While all you guys ever hear about is A Serbian Film, another shocker out of Serbia premiered at FanTasia entitled The Life and Death of a Porno Gang. Mladen Djordjevic’s transgressive feature tells the story of a pair of lovebirds who, in the attempt to do something liberating, find themselves traveling down a dark path in order to survive.
The duo start “The Porno Gang”, a traveling road show featuring all sorts of debauchery from sodomy to animal f*cking***. Yes, you heard me right. It’s a liberating experience for them, but they keep being forced out of town and are running low on funds – when an opportunity presents itself.
The film transgresses rapidly as it becomes the story of a group of free spirits who all of a sudden are the filmmakers behind a series of SNUFF movies. It’s a depressing look at the economics and welfare of other countries and people offer up their lives in order to put food on the table for their families.
Unfortunately, when things begin to get interesting, this gutsy, original, and thought-provoking feature becomes nothing more than trite hogwash. It falls into the obvious conventions of morality vs necessity, morals vs God, before tripping into the most cliché finale the world has ever seen.
While the directing itself is cheap and cruddy (the cinematography looks like I, myself shot it in the woods with my cell phone), the brilliance of it is that it’s actually a reflection of the protagonist’s plight of becoming a filmmaker; or maybe I’m giving him too much credit?
If you want shocking, Porno Gang does in fact deliver, but unfortunately it becomes proven that Mladen Djordjevic doesn’t quite have the full set of balls he proclaims to carry. For that, check out A Serbian Film.
***Right before the movie started, a very old Asian woman sat right next to me asking, “Did I miss anything?” Thankfully she left before the first scene that featured a guy f*cking a hole in the ground, or when a transvestite licks a horse’s penis. Yeah. This was nearly the most uncomfortable screening since I saw Irreversible with my friend and his mom (I still have nightmares).