about right. This movie consists of nothing but torture and pornography, neither of which is particularly well done. 

The plot has lots of women in prison (it's never explained why) while the guards go around raping them all the time. I had never seen a Prison Exploitation movie before (apparently The Shawshank Redemption and Schindler's List don't count) so I Googled Prison of Hell to see what I was in for. One of the first pictures I found was of an arm shoved all the way up a poor lady's arse. Most of the action consists of things going up arses or erections going into various other orifices (usually the face). This is brought to us by infamous exploitation director Andreas Bethmann; responsible for a number of other horror/porno movies, most of which have 'rape' in the synopsis. Also involved is special effects maestro, occasional director and chum of Uwe Boll, Olaf Ittenbach. The gore effects, when they come, are decent enough - there's a reasonable head explosion scene - but otherwise, Prison of Hell is just plain boring. If you've seen one cock sucked, you've seen them all. The mix of sexual violence, titillation and torture is horrid, but that's the point. The film knows its audience (Fetlife friends, aficionados of hardcore cinema and probably Mel Gibson) very well, and everyone else won't even know it exists in the first place. Given that I don't really enjoy pornography, I was doomed from the start.  

K3: Prison of Hell is unpleasant, ugly and dull. While it will appeal to those who enjoy that sort of thing, everyone else will be either horrified or nonplussed or both at the same time. It's not really the type of movie you assign a star rating to (unless you're in the business of reviewing pornography), but I'll do so anyway. Mostly so my Dad, in case he's Googling this, can be totally sure that I'm not a lunatic nutcase who gets off on that Andreas Bethmann's prison pornographies.

Look Dad, no stars:

Fifty Shades of Grey

I write this review following one week relaxing on the sunny beaches of Kusudasi, in Turkey. As per any beach holiday, some properly trashy beach literature was required. I brought with me I, Partridge (the brilliant Alan Partridge autobiography), Double Dexter (reasonable, but not as good as the telly series) and a William Shatner Star Trek novel. This is not a review of any of those books. As I ran out of reading material, I turned to my lovely ladyfriend's collection of digital books. Enter a sweaty, sordid three days during which I read all three Fifty Shades of Grey books.   

Fifty Shades of Grey makes for incredible holiday reading in that it is complete bollocks (fifty shades of bollocks, in fact). It is to mothers what The Da Vinci Code is to your dad. It lends itself to skim reading because one can skip entire paragraphs pages chapters of the book without losing any sense of what is going on. And the reader's brain only has to put up with but a limited number of words, since EL James just uses the same ones over and over again. I don't think I've ever seen anyone's mouth ever "twist into a line" and yet Mister Grey's does this on practically every other page. Ditto, his ragged breath and Miss Steele's repeated acquiescence.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a book about a student (Anastasia Steele) who, after her tenacious journalist friend (we know she's tenacious because she is described as such many, many times) falls ill, steps in to conduct an interview with mysterious multimillionaire Christian Grey.  She falls over and calls him gay (Fifty Shades of Gay); he sneers at her and acts like a dick. It's a horrible interview; mostly because Ana Steele is a moron and Christian Grey is a cunt.  

But if Twilight has evidenced anything, it's that a large proportion of women swoon for fictional shitty men. They'll lust after the likes of Edward Cullen, Mister Darcy, Sawyer from LOST and Christian Grey whilst at the same time complaining that all men are bastards. If the relationship between Ana and Christian seems very similar to that of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, that's because it literally is the same. Fifty Shades of Grey began life as Twilight fan-fiction (titled Master of the Universe), with EL James just changing the names for publication. So Team Jacob is now a character called Jose Rodriguez. Mexican is not the same thing as Native American, but "whatever", James thought, "they're both shades (GET IT) of brown." Ana Steele is a little too reluctant to feel like the wet, naturally submissive Bella completely, but James has the lip-biting and falling over down pat. Grey is supposed to seem cool and desirable - but this is undermined by his listening to The Kings of Leon and owning a Fight Club poster. The attempts at pop culture are laughable. As is Grey referring to Ana as 'baby'.

It becomes clear immediately that Christian and Ana are drawn to one another. But Mister Grey has a dark secret: he's into BDSM in a big way, and wants Ana as his 'submissive' rather than his girlfriend. Where most men would realise that you might want to be subtle with that sort of thing (a girl is more likely to let you tie her up if you introduce the idea in a sensitive, charming manner. Or, er, just ask first), Christian saunters into the shop where she works and gets her to sell him some cable ties, rope and duct tape. But Ana is a naive soul thick shit and merely assumes that Grey is doing some decorating. James tells us repeatedly that Ana is a highly intelligent, smart-mouthed character, but her dialogue and actions suggest otherwise. Grey wastes little time in stalking Ana; tracking her phone, having her followed and pretty much kidnapping her at the end of the night. Christian Grey is Bruce Wayne if Bruce had dedicated his life to wanting to fuck his dead mom instead of trying to avenge her. I can imagine Grey's own personal Lucius Fox, sweating away in the basement, fixing up some neat new stalking tools for Grey. Grey actually calls himself a Dark Knight at one point.

Morally (and probably legally) it's a pretty shitty thing to do to, manipulating a girl's obvious crush on you by dictating that the only relationship she can have with you is an abusive one. And so when Ana 'misbehaves', she is violently spanked. But it's fine to hit your partner when she 'misbehaves', because you're doing it in the name of kinky-fuckery. Grey justifies his physical and emotional abuse by saying "Ana, I'm fifty shades of fucked up". I escaped a boring relationship once by pretending to have a mental breakdown. I'm just saying, sometimes describing yourself as "being fucked up" is an easy way to act like a bell-end without repercussions.

Because apparently being "fucked up" (albeit in a tremendously emo way) will justify any errant or abusive behaviour on your part. Ana accepts that Grey is "fucked up" and lets him repeatedly control, beat and humiliate her. We all have to put up with things we don't like in relationships (I once watched The Tourist), but the use of phrases like "fifty shades of fucked up" is a hard limit for me.    

Compromise in this case means Ana doing whatever Grey tells her to do, and him hitting her slightly less. He even consents to let her have vanilla sex when he takes her virginity, because he's all heart, that man. Approximately two things happen in Fifty Shades of Grey, interspersed with a number of softcore sex scenes and some mildly kinky bits of bondage and spanky-panky. Throughout, the pair speak in atrocious dialogue (the whole thing reads like the script of a particularly dire pornography) as Ana converses with her own subconscious and - most irritatingly - her 'inner goddess'. This is a cheap way of showing that Ana secretly likes what Grey does to her and makes little sense. You can't talk to your subconscious, Ana, because it's your fucking subconscious. The whole point of your subconscious is that you can't hear it.

I suspect my subconscious is a bit of a moron, since I find it hard to dislike Fifty Shades of Grey. Make no mistake, it is one of the worst books I have ever read. It's better than Twilight, though. And much better than Pride and Prejudice too. Is it romantic? Not remotely. It is, however, the funniest thing I have read in a long time. I laughed more at Fifty Shades of Grey than I did my Alan Partridge autobiography. The book actually reminded me a lot of The Frightened Woman, without any of that film's arty weirdness.

Still, I'm hardly the target audience. People evidently like this sort of thing, and if that leads to a flush of kinky moms, then I suppose it's a good thing (aside from the fact that Grey is the worst poster boy for any lifestyle, ever). It's no revelation - it's just a crappy piece of erotica with passable sex scenes but a truly terrible story, characters and writing. For all of Christian Grey's fifty shades, I would argue that Ana is equally fucked up. What sort of imbecile, after all, continues to date a man who forbids her from doing as she wishes, dictates when she should eat (Christian's obsession with food is hilarious) and chastises her constantly for biting her lip? The pair deserve one another.

Fetish Dolls Die Laughing

Director: David Silvio (2011)

Starring: Laura Romeo, Michael McGovern, Aaron Bernard

Find it: Official site

When they ask me, "old man, what did you do with your life?" I shall reply, "well children, I stayed up until 2:00 in the morning, waiting for Windows Media Player to buffer so I could watch a movie about a serial killer who murders women by tickling their feet until they die." "Do you regret it all?" they'll ask me. To which I shall respond: "no, not a fucking thing." Fetish Dolls Die Laughing is a supreme waste of time. But, like the act of tickling itself, that pointlessness has an odd, innocent charm. In the days of Human Centipedes and Donkey Punching, it's only fair that the humble tickle fetish should have its moment to shine.

Of all the things I have accidentally (shut up) become an aficionado of after discovering the Internet all-those-years-ago, tickle videos must rank amongst the strangest. If you had told ten-year-old Joel H that there would one day be a place where he could see a woman strapped to a table as a man tickles her feet to no real purpose, his mind would have been blown. Even more so if you'd told him about that one video I saw where the tickler does it whilst dressed as Batman. Truly, you can find anything online.

Spoiler: she gets tickled

Detective Greer English (Romeo) is a maverick cop investigating a series of brutal murders. We're shown how she has a penchant for always putting herself in danger in order to solve crimes. This reasoning will put her on a path to the 'Tickle Monster's' table. The Tickle Monster. Really. No longer is the Boogeyman the stupidest-sounding horror movie monster. Like Jason in Jason Goes To Hell, the Tickle Monster is a malevolent force that possesses bodies and forces its victim to go around tickling women to death. The current embodiment of the Tickle Monster is Billy, a chubby foot fetishist who makes crappy bondage videos with his wife. After he tickles his wife to death, Billy/the Tickle Monster embark on a killing spree that brings them to Detective English's attention. Although she could have found him by just looking in the phonebook. Weird horror movie crimes are always committed by people called Billy.

He was not to be interrupted whilst watching Jackie Brown.

Really, the film is just a series of connected fetish videos. There is a lot of tickling in Fetish Dolls Die Laughing - and I'm not even sure how it works. Mostly, Billy just tickles someone for awhile until blood starts spurting out of their mouth and they die. There's suspension of disbelief, and then there's being asked to believe that tickling can rupture your organs and kill you to death. Ditto, a brilliant bit of logic straight out of a fetish video: that having your feet continuously tickled whilst tied up will cause incurable insanity. That's actually quite similar to The Joker's plan in The Killing Joke.

I hope you like this. Because there's 100 minutes worth of it here.

One's tolerance for Fetish Dolls Die Laughing will depend entirely on how much you enjoy watching people being tickled. It's unabashedly a fetish movie, albeit one with a more intricate plot than most. In its gratuitous pandering to a foot-loving audience, it's a shame that it couldn't offer a little more for non-fans. And at 100 minutes, it's a little too long for what it is. At least two tickle scenes could have been lost, as could a lengthy sub-plot with a second serial killer. But it's amusing, (not to the extent where you'll die laughing though, yo ho ho) imaginative, grotesque and tongue-in-cheek enough that its flaws become forgiveable. Ultimately, it's a film about a man tickling womens' feet until it kills them. You're either on board for that sort of thing or you're not. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. And vanilla is my least favourite spice.

Porn Shoot Massacre

Director: Corbin Timbrook (2009)

Starring: Robert Ambrose, Naomi Cruz, Shelly Martinez

Find it: IMDB

Sure, a movie called Porn Shoot Massacre was never going to win any Oscars, but that doesn't excuse the fact that no-one tried to make it even watchable. But then, I don't enjoy pornography, so perhaps it was lost on me from the start. In a bunch of barely connected scenes, director Malfini (Ambrose) tries to make a pornographic film whilst some sort of Jason Voorhees slash Leatherface rip-off wanders around offing his 'actresses' in the background. Twist: Malfini is in on the scam and is actually making a snuff movie rather than a porno. Which doesn't explain why half of the kills happen offscreen and without a camera present.

But then, Malfini sucks as a director. I doubt he's ever seen a pornography in his life, since what he does manage to film is softcore at best. And his snuff movie isn't much better. He's desperately ill informed as to the intricacies of adult cinema, dubbing his stars "Fetish Queen" and "Fetish princess", despite the fact they don't do anything remotely fetish-y. I didn't spot a single bare foot, mashed potato, gas mask or whatever it is people fetishize these days. He then hires a dominatrix to have her tied up and menaced. The dominatrix seems fine with it though, so I guess neither of them know what a dominatrix actually does.

The atmosphere is impressively cheerful, making Porn Shoot Massacre a hard film to truly dislike, despite its screamingly obvious flaws. By which I mean everything else. The acting is atrocious, the script consists entirely of clunkers, the music annoying and obtrusive, the special effects shonky and the nudity tiresome. Tiresome nudity is the worst kind of nudity. I did manage a cheap laugh at the midget with the dildo, though.

I watched Porn Shoot Massacre hoping for something as fun as One Eyed Monster (the Ron Jeremy comedy-horror) but instead got something as bad as real pornography itself.