The Incredible Film Fest
Sándor Lau, sandor_lau@yahoo.com
June 30, 2002
Incredible Film Fest Auckland, New Zealand April 11-May 2, 2002
| MAU MAU SEX SEX—USA 2001 Tues. April 16, Civic Theatre Genre: cannibal, comedy, shockumentary, sleazy, stock footage, scenery chewing, nudity, ape love Forgive me for stating the obvious if I point out that the Incredible Film Fest is like Levi’s for women but the opposite, made by men, for men. Porn and violence are the festival’s bread and butter. What sets the festival apart from cineplexes and cineplexxxes, are its quirky, foreign takes on violence, and intelligent, critical view of porn. In other words, the festival is something you could justify by saying it was a school project, like going to the Sex Museum in Amsterdam, rather than the peep show on Karangahape Rd. Mau Mau Sex Sex steals its name from an exploitation film distributed by producers Dan Sonney and David F. Friedman. Originally entitled Mau Mau, the film was an anthropological piece from Africa. When the director brought the film back to the States and couldn’t find anyone to distribute it, he met Dan and Dave. They hired African-American actors and a back lot to make a skirmish scene into a battle, added some spicy love, and tagged Sex Sex onto the end of the title. The film did not win any Oscars, but it earned them plenty of Benjamins. Obviously, these two men are inexcusable. So inexcusable, that their films are now being held in historical archives, and their work studied by college professors. So inexcusable that director Ted Bonnitt had to make a documentary about them and their work. Dan is eighty-five and Dave seventy-seven when the film is made. Half of the comedy comes from hearing two old-school porn peddlers going on about their gall bladders. For all the “scandalous” and “indecent” work put out by these sunshine boys of smut, I would not be surprised to find them voting Republican. Mau Mau Sex Sex takes an insightful look into the contradictions of America. While publicly scorned for corrupting the morals of the nation, Dan and Dave are poster-boys for the capitalist wet dream, and therefore necessary to the same system that publicly shuns them. They scoff at the same Puritan morality which represses sexual desire and keeps the punters pouring into the theaters, and gives Dan and Dave the cheapest publicity in the world any time there’s an outcry against their work. Not surprisingly, the old boys have quite negative attitudes towards hard core porn, the business that eventually put them out of business. In all the exploitation films they made, they were never allowed to show graphic sex. They started out filming at nudist camps, but quickly moved on, as they had to bring their own models to substitute for the beer guts and sacks of cauliflower that most campers carried around. Perhaps more than sex, Mau Mau Sex Sex is an intelligent, funny and insightful look at prudishness. In one story, Dave is called into the censor’s office questioning the use of this phrase on a poster: “Nubile starlets sucked into a vortex of passion!” The censor says, “You can’t use that word, I know what that means.” Dave insists he doesn’t know, and the censor finally tells him that “nubile” must be stricken. This must be the same censor who moved to NZ to take moral guardianship here. Also banned from the Incredible Fest is the French sex and guns female revenge film, Baise Moi, which in the spirit of American contradiction, was named as one of Time Magazine’s top 10 European films of 2000. The censor was afraid NZ would begin morally degrading activities like smoking clove cigarettes and letting dogs shit all over the sidewalk. |
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