MILF

After the painful experience of watching Kendo's "Milf", I wondered if Adult Entertainment had officially died but no one ever sent me the memo announcing its passing. As a film enthusiast who has watched tens of thousands of films in theaters and even more on a TV screen over the years, this hodge-podge of footage was most distressing.

Especially in the '60s I have been exposed to considerable avant-garde filmmaking ranging from Maya Deren to Stan Brakhage and I know abstract, non-narrative motion pictures hold some interest analogous to peering at Abstract Art in a museum. Kendo aspires to such abstraction though earning his living cranking out porn, but this time he failed miserably.

On paper the five sex scenes resemble his familiar output for labels like daring! Media and Marc Dorcel, yet this 77-minute release from lesbian label Girlfriends Films (by way of Viv Thomas in Britain) is closer to cutting-room floor random footage than any sort of feature film. It's shot MOS and remote rendering the sex unerotic, and Kendo's fondness for repeating shots and "splintering" the work in the editing room creates an incoherent mess. Adding to this, the DVD, like many sloppily programmed lately, is shabbily constructed with credits for only one of the five sequences displayed.

Fake dubbed sound, just like in primitive porn shot 40 years earlier plus terrible framing and focus complete the "abstract" approach. If Kendo worked for a photography firm or a publisher, he would be roundly reprimanded for his arbitrary cropping of images -the man absolutely refuses to show a forehead or a full face in close-ups and belongs to the gynecological school of representing sex on screen.

Taken in total, "Milf" is inferior to the amateur night gonzo garbage that represents 21st Century sex-by-the-pound, and is certainly the worst ever signed by a filmmaker - the other hacks have the vestige of intelligence to remain anonymous. I'd like to interview the gatekeeper at Girlfirends Films, a label I respect for its contribution over the past decade-plus to lesbian cinema, who approved this junk for release as shoddy as it is.