Mondo Nexus

Strange gay porn pseudo-doc It's hard to know what to make of MONDO NEXUS, a gay porn flick so obscure it's almost impossible to track down save via a hyper-rare, ancient video master. It's a strange collision between documentary and sex film, not a true White Coater and not even really "about" anything... But it's certainly not boring!

Subtitled, rather ludicrously, "A World of Connections," the film seems in its broad strokes to be a primer on gay life in early '70s NYC. There's a trip to a sex shop, interviews with sadomasochists and a hustler, and a variety of sex scenes purporting to show different modes of gay sexual behavior - there's a solo, an orgy, a weird sequence on a painter's ladder for some reason, and an encounter next to a truck in a gay cruise bar, where the vehicle purportedly gets participants revved up by generating a kind of macho, Castro Clone-style atmosphere.

Strangest of all are the interviews. The most shocking for me was the first one, with the hustler, presented only in silhouette. The fey interviewer runs him through a few probing questions, which elicit genuinely bizarre answers that are so strange they seem like they have to be true. For "What was your freakiest trick?" the guy describes being raped at gunpoint in a car, which goes well beyond the usual "Well, once I wore leather" type of answer that generally suffices as kink in lazy sex films. The next response is the real hum-dinger, though, as the guy relates being picked up by a thirty-something and brought home to "initiate" his 12-year-old son into gay lovemaking. One prays to god the story is fake, something dreamt up as shock value to get hebephiliacs' motors running, but the anonymity of the interview and graphic detail of the story still drive it too close to reality for comfort. Truly chilling stuff.

Much less horrifying, merely by default, is the later interview with a trio of leather queens, who candidly discuss everything from pissing and fisting to a dalliance with scat play. Again, it's fascinating to see answers that are so unguarded - usually the staginess of porn interviews can be smelled a mile away, and they generally shy away from anything truly controversial. It suggests there was probably, at least initially, some real documentary component to the production, and that perhaps it got retrofitted into the monstrosity it is now when some larger plan fell through.

In between these documentary segments, the sex scenes aren't terrible, and feature generally attractive performers and decent - if not terribly passionate - action. Having gone in expecting a who's-who of the ugliest, hairiest men in the city (which low-rent gay pseudo-docs usually seem primed to deliver), I was pleasantly surprised by the reasonably attractive bevy of guys, and it made the sex scenes easy to swallow - they're not terribly long and redirect quickly to the documentary mumbo jumbo. That still leaves the film as a whole a schizophrenic mess, but at a brisk 56 minutes, it's a quick one, and reasonably diverting.