Where was God when this was being filmed?
Another month, another film, but the same two questions come to mind: 'Who the hell still buys this shit?' and 'Where was God when this was being filmed?' You fucked up big guy, one lightning bolt and you could have prevented a lot of suffering.
This week the 'film' under the microscope is called High Rise. There are people in it; some male, some female and others that it is hard to tell. There are superheroes, famous people (well, pictures of them anyway), and a 6ft-tall bear that starts grooving slap bang in the middle of an orgy.
The action starts with a moron holding a clapperboard and introducing the film and, the wag, he makes a mistake. But don't get your hopes up, the lightness of mood doesn't last for long. We cut to a woman sitting on a psychiatrist's couch telling an odd-looking man: "It's like this, we just don't fuck any more." She is talking about her husband, who we learn is called Mike.
She says she has no idea how to make her husband want her and the doctor puts forward the hypothesis that it may be due to her lack of sexual experience. When he asks her if she has slept with any men other than her husband she says no... but she did once have sex with a frog. He takes it all pretty well considering she has admitted to something you still can't find on the internet. (Trust me, I googled 'sex with frogs' and all that came up were sites about ancient chat-up lines, one of which is the classic: "I'm really a prince cursed by a witch. Tell me, do you have sex with frogs?")
She blathers on before summing up the scene for the idiots and narcoleptics who may have missed it by saying, "I want a fucking fuck!" The doctor recommends being penetrated by as many people as possible, er, for the benefit of her marriage, as if morality, history and plain common sense don't suggest it is a bad idea.
The only other thing worthy of note is the dubbing. In terms of quality the matching of the soundtrack to the visual is on a par with the Nick Berg execution video. The sound is handled by a person called Tony Bendetti. Actually that might just be the beginning of his name, you can't tell because the credits run off the side of the screen. Why? Because this film is cheap. Very, very cheap.
Just when I thought I'd never be surprised by anything in a porn film ever again, it suddenly happens just like that, out of nowhere. It's the music, which really isn't that bad. As the introductory credits roll we are treated to a soul number from Rhetta Hughes that wouldn't be out of place in a KFC ad. The female star is walking through a park. The sun is out. There is a happy vibe. A feeling that everything is going to be OK pervades the scene. This might not be so bad after all. Female lead walks up to a block of flats and presses a random button. We know she is making a snap decision because she waves her finger in the air for what seems like forever before choosing a doorbell.
We then cut to a miniature railway set, specifically a train entering a tunnel. This little arthouse phallic reference shot is the second one, there was a close-up of some cherries earlier but I didn't think it was worth mentioning until the train thing happened. Anyway, there is a train and, as the laws of life dictate, it is being commanded by some subnormal shut-in with a mother fixation and no idea what a woman looks like in the nude.
It may seem pedantic, and the scale train models hidden in the converted lofts of middle-aged men who still think that maybe one day they will become train drivers are sad enough, but this isn't even to scale. The church is smaller than the train and the trees are all wrong. It is at a fine point of sadness.
The guy has a hunting cap on, balloons everywhere, and a plastic doll he calls mother as he kisses it. It is paedo heaven and exactly how I imagine Roy Whiting's cell would look if he was in a psych ward rather than a maximum security prison.
That's not important right now. What is important is that Female Lead, we'll call her FLISP from now on (Female Lead In Shite Porno), is knocking on his door. He answers and she starts giggling and flirting. She tells him she loves trains, then she hugs a stuffed panda. He tells her he collects toys, then introduces her to the plastic doll he calls mother.
She asks if he has a girlfriend. He says he hasn't. He says he doesn't need one because he has his toys. She tells him that a girl is the best toy you can have, before getting her tits out, an action that is accompanied by the sounds of someone being drowned in a bath for some reason. They both strip.
It's time to forget everything I said about the music being OK. I think what happened was they blew all their budget on Rhetta Hughes because the musical accompaniment to the misfits having sex is a song with the lyrics: "I've been bitten by the kissing bug." The music sounds like a pseudo-educational song that teaches kids the basic facts of life.
Balloons, portraits of his mother and selected toys (I only remember Woody Woodpecker) are cut into footage of them going at it on the bed. They do all the obligatory licking and sucking and penetration. FLISP shirks her contractual obligation to deep throat him by simply bending his cock to one side and running her lips down the side. She rides him a bit before his mother starts banging on the door. She comes in and screams at FLISP, who runs out as the mother probably beats the guy for having sexual relations with anyone other than her. An ugly edit brings us to a title page that reads "A tale of six titties".
The next image is of two women sexing it up on the floor of their flat when all of a sudden the doorbell rings. It's FLISP. Four seconds later they are all on a huge orgy bed with a 6ft mirror on one side. Their unholy shagging is accompanied by the strains of classical violin music. Some people would insert a joke about Vanessa Mae and how nice it would be to fiddle with her, but that would be cheap and as this is a highbrow review you won't read anything like that here. Nothing else happens. The scene ends. The next thing we see is a title page that says "Menage a Twat".
A man lies naked on a sofa reading a copy of what appears to a newspaper called Sex. He is masturbating. His doorbell rings and FLISP faints and falls through the door unconscious. Naturally his reaction, as anyone's would be, is to strip her and start licking her before she comes round. Then they rut in more positions than Prince on his honeymoon. This is crudely interrupted by a woman shouting for her husband, he is called Jack, his surname is probably Ass. She is fingering herself in the other room. Just for the record she looks like she has Tina Turner between her legs and the walls are covered with pornographic stills.
Jack goes in, taking FLISP with him. She coos, "I hope you don't mind having some company," to which Jack's wife replies, "Fuck no!" The next 10 minutes is just pasty, hairy, wobbly, barely humans sticking bits of themselves in each other, until there is a new title heading, "Aw Gee".

FLISP dances into a room full of people who are dancing, stripping or fucking each other. There is a woman who has tassels on her breasts and is swinging them in opposite directions. She can also do that thing musclemen on chatshows in the Seventies used to do where they made their pecs twitch. There is a guy taking out his aggression on a punchbag. There are other guys taking out their aggression on women underneath them.
The music is all that makes this different from any other film. The lyrics are too fucked up to list in full and as the song goes on for nearly 20 minutes it would take up most of this magazine. However, here is a little snippet: "Say hello to peace, goodbye to war, let working out at High Rise be your daily chore." This particular lyrical gem is accompanied by a man holding Argentinian and Irish flags, England's two greatest foes in the Eighties. Then we cut to a Batman poster on the wall. The 'music' screeches "Right on William Shakespeare" as a woman sucks a man whose legs are so hairy it looks like he has collected all the hair he has ever shaved off his body and crafted it into a pair of stockings. The song references Donald Duck and Mary Poppins. We are then treated to a woman who at a first glance looks like she has three breasts but when you look closer you realise that it is just the flab hanging out from under her arm and not a breast after all.
The music continues, "Job gave us heaven, Neptune gave us sea, Prometheus who stole the light from the sky..." as the visual cuts to a picture of Johnny Weissmuller. Then, out of nowhere, here comes the bear! He has piercing blue eyes and an undertone of menace. He dances a bit, shakes his head and we never see him again.
It seems a little random but I like to think this is High Rise's way of tackling the problem of porn never being able to genuinely surprise you. What happens without fail is the dumb brunette/dumber blonde has the sleazy-looking man in some part of her body for at least half the film. But introducing a 6ft bear into the middle of an orgy? Who could have seen that coming? (I don't mean the bear cumming, I am certain if you could have seen him cumming you would have done, but there must be laws against that kind of thing.) All it actually does is groove for 10 seconds before disappearing never to be seen again. Make up your own mind whether that was a conscious effort to break the monotony or if this whole film was written in a crack-fuelled brainstorming session where someone just stood up and shouted, "Let's put a fucking grooving bear into it somewhere... it can groove and... something else, it will be... yeah!" and they went with it because it was the best idea anyone had in the whole afternoon.
Just as the feeling that the scene has to end soon is replaced by the feeling that the scene will never ever end, we cut to a woman fingering herself. When the shot pans out you see she is lying in a coffin before we cut to posters of Jimi Hendrix and Laurel and Hardy in turn.
The guy who is singing, well, talking really quickly would be more accurate, starts throwing in some more leftfield namechecks that include Thomas Equinus, Emperor Hirohito, Madame Curie and Rasputin. He claims The Barber of Seville sprinkles pubic hair on the floor and Frankenstein 69s Lady Godiva. It sounds like they just shovelled LSD down the throat of a jazz-funk no-mark and told him to simply list what flashed before his eyes.
Bonnie and Clyde, Sherlock Holmes, Keats and Socrates all get a mention. The singer then accuses Popeye of fucking Olive Oyl and says something about the Spanish Inquisition before accusing Darwin of molesting apes and making some lame joke about Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg undress (get it? 'undress' instead of 'address', hilarious).
You get the feeling you are meant to learn something from this song, that it might be an early attempt at edu-porn, but all we actually learn is that someone really wasted their humanities degree. Then, thankfully, it ends and FLISP heads back to her husband to share the experience of her extra-marital whoring.
We next see her in bed with her husband. But hang on one sweet moment, this is the man who played the doctor in the first scene. In case you don't realise this unaided, they cut between him in bed and him in his office about half a dozen times to make sure you understand the clever twist.
In their post-coital moment, he is covered in her make-up with his arm around her. They start talking about her day as a slut wife and we learn that it was all one big role-playing exercise. None of it happened. It was just to spice up their love life and this is all part of FLISP's fucked-up imagination.
He cuddles her, presumably forgetting this woman talked about sex with a frog for no reason and has fantasies about fucking retarded guys and taking part in orgies to a soundtrack that sounds like a bad trip set to music by someone you've never heard of but who had a song on Jazz Sounds 7: Who Gives a Funk?
We're done now.

THE END.

High Rise? Approved!