Wacky, sexy and
boozy cinema

>> Darryl’s Hard Liquor and Porn Film Festival is a proudly prurient celebration of comedy and erotica

by MARK SLUTSKY

It may not offer the World Film Festival’s international smorgasbord of cinema, nor the Festival du nouveau cinéma’s sober sophistication, or the Rencontres internationales du documentaire’s urgent emphasis on the world’s ever-present crises. But would you really expect any of those things from something called Darryl’s Hard Liquor and Porn Film Festival?

The fest is not likely to have much in common, audience-wise, with Montreal’s more established film events (save for maybe Fantasia), but the Toronto-based show, which organizers describe as a “one night film festival” is going for something altogether different: a light, proudly prurient celebration of boozing and low-brow humour. Organizers describe it as a “comedy short film festival for adults only.”

Now in its third year in Montreal, this year’s edition features a “Porn Star Casual” dress code (“Dressing up like a porn star is not mandatory but it’s FUN and there will be prizes for costumes,” explains the Web site), and that may tell you all you need to know about it. Still, you gotta admire, or at least respect, or maybe just appreciate from a distance, the organizers’ enthusiasm and lack of self-seriousness.

The actual movies in the festival cover a very specific spectrum of filmmaking, ranging from the goofy to the silly to the wacky, to the 3D. Some are pretty clever; others are proudly dumb. Such is the case with Duncan Beedie’s animated short, The Making of Gladiator. Set on the set of the Ridley Scott film, it’s basically...a dick joke, the details of which I will not reveal here. In a similar vein is Alternative Power, a short spoof purportedly created by the “Western Academy of Natural Kinetics,” in which Ontario’s power issues are solved by harnessing the power of self-abuse.

The idea behind Marnie Parrell’s About Town is actually pretty good: she takes scenes from porno movies and adds cheesy music and syrupy narration to make it seem like you’re actually watching a realtor’s video tour of a house for sale, with the commentary ignoring the sex and focusing on the details of the house where it takes place. See-Saw is a crudely animated stop-motion (using Lego pieces) parody of the Saw movies; only in this, the characters escape from their life-threatening predicaments not through gruesome self-torture but via erotic antics.

Sex is approached from pretty much every angle: in Kat-I’s Sex Toy Stories, hostess Kat-I interviews people on the street about their, well, sex toy stories. Signe Baumane and Pierre Poire’s Teat Beat of Sex is an inspired animated series of shorts touching on one woman’s experiences with penises, masturbation and other stuff.

As well, capitalizing on the “make a movie really quickly and show it to everyone” craze that’s been sweeping the micro-budget cinema world over the last few years, the Hard Liquor and Porn Film Festival is unveiling its own variation on the theme this year with the “Montreal 69 Hour Film Challenge.” Films made in the three-day period leading up to the fest will be screened at the event. After the films, there’ll be an after party featuring VJ Pink Rubber Lady and DJ Jan Pienkowski. The whole thing is, not surprisingly, adults only, with only those 19 and over admitted.

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