A Serbian Film (2010)

Note:  I watched this on youtube.

Every now and then a movie comes along that shocks more sensibilities than a Victorian ankle show.  “It’s obscene and has fucked up shit in it.  You should totally watch it and be offended like me,” people tend to say.  So you sit down and watch it.  See a bit of shit that is indeed fucked up and wonder why someone might make this sort of thing.  A Serbian Film is one of the latest of these.

The film boils down to a retired porn star comes, or cums, out of retirement and does some fucked up shit.  There is also some newborn fucking.

Milos is our former porn actor who is renowned for having a large cock and being able to fuck on cue without needing a fluffer.  Apparently, he needs money pretty badly.  He lives in a house that would probably fetch upper six figures here in Utah.  Why he doesn’t sell it and move to a much smaller place the movie never says.  His wife also mentions in passing that he has a University degree in something.  He could get a job somewhere but again doesn’t.  

A former porn starlet comes to him with an offer.  A guy is making an arty porn thing and would like him to star in it.  He’s even offering a large amount of money.  Milos’s wife tells him he should take the job because it is good money and it ain’t like you’re going to have to fuck your son or anything.  Milos accepts and we start on our merry way.

The porn film starts innocently enough.  He just has to get a blow job from some chick.  Why that wasn’t bad at all.  The next scene has him getting another blow job and punching the chick in the face while a young girl watches.  He isn’t comfortable with this but a guy holds him in place and he cums all over the chick’s face after a bit so you can assume he enjoyed it.  The girl watching is dressed as Alice of Wonderland fame.  I’m guessing this is symbolic of Milos heading ever downward in the rabbit hole.

Well, Milos didn’t sign up for punching chicks and being watched by young girls and wants to quit.  Rather than just call the director he decides to tell him in person.  The director ends up drugging him with horse aphrodisiacs.  This may also be the bit with the newborn porn.  The details are already a bit fuzzy.  Anyways, the newborn porn segment would have worked better if we didn’t actually see it.  A few sound effects and a look of horror on Milos’s face would have done wonders.  Instead we get a fairly silly looking scene where we see too much.  And, yes, I realize that I am critiquing a scene where a newborn is fucked and I’m trying to make it work better.  
Around this point the movie becomes The Hangover and we get to watch Milos descend even farther into Hell.  Along the way he runs away when asked to fuck the earlier young girl, he fucks/ decapitates  someone else, and fucks his son.  There is a thing in there, where he skull fucks a dude to death that reminded me of R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket.  After all this I guess the family decides that therapy is too expensive and kills themselves.  Another film crew enters and we get one last “shock”:  necrophilia, although it isn’t shown.

The co-writer/director has swears that the movie is somehow symbolic of how Serbia has been treated.  I know exactly fuck all about Serbia so I have no idea how true that is.  There is quite a bit that seems symbolic, I guess.  I see it more as a commentary on the escalating nature of porn and exploitation films.  Basically both genres are identified by one-upsmanship.  You have a young lady being quadruple penetrated?  Well we have a young lady being quintuple penetrated and a midget fucking a horse.  Yeah well, in our next movie we are going to have… and so on.  So, the cold war nuclear arms escalation only with fucking.

The movie never made me angry or disgusted like a lot of the reactions to it.  It was too well made to even register.  Something like this needs shitty film stock and scratches in the print to achieve verisimilitude.  If it looked like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or, more recently, The Devil’s Rejects it would have reduced a lot of the “you are watching a movie” distance that the sheer glossiness of the movie has miles of.  I’m sure I’ll never watch it again.  Not out of disgust, mind you, just out of lack of interest.

- Bill Brock