90ways - Criticism

The promise of pornography featuring animated dinosaurs is twofold. First, it is a promise of novelty. If there are only five stories in literature, there is barely one in pornography, and it has been endlessly re-enacted by detectives, farmhands, and hospital orderlies. Bikini Girls on Dinosaur Planet, a film about cavepeople rutting amongst the hadrosaurs, has what, for smut at least, passes for the spark of inspiration.

Second, it promises to be a work of some ambition. A person whose erotic vision requires an animation department to help re-create a world millions of years removed from our own is presumably willing to put some effort into the endeavor. This enthusiasm is the first question of all porn. Most smut must constantly reassert its own glamour and the cheerful glee of its participants. Thus come the smoking jackets and the Vonnegut articles and Hef's mansion. It must hold its own biological underpinnings at arms length with ludicrous storylines and endless dialogue. And clearly, a porno flick with dinosaurs has far more initiative than decorum requires.

This fact only compounds the pain when Bikini Girls on Dinosaur Planet first fails as cool pornography, then as cheap, low-budget unthinking pornography, and bottoms out as a below-average example of flickering lights and sound. Everything about this movie is poorly played and unappealing, and what's worse, joyless and unambitious, even by the modest standards of the sex trade. Nominally, the film is about space-going scientists that observe from orbit the mating habits of a few pre-agricultural women. This is depicted in a series of vignettes of cave girls rolling around in mud, intercut with endless mumbled exposition from the space ladies and the occasional stop-motion dinosaur.

This description is inherently misleading, though, because whatever image it conjures in the mind of the reader, no matter how tawdry, is many times more imaginative, convincing, and erotic that what the film has to offer. In fact, the act of imagining the content of the movie is an act far beyond the capability of the movie itself. It is a documentary about the production of an awful porno flick. Bikini Girls on Dinosaur Planet is about confused-looking young women in earthtone bathing suits lying in scrub brush and absent-mindedly pawing at each other while some evil ghoul with no taste films them.

Because Bikini Girls takes no joy in its story, its sex, or its mise en scene, it gives the viewer no excuse to view it in any but the most literal, base way. In better porn, for example, women make a point of wild moaning and flailing. Even though these overblown displays of sexual ecstasy are patently fake and inhuman, they serve the crucial purpose of inviting the viewer to pretend for the sake of arousal and good fun that the sex they're watching arises from some kind of personal sexual impulse. On Dinosaur Planet, no one moans or smiles or makes a good faith effort to pretend to be a caveperson. When the layers of fantasy are stripped away, the viewer is left watching strangers have sex for money.

The film then begs the question: to whom is this meant to appeal? Is anyone so hopelessly perverted as to be turned on by apathy and ineptitude? This film is recommended only for those seeking a way to teach their children that sex is the exclusive sport of the bored and the tacky.

Note how this zombie demonstrates the orgy experience in his performance.

Structured to resemble The Night of the Living Dead, The Wickeds is a D-T-DVD about a group of friends who find themselves trapped in a derelict house by many varieties of the undead. The house in which this cadre of teenagers huddle, screw, and bicker was most recently rumored to be the set of a B horror production, but before that it was owned by a family torn apart by phantasms, and before that a betrayed husband built the house for his cheating wife only days before he slaughtered her in it. While the film features a haphazard collection of genre traits strung together like a high school video project, The Wickeds features a cast of unknowns and the "great" Ron Jeremy, whose acting exceeds the work of the cast by miles.

This Zombie is teasing the "hero" with his car keys.

The film treats the horror genre in a way that is perhaps less than unique but an issue the film does bring up is the "afterlife" of the genre. Film critics and rhetoricians deal with genre cycles all the time. The idea is that genres begin naively and slowly grow into more mature and self-aware forms. As the genre progresses and self-awareness becomes more profound, genre films slip into parody. I bring this up because this film poses an interesting complication. One can make the (possibly unfair) assumption that this film is a progeny of other parodies in the style of Scary Movie, which was already a send up of the Scream series, which was a send up of the slasher films. I myself have never considered genre evolution to make any allusions to inbreeding, but at the same time, if we follow the rule of Multiplicity we learn that making a copy from a copy will result in retarded children.

In Romero's nihilistic parable, a child becomes the symbolic "enemy within". In John Poage's film, a grave robber explains his "sickness" by way of a screaming match with one of the anxious teens: "Didn't you say you were bit by a vampire. You didn't drink his blood did you?"/"It was an accident!"

Initially, I felt I needed to deal with this film as a "child of Romero". The lineage to the Indie Screams of the 70's is explicit; yet, as a child might ask a parent "why" things are as they appear to be, this film seems unable to confer with any family members at all. In result, The Wickeds bastardizes famous horror sequences such as the Ben/Ghoul attack scene from Night of the Living Dead, while feigning ignorance to their meaning.

There are a few moments in the film, in which the parody seems deliberate, almost intelligent. These moments of fogged acumen are both offset and undermined by other more fundamentally poor choices. The "hero's" twin brother has a southern accent that none of the other teenagers share. But really, to identify the trouble with this film in one detail is as practical as covering an amputation wound with a band-aid. The Wickeds tries to juggle the legacies of porn, vampire films, ghost/haunting films, zombie films, schlock, and WB Nighttime Soap Operas. And through the mire, a part of me feels this disaster of a picture, pulled in a hundred futile directions, is its own kind of message.

"You guys steal from the dead? That's worse than stealing from the living because they don't even have death insurance."

And the message says more than "Look at me, I got a camera!" Oh, don't get me wrong, the film is terrible, but horror films are often credited with the same contribution to social degradation as pornography is, they just don't always feature the same production values as porn... well, except in this case. Though perhaps that's appropriate, as The Wickeds really is 87 minutes of cinematic masturbation. The difference between this and porn is that porn helps the audience get off. In this case, it works the other way around.