Destricted [DVD] [2006]

This dvd has elements of everything you'd expect from film makers making films about sex and porn because it's full of sex and,er, porn.
How it got an 18 rating is beyond me, especially when you consider the kind of films that got banned in the 70s and 80s as this is pretty hardcore stuff at times and pretty boring at others.
It goes from the ridiculous (a man boning an industrial digger with a turnip up his khyber) to the headache inducing (20 minutes of strobing over a dude and his blow up doll) to the full on moaning and groaning, slobbering and dribbling Larry Clark film as mentioned in other reviews. Everything's off camera and you think they're not going to show anything, surely not but then BOOM!
It's more miss than hit and there's probably only a few of the films that you'll want to re-watch but at this price, I'd recommend it.

The reputation of being a "compilation of the most daring and sexually explicit films ever released in the United Kingdom" precedes Destricted and it undoubtedly finds itself on many a rental list because of it. Consisting of several short films (of varying duration) by different writers/directors, names such as Sam Taylor-Wood grabbed my interest and I expected a series of shorts which dealt with how sex is used in cinema, unfortunately though this seemed to have very little to say.

The first film on the disk tells how Balkan folklore mixes sex and superstition, given that our sexuality dictates a major part of our life behaviour, it's not surprising that it is intrinsically tied into old superstitions and ancient traditions. What starts off as a curiously interesting snippet of foreign culture becomes a bit of a drag when drawn-out folk songs are performed alongside full frontal nudity. Ladies aged from their teens to their '70s stand massaging their boobs, a scene immediately followed by a group of men masturbating directly into the earth - the background stories are fascinating, but the visuals are rather bizarre and surprisingly dull. The clear narrative of the first film is next replaced by an assault on the eyes and ears as a percussion track plays to a montage of sex scenes which change several times per second, this is a shorter film but it's still not easy to stick with. A film later on in the collection (number 5) is even more difficult to watch as we are shown a man with his inflatable doll and the whole thing is set to strobe lighting. The constant flashing (two or three times a second) warranted an epilepsy warning and those who don't suffer from the condition may find themselves skipping this one after a few seconds as the relentless flashing makes this practically impossible to watch for longer than a few moments.

Perhaps the most notorious of the inclusions on this disk is Larry Clark's 'Impaled'. This becomes the most graphic of the vignettes as we are shown a wannabe male porn star being interviewed and meeting his prospective co-actress before performing his first scene. However, because this consists almost entirely of interviews and we hear from the actresses it provides us with the only real exploration of sex in film and is interesting in places. We get to hear first-hand how the girls became involved in the industry, it humanises them and we understand how they feel about their careers, what they 'save for home', and what they feel comfortable with. At 37 minutes this is the longest feature on the disk and the least surreal (there are no guys having sex with industrial equipment here with root vegetables up their back passage). I like Sam Taylor-Wood and her work here promises to be the most filmic, but her video of a man 'enjoying' the open air lacks any real depth.

In a nutshell: Inevitably this DVD varies in terms of picture and audio quality as the content from each section is captured on different media, some are difficult to watch due to obscuring of the picture quality - but that is an artistic decision. It's an odd collection which lacks any real cohesive theme. I was expecting this to be an interesting look at sex in film, or at least to have something to say, but it fails to do so. Those who simply want to legitimately rent a title they can get their rocks off to will probably be disappointed, and those like me who assumed it would be layered with some sort of analysis or have substantial artistic value will be left wondering what the point of the project was. There are no extras and the picture quality varies from adequate to poor with the 7 segments ranging from bizarre, to boring, to benign.

Destricted is a brave, and therefore controversial, showcase of work by leading American and British artists. It offers various insights into the dark world sexual fantasies and porn, calling into question the role of the voyuer along the way. A refreshing release by a daring distributer!