In their justification for passing this film with an 18 certificate, the BBFC stated that the film is,”in tone and treatment, is distinguishable from a sex work”. It’s a frankly ridiculous claim, and perhaps shows up the nonsensical situation that the British censors have dug themselves into with their facile distinction between ‘sex works’ (erotic films they disapprove of) and ‘non-sex works’ (erotic films they do approve of). Because, as Peter de Rome himself cheerfully admits in the excellent documentary included here, his films are porn, made with the express intention of being masturbatory material – the very definition the BBFC use to declare a film to be a ‘sex work’ and so banished to the sex-shop-only R18 category if it contains real, explicit sex – which this does, extensively. The Board also claim that the film has “artistic, cultural and historical merit”, which is true – but moreso than, say The Opening of Misty Beethoven, passed R18 several years ago? I don’t think so.
The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome
Moderator: MichaelB
-
MichaelB
- Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:20 pm
- Location: Worthing
- Contact:
Re: The Erotic Films of Peter De Rome
Strange Things Are Happening:
-
antnield
- Joined: Tue Jun 28, 2005 1:59 pm
- Location: Cheltenham, England
-
colinr0380
- Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
- Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK
Re: The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome
Well that was certainly an eye-opening experience! I wonder how the majority of the films would have worked with their original soundtracks but all of the newly commissioned scores worked extremely well I thought. Most of the films do not outstay their welcome and surprisingly for pornographic films a lot of the hardcore material, onanism and ejaculations usually occur quite quickly rather than being particularly lingered on for maximum impact. They often seem to come rather out of the blue, you might say!
Double Exposure is the film which follows a chap in a sky blue t-shirt and jeans walking up to a strange multi-level house (mirroring a little the strangely laid out flat in Peter de Rome's Scopo but also reminding me a little of modernist Zabriske Point style architecture). He seems to be drawn towards a naked figure on the top floor, enters the house, walks up a spiral staircase (which magically strips him naked) and then looks out of the window only to see himself looking up at the house from earlier.
Then he looks down from a balcony and sees himself again nude on a couch below. Then he goes downstairs (getting his clothes magically put back on again!) and walks off away from the house.
This one is particularly interesting for the overlapping time periods, perhaps a little reminiscent of the final sequence of 2001 where one character sees themselves further on down the line, although there is a sense that when the character actually reaches that point in the timeline where they are actually looking out of the house nude, that they may still not be satisfied, instead still disappointed that events have moved on while they were catching up. Or alternatively the vision of himself writhing on the couch might suggest that the action is a kind of daydream and the guy's mind is quite literally wandering around the environment whilst he is asleep!
Hot Pants is a quite bouncy piece, in which a chap shimmies out of his jeans (perhaps turning this into a warning about making sure that you are wearing a belt before doing any vigorous movements!), waves himself around a little (I think I noticed a helicopter move at one point) then masturbates to climax.
Quite a simple piece but the new score makes it wonderfully funky, and some of the fluid editing between normal speed and slow motion movements is really well done - interestingly the slow motion isn't used for the climax but to emphasise moments during the dancing. (Kind of a sexy version of Peckinpah's slow-motion violence inserts!)
The Second Coming. Talking of impressive erections, this short is full of them! From Buckingham Palace to Malaga resorts to various Hilton hotels. The characters even mount the Arc de Triomphe at one point, which is quite a sight to behold! There's a lot of emphasis on architecture in this one. Perhaps the score emphasises this, but it plays a little like one of those international jet-setting spy thrillers that came out in the wake of James Bond, existing to show exotic locations and suspicious characters acting shiftily who our heroes have to follow. Though once the characters go to Malaga, I was more reminded of those 1970s Jess Franco films set in Spain which seemed to bask in both the modernist apartment complexes and the old style narrow streets of the old cities.
As in Double Exposure, Peter de Rome always seems to have an eye for modern architecture that is surrounded by greenery. And de Rome did look uncannily like a young Bernard Hill in a couple of shots! (Maybe it was just the moustache that caused the comparison!)
Anyway eventually the characters track the mysterious stranger down to a room in which a seemingly dead guy has been literally nailed to a cross, crucified naked on one wall. I say seemingly because there is some movement evident, as the crucified guy gets an erection and then quite literalises the 'Second Coming' title, all whilst the congregation watches in quiet awe.
I suppose that this is an attempt to portray a gay saint, Sebastiane-style, though it also seems to be flirting with bondage situations, and is also just a very funny, bizarre punchline to a porn film!
Daydreams From A Crosstown Bus is about a guy on a bus who sees someone on the street and falls into a reverie about spending a day with him - riding bikes through the park, having a walk past some ejaculatory fountains, visiting the local aquarium and then having sex right there in front of all the fish, strolling around the docks, looking out over New York, then going back to an apartment for less aquatic themed sex (there's a neat scene of the couple kissing through a translucent shower curtain, which made me think of that scene from Irreversible. Then they both go behind it, which actually felt more erotic in the way that it was showing just figures and shadows moving rather than everything else!)
Then we cut back to the bus as it pulls away. But in an additional scene we get a surprisingly moving coda which speaks to urban alienation and the difficulty of connection (or of yet another dream guy who can never live up to, or exist in, reality).
Mumbo Jumbo is rather strange and avant-garde in that it features a lot of weird plaster casts and sculptures of mouths/vaginas with figures and/or penises visible inside them. Sort of creepy and strange at the same time (this also seems to be a good pair with the film in the extras called Moulage, since it is also set in the same studio, with a lot of the same sculpted pieces and features the same performer from Mumbo Jumbo getting himself plaster casted).
In addition to this there is a strange advertising voice over linking rhetoric about the "perfect body and performance" of a car with images of a nude. Then there is also some advertising imagery juxtaposed with nudes as well (and a couple of guys sharing a look at some photos of Judy Garland at different stages of her life juxtaposed with another guy looking at an erotic magazine).
Finally the whole film climaxes quite literally with a compilation of orgasm imagery intercut with fireworks and scored to the Liebestod section of Tristan and Isolde! Talk about a twenty-one gun salute!
Green Thoughts is one for nature lovers. A chap, apparently inspired by getting a green t-shirt out of his drawer, goes on a jaunt around the botanical gardens, looking at all the various pistils and stamens, literally hugs a tree and seems inspired back at home (is this later on or another daydream?) to masturbate thinking about it. There's quite a nice contrast between looking out of one window from the apartment at a brick wall and then looking into a room the other way from a verdant garden, which I guess is suggesting something about the urban environment juxtaposed with a natural one (although the natural one here is a totally man-made arboreal garden, complete with ejaculating fountains!)
Underground is the film about a striped suited young man exchanging looks with a long haired flowery-faded jeaned hippie on a crowded subway train before going to a less crowded carriage to have vigorous sex before the next station, whereupon the suited chap makes a quick exit.
The score of this one is quite hilarious at times - I particularly like during the first section of the blow job scene there is a sound of something like a hammer hitting a block of wood that is perfectly timed to each stroke! Then the score goes into a nice dreamy, slightly tension filled phase, as if to emphasise the risky nature of the location as well as the propulsive forward motion of both the sex and the subway train itself.
I must admit though that I couldn't really concentrate on the erotic aspects of this film since, as a regular train commuter who regularly finds it a horrible nightmare to have to ask people who leave baby carriages blocking the exits if they can move them so that I can leave the train, I was thinking more of what the appropriate etiquette would be if you instead had to ask two people having sex if they could possibly move out of the way of the doors! Would I be like that one guy in the otherwise deserted carriage and just have to pretend to be asleep while the couple were fooling around, even if it meant that I was going to miss my stop? Or would it be possible to just tap them on the shoulder, apologise for interrupting and ask if it would be possible to squeeze past?
Anyway, it was another enjoyable short. The flashes of fun humour are the best things about them - in Underground I especially liked the way that the suited man is reading his paper at the beginning and then after he leaves the train at the end, the hippie sits down with the paper to read the punchline headline of "Is There No Sense of Decency?"!
In the end I suppose we could see the film as illustrating the lengths to which a commuter has to go to in order to get a free newspaper on their train journey!
Prometheus is quite strong stuff, going into areas of BDSM. After a introduction at the Port Authority Bus Terminal (which I have previously only been familiar with from the episode of The Simpsons where they visit New York by bus!) there is a nice sequence at the start of the main character walking through 42nd Street. There are some great theatre marquees on display in some shots advertising that they are "Cooled by refrigeration" and are playing double bills of Frogs starring Ray Milland and Godzilla Vs The Smog Monster ("a tidal wave of slimy horror!"), or Robert Mitchum ("as a two-fisted machine gunning adventurer") in The Wrath of God playing against Oliver Reed in The Sitting Target!
The character (dressed in an American flag t-shirt) appears to be being stalked by an ominous car (with the paranoia thriller score adding to that impression), until it stops and he gets in. We get to see what must have been the height of modern technology at the time - a rotary dial car telephone as one of the inhabitants of the car who looks a little like Jesus (or perhaps more appropriately, Charles Manson!) makes a telephone call, presumably to prepare for their arrival.
The message of this film appears to be never to accept lifts from strangers. Unless of course you really want to end up spreadeagled naked to a hardwood floor and have your crotch stamped on! I thought it was very amusing the way that the Jesus/Manson guy (complete with flowing white robes!) ushers two or three guys in to ramp up the action even more, eventually culminating in the inevitable gentleman holding a bullwhip (I can only assume that in all of the excitement the handle of that whip purely by accident ended up being inserted into a certain orifice!)
My big concern with this film was how exactly they were going to explain there being four hooks in the floor to any casual guests that might come around! "Oh, that's where we tie people down and have our way with them!" Also, wouldn't putting those hooks in the floor wreck the woodwork? I'm afraid that I worry too much about little incidental details like these!
Anyway the guy getting manhandled, probed and pulled around seemed to be enjoying it, so no harm done! And I suppose we do get a happy ending as after being left alone he is discovered, untied (with the reappearance of magic again briefly as one of the ropes comes untied in a stop-motion animation fashion) and carried out of the picture by a different, more sympathetic man!
Fragments: The Incomplete Films of Peter de Rome is the highlight of the whole set - a wonderful documentary talking through Peter de Rome's life (apparently going over to the US after an offer from Selznick to work on the remake of A Farewell To Arms, but the film stalled production and instead he went to work on a counter at Tiffany's in order to make some money) and with extracts from lots of his uncompleted works. De Rome brings up Welles's unfinished films himself, and even though he quickly states that he is not in the same league this documentary is definitely in the same fascinating vein as the "One Man Band" one on the F For Fake Criterion set which showed all of those fascinating extracts from films that never came to be.
One of the great things about the documentary is that we see some of the films that would otherwise be of anonymous guys jerking off and so on, but De Rome gives some charming context to a lot of the films, saying where he found particular guys and what was going on around the shooting of the films that brings that period to life even more than seeing the films themselves do. The interview starts with De Rome rifling through some family pictures and saying what their significance is to him, and in a sense the porn films are very much performing the same kind of function of bringing to life again previous encounters and acquaintances maybe long lost, as well as of course providing a valuable informal record of the era too.
The other films by Peter de Rome included as extra features are perhaps even more interesting than those in the main feature - Scopo is a great piece on voyeurism and I'm still trying to work out the geography of that London flat (maybe not quite as good as The Tenant or Repulsion but it brings that feeling of paranoia to mind a little whilst watching!); The Fire Island Kids is set in perhaps the most luxurious beach house I have ever seen (I wish that I had what looks like a fur lined birds nest-style box high above my living room in which to relax in of an evening!); Moulage is about the process of full body casting, although I was much more charmed by the extremely non-plussed cat sitting at the bottom of the bed watching all of the goop being applied! (and I love the way that when the chest piece is taken off and put to one side that the cat immediately jumps into it to explore!); and Brown Study contrasts a modern American black guy against Leni Reifenstahl's photographs of the People of Kau.
Abracadaver! is a nice, if slight, tale of dastardly magicians. It perhaps might be a better fit for a Nathan Schiff release than a Peter de Rome one (it seems that the moments of magic in Peter de Rome's actual films are more benign than the pseudo-snuff heterosexual murdering tricks that turn up here!), but I can't complain at all about its inclusion on this release.
Of course the booklet essays are also up to the usual BFI standard - there are pieces on the burgeoning gay movement at the time, about the films themselves as 'experimental artworks', and a fascinating piece charting the history of gay sex films from Un Chant d'amour and Fireworks onwards. Although while that piece does mention the Andy Warhol film Blow Job as an important work bringing gay sex closer to the silver screen (if still off screen!), it strangely doesn't mention the very impressive, if rough-hewn, Warhol magnum opus filmed a year later (also on Fire Island) called My Hustler, which really deserves to be unearthed for better appreciation at some time in the future.
Double Exposure is the film which follows a chap in a sky blue t-shirt and jeans walking up to a strange multi-level house (mirroring a little the strangely laid out flat in Peter de Rome's Scopo but also reminding me a little of modernist Zabriske Point style architecture). He seems to be drawn towards a naked figure on the top floor, enters the house, walks up a spiral staircase (which magically strips him naked) and then looks out of the window only to see himself looking up at the house from earlier.
Then he looks down from a balcony and sees himself again nude on a couch below. Then he goes downstairs (getting his clothes magically put back on again!) and walks off away from the house.
This one is particularly interesting for the overlapping time periods, perhaps a little reminiscent of the final sequence of 2001 where one character sees themselves further on down the line, although there is a sense that when the character actually reaches that point in the timeline where they are actually looking out of the house nude, that they may still not be satisfied, instead still disappointed that events have moved on while they were catching up. Or alternatively the vision of himself writhing on the couch might suggest that the action is a kind of daydream and the guy's mind is quite literally wandering around the environment whilst he is asleep!
Hot Pants is a quite bouncy piece, in which a chap shimmies out of his jeans (perhaps turning this into a warning about making sure that you are wearing a belt before doing any vigorous movements!), waves himself around a little (I think I noticed a helicopter move at one point) then masturbates to climax.
Quite a simple piece but the new score makes it wonderfully funky, and some of the fluid editing between normal speed and slow motion movements is really well done - interestingly the slow motion isn't used for the climax but to emphasise moments during the dancing. (Kind of a sexy version of Peckinpah's slow-motion violence inserts!)
The Second Coming. Talking of impressive erections, this short is full of them! From Buckingham Palace to Malaga resorts to various Hilton hotels. The characters even mount the Arc de Triomphe at one point, which is quite a sight to behold! There's a lot of emphasis on architecture in this one. Perhaps the score emphasises this, but it plays a little like one of those international jet-setting spy thrillers that came out in the wake of James Bond, existing to show exotic locations and suspicious characters acting shiftily who our heroes have to follow. Though once the characters go to Malaga, I was more reminded of those 1970s Jess Franco films set in Spain which seemed to bask in both the modernist apartment complexes and the old style narrow streets of the old cities.
As in Double Exposure, Peter de Rome always seems to have an eye for modern architecture that is surrounded by greenery. And de Rome did look uncannily like a young Bernard Hill in a couple of shots! (Maybe it was just the moustache that caused the comparison!)
Anyway eventually the characters track the mysterious stranger down to a room in which a seemingly dead guy has been literally nailed to a cross, crucified naked on one wall. I say seemingly because there is some movement evident, as the crucified guy gets an erection and then quite literalises the 'Second Coming' title, all whilst the congregation watches in quiet awe.
I suppose that this is an attempt to portray a gay saint, Sebastiane-style, though it also seems to be flirting with bondage situations, and is also just a very funny, bizarre punchline to a porn film!
Daydreams From A Crosstown Bus is about a guy on a bus who sees someone on the street and falls into a reverie about spending a day with him - riding bikes through the park, having a walk past some ejaculatory fountains, visiting the local aquarium and then having sex right there in front of all the fish, strolling around the docks, looking out over New York, then going back to an apartment for less aquatic themed sex (there's a neat scene of the couple kissing through a translucent shower curtain, which made me think of that scene from Irreversible. Then they both go behind it, which actually felt more erotic in the way that it was showing just figures and shadows moving rather than everything else!)
Then we cut back to the bus as it pulls away. But in an additional scene we get a surprisingly moving coda which speaks to urban alienation and the difficulty of connection (or of yet another dream guy who can never live up to, or exist in, reality).
Mumbo Jumbo is rather strange and avant-garde in that it features a lot of weird plaster casts and sculptures of mouths/vaginas with figures and/or penises visible inside them. Sort of creepy and strange at the same time (this also seems to be a good pair with the film in the extras called Moulage, since it is also set in the same studio, with a lot of the same sculpted pieces and features the same performer from Mumbo Jumbo getting himself plaster casted).
In addition to this there is a strange advertising voice over linking rhetoric about the "perfect body and performance" of a car with images of a nude. Then there is also some advertising imagery juxtaposed with nudes as well (and a couple of guys sharing a look at some photos of Judy Garland at different stages of her life juxtaposed with another guy looking at an erotic magazine).
Finally the whole film climaxes quite literally with a compilation of orgasm imagery intercut with fireworks and scored to the Liebestod section of Tristan and Isolde! Talk about a twenty-one gun salute!
Green Thoughts is one for nature lovers. A chap, apparently inspired by getting a green t-shirt out of his drawer, goes on a jaunt around the botanical gardens, looking at all the various pistils and stamens, literally hugs a tree and seems inspired back at home (is this later on or another daydream?) to masturbate thinking about it. There's quite a nice contrast between looking out of one window from the apartment at a brick wall and then looking into a room the other way from a verdant garden, which I guess is suggesting something about the urban environment juxtaposed with a natural one (although the natural one here is a totally man-made arboreal garden, complete with ejaculating fountains!)
Underground is the film about a striped suited young man exchanging looks with a long haired flowery-faded jeaned hippie on a crowded subway train before going to a less crowded carriage to have vigorous sex before the next station, whereupon the suited chap makes a quick exit.
The score of this one is quite hilarious at times - I particularly like during the first section of the blow job scene there is a sound of something like a hammer hitting a block of wood that is perfectly timed to each stroke! Then the score goes into a nice dreamy, slightly tension filled phase, as if to emphasise the risky nature of the location as well as the propulsive forward motion of both the sex and the subway train itself.
I must admit though that I couldn't really concentrate on the erotic aspects of this film since, as a regular train commuter who regularly finds it a horrible nightmare to have to ask people who leave baby carriages blocking the exits if they can move them so that I can leave the train, I was thinking more of what the appropriate etiquette would be if you instead had to ask two people having sex if they could possibly move out of the way of the doors! Would I be like that one guy in the otherwise deserted carriage and just have to pretend to be asleep while the couple were fooling around, even if it meant that I was going to miss my stop? Or would it be possible to just tap them on the shoulder, apologise for interrupting and ask if it would be possible to squeeze past?
Anyway, it was another enjoyable short. The flashes of fun humour are the best things about them - in Underground I especially liked the way that the suited man is reading his paper at the beginning and then after he leaves the train at the end, the hippie sits down with the paper to read the punchline headline of "Is There No Sense of Decency?"!
In the end I suppose we could see the film as illustrating the lengths to which a commuter has to go to in order to get a free newspaper on their train journey!
Prometheus is quite strong stuff, going into areas of BDSM. After a introduction at the Port Authority Bus Terminal (which I have previously only been familiar with from the episode of The Simpsons where they visit New York by bus!) there is a nice sequence at the start of the main character walking through 42nd Street. There are some great theatre marquees on display in some shots advertising that they are "Cooled by refrigeration" and are playing double bills of Frogs starring Ray Milland and Godzilla Vs The Smog Monster ("a tidal wave of slimy horror!"), or Robert Mitchum ("as a two-fisted machine gunning adventurer") in The Wrath of God playing against Oliver Reed in The Sitting Target!
The character (dressed in an American flag t-shirt) appears to be being stalked by an ominous car (with the paranoia thriller score adding to that impression), until it stops and he gets in. We get to see what must have been the height of modern technology at the time - a rotary dial car telephone as one of the inhabitants of the car who looks a little like Jesus (or perhaps more appropriately, Charles Manson!) makes a telephone call, presumably to prepare for their arrival.
The message of this film appears to be never to accept lifts from strangers. Unless of course you really want to end up spreadeagled naked to a hardwood floor and have your crotch stamped on! I thought it was very amusing the way that the Jesus/Manson guy (complete with flowing white robes!) ushers two or three guys in to ramp up the action even more, eventually culminating in the inevitable gentleman holding a bullwhip (I can only assume that in all of the excitement the handle of that whip purely by accident ended up being inserted into a certain orifice!)
My big concern with this film was how exactly they were going to explain there being four hooks in the floor to any casual guests that might come around! "Oh, that's where we tie people down and have our way with them!" Also, wouldn't putting those hooks in the floor wreck the woodwork? I'm afraid that I worry too much about little incidental details like these!
Anyway the guy getting manhandled, probed and pulled around seemed to be enjoying it, so no harm done! And I suppose we do get a happy ending as after being left alone he is discovered, untied (with the reappearance of magic again briefly as one of the ropes comes untied in a stop-motion animation fashion) and carried out of the picture by a different, more sympathetic man!
Fragments: The Incomplete Films of Peter de Rome is the highlight of the whole set - a wonderful documentary talking through Peter de Rome's life (apparently going over to the US after an offer from Selznick to work on the remake of A Farewell To Arms, but the film stalled production and instead he went to work on a counter at Tiffany's in order to make some money) and with extracts from lots of his uncompleted works. De Rome brings up Welles's unfinished films himself, and even though he quickly states that he is not in the same league this documentary is definitely in the same fascinating vein as the "One Man Band" one on the F For Fake Criterion set which showed all of those fascinating extracts from films that never came to be.
One of the great things about the documentary is that we see some of the films that would otherwise be of anonymous guys jerking off and so on, but De Rome gives some charming context to a lot of the films, saying where he found particular guys and what was going on around the shooting of the films that brings that period to life even more than seeing the films themselves do. The interview starts with De Rome rifling through some family pictures and saying what their significance is to him, and in a sense the porn films are very much performing the same kind of function of bringing to life again previous encounters and acquaintances maybe long lost, as well as of course providing a valuable informal record of the era too.
The other films by Peter de Rome included as extra features are perhaps even more interesting than those in the main feature - Scopo is a great piece on voyeurism and I'm still trying to work out the geography of that London flat (maybe not quite as good as The Tenant or Repulsion but it brings that feeling of paranoia to mind a little whilst watching!); The Fire Island Kids is set in perhaps the most luxurious beach house I have ever seen (I wish that I had what looks like a fur lined birds nest-style box high above my living room in which to relax in of an evening!); Moulage is about the process of full body casting, although I was much more charmed by the extremely non-plussed cat sitting at the bottom of the bed watching all of the goop being applied! (and I love the way that when the chest piece is taken off and put to one side that the cat immediately jumps into it to explore!); and Brown Study contrasts a modern American black guy against Leni Reifenstahl's photographs of the People of Kau.
Abracadaver! is a nice, if slight, tale of dastardly magicians. It perhaps might be a better fit for a Nathan Schiff release than a Peter de Rome one (it seems that the moments of magic in Peter de Rome's actual films are more benign than the pseudo-snuff heterosexual murdering tricks that turn up here!), but I can't complain at all about its inclusion on this release.
Of course the booklet essays are also up to the usual BFI standard - there are pieces on the burgeoning gay movement at the time, about the films themselves as 'experimental artworks', and a fascinating piece charting the history of gay sex films from Un Chant d'amour and Fireworks onwards. Although while that piece does mention the Andy Warhol film Blow Job as an important work bringing gay sex closer to the silver screen (if still off screen!), it strangely doesn't mention the very impressive, if rough-hewn, Warhol magnum opus filmed a year later (also on Fire Island) called My Hustler, which really deserves to be unearthed for better appreciation at some time in the future.
-
MichaelB
- Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:20 pm
- Location: Worthing
- Contact:
-
MichaelB
- Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:20 pm
- Location: Worthing
- Contact:
Re: The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome
The BFI has just won a Golden Flying Penis trophy (picture here) at the Erotic Awards for The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome, "in recognition of a significant contribution to the appreciation of the art and history of erotic cinema made during the past year."
Given that the design of the trophy fully matches its name, you can probably work out yourself if the link is NSFW.
Given that the design of the trophy fully matches its name, you can probably work out yourself if the link is NSFW.
-
MichaelB
- Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:20 pm
- Location: Worthing
- Contact:
Re: The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome
Composer Stephen Thrower discusses his three new Peter de Rome scores. Of Fire Island Kids, he says:
I hope it conveys the kind of strange compulsive space that opens up when you fuck while stoned.
-
knives
- Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm
Re: The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome
The documentary on this set is just wonderful and probably the best I've seen made for one of these DVDs. de Rome's such a funny odd fellow. The moment outside the Apollo had me rolling.
-
MichaelB
- Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:20 pm
- Location: Worthing
- Contact:
Re: The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome
Sadly, this IMDB conversation fizzled out a fortnight ago, but it's well worth reading with the advance knowledge that 'davidvmcgillivray-24-905811' is the very producer being slagged off by Nathan Schiff fan 'chefjoseph' as a HACK, although he doesn't let on.colinr0380 wrote:Abracadaver! is a nice, if slight, tale of dastardly magicians. It perhaps might be a better fit for a Nathan Schiff release than a Peter de Rome one (it seems that the moments of magic in Peter de Rome's actual films are more benign than the pseudo-snuff heterosexual murdering tricks that turn up here!), but I can't complain at all about its inclusion on this release.
(Aside from the username, of course, which one might have thought would provide a pretty neon-illuminated clue...)
-
colinr0380
- Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
- Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK
Re: The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome
You know, watching Abracadaver! I couldn't help but be reminded of this Mitchell and Webb sketch, which seems to be going into the same uncomfortable job interview territory! Plus there is a follow up sketch in which the naive actor gets on set and finds the 'bath scene' has been replaced by him getting shackled to a board and getting whipped in front of both the cameras, the crew and the director's select group of specially invited friends, which really seems to be channelling the last scene of the Schiff short! (This was where I had slight qualms about Abracadaver!, since de Rome's character in that short is portrayed as quite predatory, for reasons that become apparent at the end, but which is quite in contrast to the charming gentleman on display in the real life documentary and the fun, rather than exploitative feeling, shorts on the rest of the disc)