Batman XXX, or: The Dark Knight Comes Again

 

 

Today at ComicsAlliance, it’s the most anticipated review of a porn parody of the year when I deliver 1600 hot, throbbing words about Batman XXX!

It is, as you might expect, probably not a review that you want to get caught reading at your workplace, but there’s nothing pornographic about the review itself. There is one picture of Evan Stone and Kimberly Kane in mid-coitus, but their lady-and-gentlemen-bits are cropped out, and CA’s rules against profanity meant that I had yet another opportunity to write the word “shtupping,” which I just do not get to do as much as I’d like.

In any event, I actually did my best to contextualize it and provide a good review. I know, you’re shocked: “Chris Sims? Writing a pseudo-brainy essay about something silly and ultimately inconsequential? ALLOW ME TO RETRIEVE MY MONOCLE!” To which I say “Shut up, jerk.”

I do wonder, though… does this mean I’m one a’ them sex bloggers now?

15 thoughts on “Batman XXX, or: The Dark Knight Comes Again

  1. All I know is you got paid to watch porn, so if you weren’t already living the dream of 15 year olds (and 15 year olds at heart) everywhere before, you sure as hell are now.

  2. Is saying that the porn movie could have done without the porn damning with faint praise? Because it was so good, sometimes those scenes felt unnecessary to the larger plot.

  3. Pros: You have a job where you paid to watch porn.

    Cons: That exact same job also required you to watch Marmaduke.

    On balance, I think you’re still ahead. But it may be a closer call than just this item suggests…

  4. “Because it was so good, sometimes those scenes felt unnecessary to the larger plot.”

    Plot? A porn movie with a plot?!?

    Why?

  5. Yep, Nimbus, back in the days of “porno-chic” ca. 1973 and well into the eighties, the so-called Golden Age of Porn, back when porn movies were shot on actual film, porn movies used to have plots. Even after the shift to shooting on video, the semblance of plot-based narrative remained for many years, especially in porn geared to the couples market.

    As the nineties moved on with the rise of gonzo, POV and wall-to-wall , when basically any Bruce, Dick and Harriet with a camcorder could make his/her own porn or, with the right contacts could get it taken up and distributed, narrative concerns were tossed aside in the interests of portraying raw sex. This approach probably has some validity, since most viewers probably just fast forwarded (in the days of Beta and VHS) or skip (in the case of DVDs) directly to the sex scenes, anyway.

    As for why porn movies bothered with having plots in the old days; in the very old days when porn was very much an underground (and illegal) thing – the days of stag films and 8 mm loops, they didn’t. In the seventies, in light of the sexual revolution and a liberalization of standards, there was a movement among the makers of sex films to seek legitimacy as an artform. Also, if porn is seen as a legitimate art… the welding of explicit eroticism and narrative… a work of porn becomes easier to defend in obscenity cases on First Amendment grounds concerning the protection of free expression.

    Today’s porn geared toward the “raincoat crowd” is, in many ways, reminiscent of the old 8mm loops than Golden Age porn. However, now that people are making their own and posting it to certain sites on the net, often for free, the porn industry is in trouble. I suspect they’re trying new things to goose paid sales and rentals and, again, they’re looking to the past.

    In the seventies, porno parodies were quite common as were stealing plots from popular movies and sexing them up. In the past year and a half or so, there’s been an uptick in the releases of nostalgic parodies of beloved TV series.

    Getting back to Batman XXX, however, like many, I am surprised that, despite Vivid’s team of lawyers, that DC hasn’t stepped in to stop or otherwise deflect this release. In the seventies, DC Comics squashed “Superwoman”, but it was apparently released crudely re-dubbed as “Ms. Magnificent” with the S-shield logo on the heroine’s shirt manually scratched out frame by frame

  6. Oh, Chris, sorry to take up your comment section with such a lengthy lecture.

  7. I watched the film, loved it for all the Batman love, um, bad choice of words there, I think.

    But I was disappointed that there was no callback to BATMAN #66.

    The “Boner” issue.

    Sample panel
    here
    .

    They just won’t stop saying “BONER”!

    And yeah, the Joker 3 way was super creepy!

  8. Not only did pornos have plots, but New Wave Hookers 2 had a plot twist!

    There were these hookers who under a spell by Little Willie, who was the pimp. (Played by child actor John Anthony Bailey from Wonder Bug) He was also an evangelistic preacher for the church of “Big Willie”, the great pimp in the sky.
    But it turns out the whole time, Little Willie was under a spell of the bisexual Queens of Atlantis who were having the hookers kill the men of the earth after schtupping them.

    I used to have showing parties and we’d fast forward the boring sex scenes just to laugh at the story.

  9. @Donald G: My comment was merely a rhetorical chuckle at the idea of plots in pornos (because that’s not what most of us watch ’em for – and I was a teenager in the early 80s). I never expected a serious lengthy response. Wow. In a good way, I mean.

    I bow to your knowledge.

  10. Nimbus: I was a teenager in the early eighties, too, in a Navy town and the home of Pat Robertson’s empire. I remember the news stories when the Norfolk vice squad raided the Naro Expanded Cinema (an Arts Repertory Theater, not a porno place) to seize the German gay film, “Taxi zum Klo”. I had known about the existence of movies for adults with “nekkid people” since I was eight from being driven down High Street in Portsmouth for swimming lessons at the Y. While the theater across the street showed R-rated sexploitation flicks and down the street, the Commodore showed porno, but it was the raid on the Naro in late eighty or early eighty-one that got me interested in the intersection of porn, obscenity, and First Amendment issues (as a layperson, since I am not a lawyer).

    By the time I was old enough to get in to see a porn movie, vice suppression efforts, revised zoning laws and economic conditions had largely killed off the porn theaters back home. So, for years I read library books on obscenity cases and academic books on porn… in addition to other recreational and academic reading. I didn’t see my first genuine porn movies until I was well into my twenties, while my wife was in grad school. Some of what she was studying, which I was able to glean second-hand … feminist theory, queer theory, gender theory… came in useful.

    Now, I over-analyze porn on a well-regarded comic blogger’s comments thread. There’s probably a cautionary tale in there somewhere…(Hey, waitaminute!…)