Fantasia 2019: Porno

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I can vividly recall the first time I said the word "fuck" out loud. I was sixteen years old and my best (and only) friend was doing her damndest to snap me out of my ultra-religious upbringing and scoot me on into the sweet filth-mindedness of the secular 90s, from which I'd remained somewhat cloistered. The word felt like sawdust in my throat, dry, I coughed it out unsure how it would sound. My friend laughed violently at me. It felt like the beginning of my life.

I thought a lot about that time in my life while watching Porno, the deliriously crass and devilish first feature from filmmaker Keola Racela that's just screened at the 2019 Fantasia Film Festival -- those tentative first toe-dips towards personhood through a curious poking around in what'd moments before been deemed poisonous. Sex and violence and foul language, oh my. It felt warm, so I jammed my whole fist in and went nuts.

Funny enough Porno drops us down in the exact same time period I was learning to whisper the word "fuck" and giddily feeling out its sharp contours -- it's 1992 and our cast of characters are a group of Christian teenagers who work at a small-town single-screen movie theater, and if you think that's weird then I will tell you how I could only play G-rated movies on the TV screens at the video store I worked at through High School. It's a thing, and Porno nods often at the bridge between these sacreds among the profane -- the oldest member of the group is a Christian Rocker, commence giggling.

Racela does laugh at the innocence and naïveté of these kids, but it's the good-natured sort that only could come from somebody who's been there and cringed thinking back upon it. He's also fluent in the way our kinky thoughts get twisted up into even kinkier ones thanks to that great old sexual steam engine called Repression, which this horror flick externalizes a la an on point Buffy episode into a saucy succubus set to feast upon their tasty unspoilt loins, naturally born out of the reels of a dirty movie the kids find buried in the theater's basement. 

The cast is a ton of fun and imbue Porno with a lot of actual character and heart -- it's goofy and gooey and happily a little bit gay, and it's a lot good-natured, even when a scene of indescribable body horror is being played out in the sort of close up that'll have every man in the audience screaming, "BACK! PULL THE CAMERA BACK!!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!" The love of god, Porno says, isn't itself the problem -- it's loving him so hard that your genitals explode. Don't do that, and you'll probably be okay, kiddos.