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Skin Flick

Germany/UK/Canada/ 1999

Reviewed by Jos Arroyo

Synopsis

Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.

The plot focuses on a gang of skinheads (Dirk, Dieter, Manfred, Reinhold, Wolfgang), an inter-racial gay couple (Karl is white, Leroy black), and Cameltoe, Reinhold's girlfriend. A photographer snaps Cameltoe but when he tries to get her to undress she destroys his film and chases him away. Dirk and Dieter beat up someone in a cemetery and have sex with each other. Manfred masturbates while reading Mein Kampf. Wolfgang steals money from a woman's purse in a park and has sex with Karl in a cottage, while Leroy has sex with the plumber at home.

Wolfgang follows Karl to his house before reconvening at Reinhold's with the rest of the gang. Reinhold is having sex with Cameltoe, but when his friends arrive they fight and he kicks her out. Dirk and Dieter have sex while Manfred watches Wolfgang fuck Reinhold. After they've all come, they decide to go and rob Karl. They arrive at his house and find him with Leroy. The skinheads rob the couple, force Karl to fuck Leroy and then force Karl to watch his boyfriend being raped. The gang exhorts Manfred to fuck Leroy as part of his initiation, but rather than consenting, Manfred punches Dieter. Taking advantage of the commotion, Leroy stabs Dirk and, while the rest of the gang remove the body and get away, Karl grabs a gun and 'punishes' Dieter by fucking him at gunpoint. Later Leroy smiles at the idea that he might see Reinhold walking down the street.

Review

Skin Flick is wittily being billed as Bruce LaBruce's first "legitimate" porn film. Such a description alludes to the amount and kind of sex depicted in his previous films (No Skin Off My Ass, Super 8 1/2, Hustler White) and highlights the outsider status of his work by reminding us that, despite their artfulness, his films are delegitimised by their corrosive content, cheap production values and underground aesthetics - in other words, their queerness. Here, we get more of the same but with more explicit sex. It's great marketing but, as is the nature of marketing, it promises more than it delivers. Skin Flick is more than a porn film, and possibly as a result, also rather less.

The opening scenes are a reminder of all of LaBruce's strengths as he deftly depicts the style, rules and behavioural codes of skinhead culture by presenting eight separate characters in individual vignettes, linking them up at every step. That it all looks so easy, fluid and energetic is merely proof of LaBruce's skill. A sense of movement is achieved through the music, the pacing of the characters' movements within a shot and the intercutting between vignettes, while the grainy black-and-white stock alternating with colour adds texture. LaBruce also knows his mise en scène: everything in each shot counts and the art direction and camera movements are active and wittily intelligent components of his storytelling. Best of all, LaBruce has great timing, and Skin Flick's opening demonstrates his comic range, using slapstick (Manfred's pratfalls), verbal humour (when Wolfgang tries to pick up Karl at a cottage, Karl asks, "Do I look like George Michael to you?"), visual gags (the point-of-view zooms), not to mention the scabrous camp which is such an integral part of his work. However, all of this comes crashing down as soon as the required and ritualised sex scenes begin.

Skin Flick is evidence of just how narrow today's gay porn's visual and narrative vocabularies are. There's only so much LaBruce can do when the genre dictates a cock must be seen going up an asshole in huge close-up. Besides, these scenes go against the grain of his work - he usually makes desire sexy and sex itself matter-of-fact and funny. However, sex scenes in porn function as spectacle, designed to turn punters on and get them off. In Skin Flick, despite the cast's obvious attractions, these scenes don't work. Perhaps we all appreciate our own porn, but find everyone else's boring, embarrassing or offensive. Or it could be that by trying to do too much within the genre LaBruce forfeits its primary function as masturbation material and risks creating boredom, embarrassment and offence.

The inter-racial rape scene, for instance, is a staple of porn in which victimisation often turns into mutual pleasure. However, LaBruce is too aware of histories of racial codes of representation to leave well alone. As we can see by the noirish lighting and distraught camera movements, Leroy's rape is meant to be brutal and distressing. Yet these very attempts to clue the audience in to the film-maker's awareness of the politics of representing race and sexuality disrupt the conventions of pornographic representation and jolt the audience out of their usual engagement with this particular type of fantasy; the attempt to forestall a racist reading makes the depiction itself seem racist.

Identity politics are an overt theme in Skin Flick. The gang share a skinhead culture but they all come from different countries (each gets to sing his national anthem). They all sleep with each other but refuse a gay identity and queerbash others. Seeing the very funny Cameltoe here is a reminder of what a novelty women are in gay porn. We also see that positive images are still important, although they're relevant only in some contexts and to some audiences. Queers as neo-Nazi queerbashing thugs? No problem. A black man called a monkey? Ouch! Watching the film with an audience is in itself an interesting commentary on how central gay porn is to contemporary gay culture and how novel the experience of watching it socially has become. Although hardcore porn is banned in the UK, audiences at the Edinburgh Festival and London's National Film Theatre demonstrated they were experienced viewers through their responses, though some of the reactions to the sex scenes would certainly have been different if the viewers were watching in private.

The shock effects of LaBruce's films have always been intentional. He's an enfant terrible who enjoys discomfiting the bourgeoisie, particularly the pink bourgeoisie. However, on the evidence of Skin Flick (and much of the penetration has been cut for the UK release), his skills as a pornographer are either in conflict with his sensibility or simply don't measure up. Skin Flick might be the only porn film in which the sex scenes work against the pleasures of the film. Sometimes more is indeed less.

Credits

Screenplay

Bruce LaBruce

Director of Photography

James Carman

Editors

Manfred Mancini

Joerg Andreas

Art Director

Peter Armstrong

Music

Gavin Brown

©Cazzo Film

Production Companies

Cazzo Film in association with Millivres and Suzuki Akihiro/Stance Company

Executive Producer

Juergen Anger

Line Producer

Luis Hoyos

Text/Poetry

Yaroslav Mogutin

Additional Super 8

Michael Brynntrup

2nd Camera Unit

Joerg Polzer

Diego Reiwald

Lighting

James Carman

Soeren Salzer

Diego Reiwald

Skin Head House

Steven

Costumes

Edgar Langer

Make-up

Edgar Langer

Additional Music

Kilslug

Nip Drivers

Hype

Soundtrack

"Sex Dwarf" by David Ball, Marc Almond, performed by Soft Cell; "Starlicker" by Danko Jones

Sound Recordist

Soeren Salzer

Sound Editing/Mixing

Manfred Mancini

Cast

Steve Master

Dieter

Eden Miller

Dirk

Tom International

[Yaroslav Mogutin]

Reinhold

Ralph Steel

Wolfgang

Tim Vincent

Manfred

Jens Hammer

Karl

Nikki Richardson

[Nikki Uberti]

Cameltoe

Bastian

Leroy

Darren James

plumber

Terry Richardson

photographer

Patricia Villa

lady on bench

Rebecca

[Cassidy]

falling woman

Luis

[Luis Hoyos]

fruit market vendor

Bruce LaBruce

Eric

Pierrot

bashing victims

Certificate

tbc

Distributor

Millivres Multimedia

6,030 feet

67 minutes

In Colour