I am going to break away from my usual Wednesday format, which I guess is not surprising because Wednesdays have been kind of up in the air in general. However, I wrote a little essay last week and I am going to kind of do an essay/dvd review this week in place of music video reviews.
Last night as I was perusing the Watch Insantly feature on Netflix I stumbled onto a movie called Donkey Punch. I remember hearing about it and I had 90 minutes to kill so I watched it. Yes, I watched it to be able to say I watched a movie called Donkey Punch. For those of you unversed in what a Donkey Punch is, go google it or something. I will say it is a sexual act and as the title of this movie, it features prominently into the plot of the film. In fact, the sexual act is not teased at, or hinted at, it is shown in its entirety.
The movie is about 3 girls who end up on a boat with 4 guys they have just met. They drink with them, do drugs with them and then 2 of the girls take 3 of the guys in the big bedroom on the boat and they have an orgy, which ends with a donkey punch, which kills the girl on the receiving end of the donkey punch. From there the movie spirals into a cabin feverish movie where all of the characters get a chance to be crazy as they decide what to do. People cry, people die and friends are turned against each other.
The movie is nothing special, except for the rawness of the sex. The people are pretty, the movie never gets gory enough to be offensive, the acting is bad, the script is bad, yet I found myself kind of intrigued by the movie.
In Horror films the slutty girls always die and the virginal girl always lives. Donkey Punch is basically the same way, except it has more in common with Hostel, than a slasher flick. In Hostel, a group of young men get to live in a fantasy for the first 35 minutes of the movie. They get drugs, alcohol and sex with hot girls and then they spend the final hour of the movie paying for it. The guys are lured, by the sexy girls into a den of torture as punishment for their fantasy. The fantasy turns into a living nightmare. In Donkey Punch, the "virginal" girl wants to forget her stupid ex-boyfriend and to do so, the girls join these guys on their boat. They get the free alcohol, the free drugs and the sex and then they all pay for it, most with the lives.
It has never paid to be promiscuous in the horror film genre, but it was different in Hostel. In most horror films the couples having sex know each other, or are couples, but in Hostel and Donkey Punch, they are strangers. The movies begin as fantasies. Donkey Punch examines how friendships are tested in an untimely death, but it also is warning about the dangers of going home with someone you just met. The guys all seem very nice at first, but when the shit hits the fan, the guys turn out to not be so nice. Guys and girls, both put on their best faces when you first meet them and maybe going out to sea with them right after that is not such a smart idea. When tragedy strikes these people, they do not band together because they do not know each other. They are weary of each other.
In Hostel, one of those weird movies I love that most people hate, the guys fall victim to the hot foreign girls and spend the movie getting limbs sliced off, and enduring ungodly other tortures. This is what happens when you allow yourself to be led around by super hot girls you do not know. If the guys were not so interested in sex with these random girls, they probably would have made it out just fine. Now, the biggest difference in Hostel and most horror movies is that a guy is the main character. We are looking at the horror genre through the eyes of a male, and when a guy fights back it is a little different. The guy is not fighting to survive, he is fighting for revenge.
In Donkey Punch the girl only fights when she feels she has to to, but in Hostel, the guy finds a way to go kill everyone he can, even after he is free. In Donkey Punch and Hostel there is 1 survivor, but the way they got there is different. However, the message is the same: Be careful who you sleep with and be careful who you trust because when you do not know someone, you cannot know their motives and you might get punched in the back of the head right before an orgasm and die, or you might end up being hacked up by crazy people.
I know most people just see these movies as stupid or silly or pointless, but there is a point here and I like it. I am not suggesting we start showing these kinds of movies in high schools or anything, but they can have merit if you look at them the right way. Donkey Punch is a movie based on a silly premise about silly sex acts, but in a way it is warning us, not only of possibly painful sex acts, but warning us about going somewhere with strangers. Eli Roth's Hostel is torture porn, sure, but it works because of how the fantasy is set up. Everything goes the way the guys want until they are tortured.
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