Skin flick (E)

WARNING: THIS IS A CENSORED R-RATED VERSION OF AN ORIGINAL X-RATED PORNOGRAPHIC VIDEO. MANY SCENES ARE HEAVILY EDITED. PLEASE NOTE THAT CINEMEDIA ACCESS COLLECTION CANNOT LOAN X-RATED MATERIAL. Bruce LaBruce is increasingly queer cinema’s most maverick filmmaker, not only producing films that defy the conventions of mainstream Hollywood but also creating queer and bisexual characters who are heretical to the homosexual mainstream itself. “Skin Flick” is a pornographic film that allows itself to experiment with both representation and the techniques of film and video. Continuing LaBruce’s fetishising of skinheads, “Skin Flick” is about a group of fascist youths who spend their time having sex with one another when they are not bashing homosexuals and people of colour. The film contrasts the aggression and violence of the skinheads with the bourgeois emptiness of a mixed-race gay couple. After being raped and tortured by the skins, the couple turn the table and extract their revenge. However, they find that the pleasure of violence is addictive. “Skin Flick”, in the highly censored version that appears on this videotape, loses some of the power that it achieved in the original in which the highly stylised pornographic sex scenes allowed the viewer to contrast fantasy from reality. Paradoxically this version is more morally ambivalent since without the aesthetics of porn, the narrative of “Skin Flick” comes to the fore and we are unsure how much of the skinhead’s racism, aggression and homophobia we are meant to identify with.