aleksrb

Zivot i smrt porno bande (2009)

This movie tells a story of modern Serbia to those who can listen!

I am stressing that I am a friend of Mladen Djordjevic, the director of this movie, so my review may be biased partially. Yes, this movie is a shocker, all of you horror and sex scene lovers can find amusement in it, but this is not it's primary role. It is primarily a metaphor of a life of anyone "different" currently living in Serbia today, and it was so for the last 20 years, since the war in Croatia started, probably even before that. About 10 percent of the youth population in Belgrade at that time were listening to rock or heavy metal in the 1990's. It was our main connection to the western culture. This music was played only in 3-4 clubs which every teen with this taste for music had heard of. There I could see the truth about Serbia - like myself, these kids were on the borderline of society, driven away from the main, lets say rural, crude type of culture which rose in the beginning of the 90's and is still omnipresent. I was with people who were castaways, like me. Same is the destiny of the characters of the Porn Gang, they are all castaways in a sense, feeling they don't fit in with the "group" or should I say "mass", trying to have fun on a porn trip. It should be educational for the rural people, but they find it offensive and show their true nature (the mass rape scene in the woods). As Mladen told me he wanted to show in the most brutal way the hypocrisy of the sexual self-repression going on with the Serbian people, which breaks out when it has a chance/motive. Belgrade is a metropolis, but gay issues are not well accepted here, you can imagine how they are accepted in small towns of Serbia, not to mention other issues like that involving a horse in a sex scene or others. Then just when they are almost ready to give it all up and go home, mostly because the dope they are using is almost gone, this guy who is an ex war reporter and who has seen many bad things, offers to pay them a lot of money if they shoot snuff scenes of local people. In my opinion it is the critique of the western governments meddling in Serbian affairs, making money on our suffering and making us slaves by giving us money to do what they tell us. Yes, my dear friends from the west, it is hard to swallow, but we are in a way enslaved by the governments of the western world, mainly USA, but also some European countries. These countries with USA in the lead, have taken Kosovo from Serbia in 1999, all based on a will to make a military base there, which they did. It is these influences that have made most of our state banks go bankrupt in the early 2000's, giving the space for the European banks which just waltzed in these same buildings, these same once properties of the Serbian state, and are now milking the money from us little by little. The war in Former Yugoslavia is a grim subject itself, which happened partially because the western countries wanted it to happen. If you are not yet aware of this, let me tell you this is not some fantasy horror movie or some over-the-top rendition of issues in Serbia, like it is the case with "Serbian Film". It is the movie that deals with the consequences of real horrors that really happened here. Even though the Porn Gang members are rejects and drug users, they are not violent people in nature, more like some hippies who were told they can get more drugs if they film people killing themselves or willing to be killed by others. This doesn't redeem them, but does make them, it is maybe weird to say it, but I feel as if they are martyrs, people stuck between the hammer and the anvil, or "between the rock and a hard place". They are people who don't have a chance to do anything and to become anyone in today Serbia, they were doomed to fail from the beginning. The snuff is a brutally honest tool by which Mladen depicts the rally grim situation in today's Serbia. Serbia is literally stuck "between a rock and a hard place". We are not making a progress, or maybe we are and it's a really small one.

The final scene somewhat shocked me, but since I don't want to make anymore spoilers, I won't tell nothing about it. If you don't fear the gore (all of it is staged, and I mean ALL) and are not offended by various sexual situations (I was on the set people, it is all FAKE, the horse is a mare with added silicone penis cast, they are real actors, not porn actors) to watch the movie with an open heart and having in mind everything I just wrote. Hope you'll see some beauty in it.